The good people at Kanbanize invited me to write a guest post on their blog. I accepted and wrote a post on tracking and learning from Queue Length, a topic I picked up from Donald Reinertsen excellent book Principles of Product Development Flow.
Go over there and read the post - I’m happy how it turned out.
The rest of this post will be very meta… because it will be about how I can write the post on short queue length fast, by having short queue length.
When I got the request to write the post I accepted and then Alexander kindly wrote back and gave me long (2 months!) time to write the post. It was at this point I decided to do it right away. I, maybe a bit rude, wrote this back:
Hehe - I cannot do that. It doesn’t get easier for me waiting. It’s just physic weight that I carry around.
Now, to be even more “rude”, writing this post is not the most important thing for me. However, the thought of adding it to my queue of work that I “need to do some time in the future” was not compelling to me.
Therefore I decided on a topic that I could write more or less by heart and then time boxed one hour to write the post. And then just went to work.
One hour later the post was done, I sent it over to Alexander and noted the work as Done in my mind. Done. Gone. Over. More room for other work, without making long lists of work.
Queue length
I didn’t have a lot of things in my queue. I had many things to do, but very few that I’ve committed to do. Maybe I’m lucky that way but I try to keep my queue short and then have a lot of options for things that I can / might do.
Although this work was not prioritized for me I still decided to do it before other work, since it would both keep my queue smaller (as I’m promoting in the blog post) and also, as a result, be beneficial for the flow or my overall work.
Summary
The post is found over at the Kanbanize blog. Go read it. And then let me know if you like it.
Now you know how I wrote it. And how I wrote this post too. Now I only need to write a post on how I wrote the post on how I wrote the post….