Whether you’re a cook on their own in the back of a pub, or a line cook in a burger bar, there’s an element of the assembly line to what you’re doing.
And if, for some reason you’re not even in the food service industry, we can learn a lot from the world of manufacture and bring it into the work that we do.
Life before the idea
You don’t have to call yourself a project manager to have managed some kind of project. If you’ve had to move house, plan a birthday party or travel for a holiday, you’ve managed a project.
A project is nothing more than a series of tasks. Some of them are connected, some take longer than others, some are binary in that they’re done or not done, while others involve other people and thus are the worst.
Todo lists are useful, as are methods like David Allan’s Getting Things Done, but systems like that treat every task as either “done” or “not done”, which just isn’t realistic.
I have people in my life who are very dear to me, who manage all of this stuff in their heads. I don’t know how, but somehow they manage. Actually, I do know how; they simply don’t sleep. Not because they’re permanently running around doing stuff, but because their brains are constantly trying to run complex project management software when they should be asleep.
So, how do you manage a complex project with lots of moving parts? Well, first you have to build an aeroplane.
From part bins to kanban
After the Nazis bombed the factories making Spitfires in Southampton during the second world war, Brits began building them in secret, hiding them in sheds, back gardens, hotels and even a bus depot.
The allies needed as many as they could get, so efficiency was of the utmost importance. At the time, a lot of factories adhered to the Henry Ford method of manufacture, which meant that parts were supplied based on anticipated demand.
So a standard thork prench might be made by affixing two rotary gerdles to a stantion tusk. But if the pimhole goes out of sync with the elbow nut, your hinkle press gets jammed and you have to halt production of stantion tusks.
Meanwhile on the other side of the factory, you’re still merrily making rotary girdles that’ll just pile up with no thork prenches to affix them to. This, naturally, creates waste, not to mention the buildup of excess fluid on the gert strain.
But if you had a couple of bins at the end of the production line for each part, you could ensure you only made as much as you needed, and maybe even adapt the machine to make a different sort of part if demand for the other one slowed. And this is precisely what those plucky Brits did.
Instead of making all of the parts all of the time, they’d make enough parts to fill two bins. Factory workers who needed, let’s say, a drangle, would take it from bin A. They’d keep going until bin A was empty, at which point the dranglemen would pour the contents of bin B into bin A, and start making new drangles.
Bin B was the buffer bin which, apart from being immensely satisfying to say, meant part makers weren’t having to estimate demand; they just made enough to fill the bin.
Taiichi Ohno, and the Toyota Production System
In the late 1940s, an industrial engineer from Japan, called Taiichi Ohno, took this idea to Toyota.
So successful was this program that in 1973, at the height of the gas crisis, the government of Japan sent investigators to our factories to determine why we were still able to make a profit while others were not. They discovered that the secret of our success truly was our lean manufacturing approach.
This comes from Akio Toyoda, whose grandfather Kichiro founded the Toyota Loom Company, which would later become the famous car manufacturer. And yes, he spells his name Toyoda with a D; I haven’t just started doing a voice.
Taiichi Ohno implemented the two bins approach and a few other ideas snd essentially created the Toyota Production System, a renowned method of manufacture that reduced waste and overburden while also staying flexible. But the system has lots more to offer than just making widgets.
In honour of Ohno-san, we also created a special division called the Toyota Production Systems Support Center to help organisations such as hospitals, food banks, and even COVID testing sites to become more efficient through the application of TPS.
Along with implementing a new method of manufacture that reduced waste, Ohno created 10 precepts that helped Toyota become a dominating force. Now, he was pretty hardcore when it came to efficiency, but not for the sort of reasons we are.
For him, wasted time is wasted money for the company, where for us, time theft is just our way of making sure we can regain a little sanity during our work day, whether that means taking an extra-long wee to finish the New York Times mini crossword, or fitting in a few minutes of TikTok in-between meetings.
Your boss might call that inefficient. I call it ensuring you don’t go stir crazy and snap your keyboard in half. That said, there are a few precepts Ohno got right.
First say “I can do it”, and try before everything.
At some point I’d love to bend your ear about audacity. I think there’s something to be said for creative people who have the audacity to go “I reckon I could have a go at that” without any prior experience.
That’s how I interpret this precept, anyway. Before pre-deciding that you can’t do something for whatever reason, why not just give it a go first? Treat it like an experiment and see what happens.
Once you start something, persevere with it. Do not give up until you finish it.
I know we’ve talked about sticking with something when it gets hard or it stops being novel. And I really like this precept, but I do think it’s harder than it seems for some of us.
A way to reframe this, especially if you’re someone who has a story about themselves that says they never finish anything, is to decide what an ending looks like. Ending an experiment because it didn’t have the outcome you intended is perfectly valid. But just letting an experiment linger without a result… well, that isn’t really an experiment, that’s more of a laboratory accident.
Valueless motions are equal to shortening one’s life.
Ooph. The amount of times I would have loved to have said that when my boss proposed another meeting.
My interpretation of this will probably differ from Ohno’s, but to me this says “decide on the things that need to be done that bring value, and eliminate everything else”.
And of course, you know what we’re about here. You know that includes rest, relaxation, fun, and aimless activity. That’s part of the deal of being human, and it’s the 20% necessary for you to work at your best.
At the heart of the Toyota Production System as created by Ohno is a Japanese word you might have already come across: kanban. And incase you’ve heard an American friend pronounce it as “kaaan baaan” because they think they’re being culturally sensitive, you can tell them to settle down; it’s just kanban.
To illustrate what it is and how useful it can be, let’s get out of the factory and into a church.
How to plan a wedding
Let’s say you’re getting married. It’s 2025 so you probably can’t afford the napkins let alone a wedding planner, so you elect to plan the thing yourself.
You’ve picked your theme and drawn up your guest list. Now you’ve got to book a venue, hire a photographer, let your other half find the band or the DJ because that’ll keep them busy, shop for an outfit, make a seating chart, choose party favours, figure out transportation, schedule the rehearsal… you’ve basically given yourself a whole extra job and the worst part of it is you have to pay through the nose to do it.
Anyway, you’ve got all these tasks to worry about. Some you can knock out in one session, while others could take weeks of back-and-forth. If you invite Janet from Accounts Receivable to the reception, do you sit her next to the hobbit from IT or would the free wine on the table set off a chain of events that would culminate in an HR violation and an act of public indecency?
Keeping al of this in your head is like writing a cheque to a couple’s counsellor before you’ve even tied the knot, so let’s take everything out of your head and put it on a board.
The Japanese word kanban literally translates to “sign board”. The method has changed over the years since its introduction at Toyota, but it works like this.
Imagine a noticeboard hung up on your kitchen wall. Now divide that board into three columns. Take that fancy label maker you bought during lockdown and label the first column “Backlog”, the second column “In progress”, and the third “Done”.
Now get a bunch of PostIt notes, and write each task on a new note. Stick all your notes to the board, keeping them in the “Backlog” column.
Whenever you decide to get organised, this part of the process can be both relieving and really scary. It’s great to finally release that mental constipation, but seeing a mountain of things to do can feel somewhat daunting. So go gentle with yourself, and remember you’ve got time. You have got time, haven’t you? Don’t tell me the big day’s next week?
If you’ve divided up the labour so your partner has more to do than book the band and the booze, you could use coloured sticky notes to help you keep track of who’s doing what job.
Now, as you start working on a task, you move the corresponding sticky note to the “In progress” column. If it’s something like sending an email or making a phone call, you can then move it to “Done” and breathe a sigh of relief.
Other jobs might, of course, take longer. But an important thing – which we’re again going to borrow from Getting Things Done – is to make each PostIt note count for the smallest atomic unit of a task.
For example, “Buy wedding cake” might sound like a simple activity, but this is a wedding so of course it’s not. You’ve got to research the bakery, discuss options with the baker, try different fillings and then make a final decision.
In a sense, buying the cake for a wedding is actually its own project, as it’s a single outcome made up of multiple tasks.
Now it’s at this point you’re probably going to run out of kitchen wall, so maybe it’s time to go digital.
If you’ve ever used the Trello app, you’ll already be familiar with the kanban approach. Notion, the info management app also lets you view data in a kanban style. And it’s part of management workflows beloved by software companies, game studios, and scrappy startups alike.
Mapping the process out visually helps you get a sense of the pipeline. At a glance you can see what you’re working on, what’s still to be done, and what you’ve already accomplished.
This is exactly what Ed Catmull, former President of Pixar implemented within his animation studio. The kanban method meant colleagues could see where projects were in the pipeline, and where things were getting stuck.
This way of working was profiled briefly in an early episode of the amazing sitcom Silicon Valley. They were implementing a particular style of working called Scrum, which is similar to the style Spotify implemented back in 2010.
The then head of operations, Mattias Jansson, implemented a simple kanban board made up of three columns (”To do”, “Doing”, and “Done”) to keep track of the work of the then 7-person operations team.
They appointed a sort of goalie, not unlike our sous chef from the top of the episode, to catch jobs as they came in. If a job could be done quickly, it was done there-and-then. Otherwise, it made its way onto the board.
You can’t kanban everything
Now, one of the things kanban can’t help you with is what to do with your growing backlog. If you’re using kanban for a personal project and it’s just you, placing every atomic unit of action in a single column is just going to feel daunting.
The trick is not to start breaking it down until necessary. If we go back to our wedding scenario, if you’re 12 months out from your wedding, you can safely put “Buy wedding cake” on your board as a single action.
Later down the line, this will become what Scrum managers like to call an “epic”. Scrum is the method Jared introduced in the Silicon Valley sitcom. An “epic” is basically their word for a project, or a large span of work that’ll take you more than a couple of weeks to finish.
If you’re trying to plan your wedding on a kitchen noticeboard, you might find it tricky to juggle multiple projects at the same time. Also, kanban is really just a simple visual metaphor; it can’t help you keep track of time or remind you to do something, or help protect you from forgetting about it. That’s where tools like Trello can be really helpful.
You create cards and arrange them in columns, just like you would with a physical noticeboard. But cards can have lots of things attached to them, like dates, tags, even todo lists. And if you do need to turn “Buy wedding cake” into a project, you can create a new board and link your single “wedding cake” card to that new board. That way you end up with a board that shows the whole overview of your wedding plan, with linked boards to help you manage the finicky details.
But you’re not listening to this podcast because you have a wedding to plan. You’re here – presumably – because you’re a creative soul who’d maybe like to get as organised in their extracurricular work as they are at the day job.
Tracking your creative work via kanban
So let’s say you’re a hot sauce fanatic and you’ve started a new podcast, where every week you interview a new small batch hot sauce supplier. You’re going on holiday in a couple of months so you’re going to need a few episodes in your pocket to tide you over, so you plan to record a bunch of episodes in one week.
You create a Trello board where the first column has a bunch of cards, one for each of the hot sauce brands you want to contact. As you invite each one onto the show, you move them from the “Inbox” column into the “Contacted” column.
As each potential guest replies and you set a date and time to record, you move that person’s card to “Scheduled”. Then once you’ve recorded with the guest, you move them on to “Recorded”. And so on, all thew ay through to promoting the episode and releasing it.
Tracking your podcast this way means you can juggle multiple episodes at the same time without having to try and remember where you were with each one of them. And you can even automate the process, so as soon as someone books a recording time on your calendar, that card is moved to the next column.
Now, an episode is a mini project within itself, with lots of little sub tasks. Rather than create a whole new Trello board for each episode, you can click the card and add a checklist, straight out of episode 8. This is less of a todo list and more a way to keep track of the things that can go wrong, or an expression of what “done” looks like.
You can use this method to track any kind of repeated work, like blogging or newsletter writing, YouTube or TikTok video making, even your Instagram calendar.
Are you on board?
Now, of course there are some nuts that are just too small to be cracked by this particular hammer. You probably don’t need a kanban board to help you buy more dog food, but you could use one to help find her a new brother or sister.
If you do end up with a big backlog and it starts to feel overwhelming, you might want to consider going all the way back to episode one, and checking out the Eisenhower Matrix, as you might find some of the stuff in that column isn’t really all that important.
But I’ve seen people use kanban boards to plan weddings and I’ve recommended them for home renovations. They’re incredibly simple, and they’re foundational for lots of other project management methodologies.
But at its heart is something very simple, very visual, and thus, very tangible. And with that, I’m going to move this episode from your “In progress” queue to the “Done” column.