Whipping up WIP limits: when you need a proven way to conquer staggering piles of unfinished projects

Agile practices for one (#1)

You love your hobbies (and your work, I hope). But you’re a bit loathe to enter the room where you keep your projects. Because you know, you’ll face umpteen half-finished ones staring back at you, like disappointed, neglected children.

That’s because you’re always full of ideas and working on one gets you even more that you just can’t wait to get started on or at least planning, designing, and gathering materials for it.

I get it. I’m like that.

But it has drawbacks. Serious ones.

Yet the answer is straightforward albeit a little challenging for anyone with ADHD.

WIP Limits.

Say what?

WIP stands for Work In Progress and WIP limits are a concept from Kanban — one of the big(gest), and definitely earliest, schools of agile thought.

It involves setting and sticking to a limit for the number of tasks you have in progress simultaneously. When you're at your maximum you’ll have to get-to-done on at least one before starting with a new one.

It’s not as restrictive as it sounds. WIP limits apply to types of tasks (or operations).

The idea is to avoid letting things pile up — to keep work (items) flowing through the manufacturing process¹ and avoid (long) queues between operations, where no value is added and avoidable storage and financial costs are incurred.

Kanban’s WIP limit’s usefulness extends far beyond manufacturing.

Any (structured) multi-step process — regardless of the number of people involved — can benefit from Kanban in general and WIP limits in particular.

Take knowledge work. Anything sitting in a pile waiting for the next step in a process, is stock. Even if the pile is purely digital, it still requires storage space somewhere.

Sounds good, yes?

But what the heck is the value and use for individuals?

WIP limits have benefits for everyone and I strongly recommend them for anyone with an ADHD brain. Even, or maybe especially, because finishing — sticking with something until done — can be harder for an ADHD brain.

Here’s why.

In my experience, having many half-finished projects lying about, not only clutters your environment (taking up storage space in your house) it also leads to

1. mind clutter (brains don’t like open loops — anything unfinished — and your subconscious will keep engaging with it²)

2. choice-stress (what shall I work on now),

3. procrastination (when nothing really appeals so you’d rather start on a shiny, bright, new idea),

4. overwhelm (from an every growing to-do — to-finish — list) and thus more procrastination, and

5. feelings of inadequacy (I don’t finish anything) and all the

6. self-flaggelation and lowering of self-esteem that can lead to.

Limiting the tasks and projects you have in progress, helps minimize all this.

And don’t you just love the idea that instead of bemoaning a stack of half-finished projects lying around, you get to enjoy and celebrate a stack of finished ones!

That’s why I now strive to keep the number of knot work projects in progress down to three and the number of projects around the house down to even less.

As a result, I have no more lakes or mountains of projects accumulating uncontrollably. The lakes and mountains now pertain to either “done” (yay!) or “might do” (yay! as well because “might” means I can still decide not to take it up).

Try it!

Let me know how you’re getting on and ask me questions in the comments! I’d love to hear your experience!

To get started with this, you might think you’d have to work your way through everything you have in progress until their number is down below your desired WIP limit. Fortunately, no you don’t. Pick your WIP limit, pick that number of unfinished items and relegate everything else to the “might do” bin.

To get the benefits, I recommend storing “might do” and as yet unfinished stuff where you won’t be reminded of it easily yet can go to when you’re ready to pick your next next task or activity. Like well out-of-sight in a garden shed or garage for physical stuff, and in a spark file or folder (well down your folder hierarchy) for digital stuff.

If you liked this and would like to read more like it — that’s a lot of ‘like’s in one short sentence 😆, feel free to subscribe.

1. Kanban originates in manufacturing. Toyota’s car manufacturing to be precise.

2. It’s actually a tactic you can use to great effect to avoid staring at a blank screen when you just can’t get started although you know what you want to work on. Not recommended for ADHD brains, though. Especially not when work sessions are supposed to be separated by a good night’s sleep.