The Shu-Ha-Ri model of Lean Procrastination

Basics

So what is Lean Procrastination?

Lean Procrastination is a method to organise the work of a single person. It’s Procrastination (the bad habit of postponing things until it’s too late) done Lean (a mindset/ruleset advising you to do/decide stuff at the last responsible moment, just-in-time).

The basic idea is to successfully procrastinate until the last responsible moment (which could be well after an agreed deadline, or much earlier!) and to fully enjoy that special moment (which is the infinitesimal point in time between a bit too early and a little too late). You maximise the time where you do NOT work, while keeping in mind that you still want to be “successful”. What does that mean? I’m talking about overall achievement, not meeting deadlines. If you deliver something late (according to a previously agreed date), it may still be just-in-time—if it does not negatively affect the overall outcome. The definition of the last responsible moment and how to identify it is a topic of currently ongoing research (we developed a game for that) and will be covered in a later post—as well as a more detailed definition of “success”.

It’s simple (not easy) to achieve Lean Procrastination through for instance the use of a Personal Kanban board or by successfully applying Getting Things Done. Perfect flow on your personal Kanban board is Lean Procrastination Shu-Level. More on the levels below.

Drive—do it with Love

The key to getting rid of management overhead is Love. Love for the work you do. (We might do research on other influences Love has on this in the future.) The most concise definition of “Love your work” (i.e. Motivation) that we know is from Drive by Daniel Pink: For the best intrinsic motivation, you need mastery, autonomy and purpose. How do these aspects influence Lean Procrastination?

Mastery

If you’re not a master at what you do, you will need management overhead for the actual work itself. You will need to optimise the overhead instead of doing the content. You don’t actually need to be a master (though it helps), to be on your way to mastery will be sufficient. Engaged learning is a boost to motivation.

Autonomy

If you are working on tasks where someone tells you how to do your work, if you’re not able to organise your work according to your flow, you need those rules as a physical reminder.

Purpose

Things you need to do but that you don’t love to do (think of tax) don’t come back to you automatically, you need external reminder.

The Levels

Shu

Having your work perfectly organised on a Personal Kanban Board, using Getting Things Done or any other method that includes some sort of task list, means you reached the Shu level of Lean Procrastination. Why only Shu? Because there’s still external management overhead, rules to follow etc.

Shu is defined as “follow the rules”. So the definition of Shu-level Lean Procrastination is:

1. have rules to organise your work
2. apply those rules successfully for end-to-end achievement of your goals
3. stick to those rules

Ha

At Ha-level, you start to “bend the rules”. You keep this level of organisation with the same successes. You occasionally (and deliberately) do stuff that’s not on your list. You become more independent of the list.

Ri

At Ri-level, you “are the rules”. You don’t need the list (or any extrinsic management system) any more.

Take away

Procrastination does not need to be painful. Mastery of Lean Procrastination can greatly improve your personal organisation, given you organise work you love doing.

Acknowledgements

A surprising number of people gave feedback on the idea and the concept. First thanks to Marc Bless who loved my idea of Procrastination Coaching from the first minute and encouraged me to create the @ProProCoach Twitter account (and helped me find a name that works). Thanks to all folks at the XPDays in Hamburg last November, where I proposed “Lean Procrastination Coaching” as an OpenSpace butterfly session (it didn’t seem to make sense to give that session a time and a place). All day long people where asking if that session had already taken place:-) A special Thank you goes to Markus Andrezak. He wrote on Twitter during that OpenSpace day: “Can one buy a @ProProCoach ? I’d like to get one too …”

That left Marc and me in an unusual and unexpected situation: For a bit of funny nonsense, without any concept or true idea, we already had a potential customer! We realised we had become the leanest possible startup. Although so far Markus didn’t take in our offer of a free Procrastination Coaching yet (I’m sure he will do so later), it set us off thinking about the topic in earnest. Last week, I asked Marc if we should propose a session on Lean Procrastination for the XP2011 conference. We did. At the last responsible moment, of course. John McFadyen and Mike Sutton greatly helped with a perfection game on our proposal!

Just… a while ago, I developed the idea of issuing badges and certifications… But that’s another story which will be told later.

I sent the draft of this text to a first few friends, whom I want to thank for their feedback: Chris Matts, who already earned two lean procrastination badges, and Alan Shalloway, who greatly improved the first section of this post. Janice Linden-Reed volunteered to write the first guest post on this blog—which meant I had to seriously write and finish this post so that she has something to write about:-)

In January, up came the ACCN, where 10 people joined me in an OpenSpace session on the topic, including Ivana Gancheva, Ken Power and Niklas Bjørnerstedt, who shared their insights and amazed me with their interest in the concept.

My friend Andreas Leidig gave some good hints to improve wording and understandability… All remaining issues are my very own.