We use Kanban to coordinate our projects and tasks. Kanban is focused on visualizing and improving throughput, that is, making projects (high-level) and tasks (low-level) go through the system as fast as by limiting work in progress, which in turn minimizes waste (time and money).

Our field of work is IT operations and we’re generally quite busy with fulfilling requests from our internal and external stakeholders. Most of our tasks are quite small, about 1-4 hours each, and produce value immediately. We can generally get these done (“through the system”) quickly without having to stop in the middle and can then forget about them. However, we also have bigger tasks that tend to take a lot longer, maybe 8-24 hours of focused work and often involve multiple persons.

We - like many others - have the problem that our work gets easily interrupted. Some interruptions come from the inside. For example, you remember “a thing you need to do” and without thinking start doing it immediately. Other interruptions are external, for example a colleague ask you for advise or a customer calls you asking for help. Almost always these things could wait a bit, but the person simply acted on an impulse.