Getting yourself aligned with your day is by far the most important ritual to help you take control of your time for maximum productivity and balance. This ritual is something that you will do daily as you use your Kanban Jornal, and overall it is not hard to do. Just give yourself at least 15 to 30 minutes to do it.
The purpose of your planning is to choose a reasonable amount of tasks to get done based on things you may have put in your Future Log, project plans, group Kanban boards, and perhaps items you did not get done from the prior day.
The principle in Kanban that you are applying is the one that is focusing on flow and just-in-time delivery. Remember, in order to achieve flow, you need to set reasonable challenges. If the thing that you are trying to get done is too large, complicated, or something new, then you may want to spend some time and create a small project plan in your journal to break down the work. Once you do that, then the daily planning goes a lot easier.
If you have not started your daily journal page, then find a new page and create one. A good way to start your daily list is to first list the meetings and appointments you may have. These items will take away time from doing other tasks or project work, so listing them first enables you to visualize the impact. Next, you can start to pull in the highest priority tasks until you feel you have reached a reasonable work limit. Be sure to mark each item with the right visual symbol from the Kanban key.
Keep in mind that most of us are horrible planners. We are sometimes too ambitious or we may overestimate how long something will take us. Don't beat yourself up if this happens. Your daily planning should be based on a Plan->Do->Check->Act model. When you are starting the day, you should be checking and taking actions based on the prior day. In the case of bringing in too much work, give yourself permission to take on less work by pushing things off of your daily to-do list and storing them back in the future log.
After making final adjustments to your daily plan, you are now ready to go off and have a productive day!
