Less Is More: How Our Board Has Helped Me Through Burnout

On a previous post, I shared my agile practice of the Daily. Likewise, I showed you the board my husband and I use to keep our work organized and prioritized. As this blog has always been about my personal journey, today I would like to share some changes we’ve made to this board. It now guarantees we’re getting small wins throughout each week while we’re navigating through our burnout.

I’ve always been very organized. Part of the reason is because mess means noise to me, visual and mental noise. If I don’t isolate or even silence a little bit this noise, tension starts building up until the glass spills. And when this happens, we know burnout might be around the corner.

Let me remind you how our board looked like:

We use a wall with post-its. So, here we visualize all our projects, and at the same time, we assign their corresponding tasks. Right now though, I would like to focus on the columns. Originally, we had an Inbox, or backlog for pending tasks. From this column we would select up to three tasks to concentrate on (Vital Few column). From those three tasks, we would work on one at a time. The chosen task — being our top priority — would now be placed under the column of Laser Focus. Once finished, it would go to Done.

What happened with this system? Our Inbox was too full — meaning visually cluttered. As a consequence, we decided to simplify the board for the sake of limiting the visual noise — too many post-its on the same wall.

Now, where we had the Inbox, we put a column called Up Next. Under it, you’ll find the tasks we would like to work on on a given week. This forces us to improve our predictability. In other words, it helps us become more realistic in terms of what we can really accomplish within this timeframe. Then, in the column of Vital Few, we move the three tasks — no more — that will require our attention in a given day. The rest of the columns work the same as before — Laser Focus and Done. We still have our Inbox, now separated from the board so that we can place tasks we don’t need to think of yet.

By the end of each day or week, the board looks usually empty. It’s ok though if we don’t complete all the tasks we set ourselves to do. The point here is that by applying these changes we can appreciate our progress. The latter is huge, specially for me, as most of my tasks are the same week after week. For me it felt like I was never completing anything because I was constantly recycling post-its from Done to Inbox. The post-its never left the board. As the Inbox is now on a different wall, I get to remove all post-its by the end of the week and enjoy my blank canvas.

All these minor changes might seem like a visual trick. However, our brain works by signals. Just as drinking coffee every morning might mean it’s time to work, seeing a clean board can send a signal of progress and new beginnings. If we don’t feel we’re moving forward, sooner or later we’ll get stuck. This at the same time produces stress and anxiety, and it can lead to burnout.

So, how do you visualize progress at work and in your personal life?