For as long as I can remember I’ve always been overwhelmed by the number of things I wanted to do or try. As a voracious reader of personal development books I seemed to have a never ending torrent of good ideas raining around me at all times. Ideas about how I could be better. Ideas about new habits to start or stop. Ideas about how to build a life that I’m proud of. Being the overachiever that I am, I would find myself trying to do all the things all the time. I wouldn’t ever consciously stop one personal development intention and start a new one because I never got super clear about what I was actually trying to do. I would just let all these good intentions and good ideas kind of wash over me and because I am not some kind of prodigy this would obviously always mean I was failing on at least a handful of vague intentions at the same time. Instead of feeling like I was making and keeping commitments to myself I was always operating under a vague sense that I wasn’t doing the things I said I wanted to do (even though, overall, I was definitely doing a lot).
Eventually, I homed in on two key concepts for the system I ended up developing for myself: limiting work in progress (WIP) and iterative experimentation.
As anyone familiar with the Theory of Constraints knows, putting a cap on the number of things that are allowed to be “active” at once actually increases the flow of items through a system. If you have a backlog of 10 items you’ll actually complete them faster if you only work on 1 or 2 at a time, rather than trying to chip away at all 10 simultaneously. In the case of personal development, we don’t actually care about finishing things quickly — but we do care about finishing things (which is really more of a psychological state than anything else). The power of this idea was fairly obvious to me in a work or school context, but I started to wonder if it applied in a broader personal development context, too.
Secondarily, as I got deeper into my work with organizations through my job at The Ready I came to better understand the power that continuous experimentation can have when a team is trying to do something new. While I had always been interested in self-experimentation, especially as part of the quantified self movement, I developed a new appreciation for what disciplined and iterative experimentation looks like and what it can unlock through my work at The Ready. I started to apply this experimental mindset to my own personal development endeavors with really surprising results.
The combination of limiting WIP and adopting a habit of continuous experimentation was what helped me start to feel good about my personal development efforts for the first time. In the rest of this article I will show you the system I developed for myself as simply and directly as possible.
The goal is to create an external system that can hold all the ideas for potential experiments you get from the world around you (books, podcasts, etc.), help you develop those ideas into full-fledged yet tractable experiments, help you limit the number of experiments you are pursuing at once, guide you in learning from the experiments you’ve done, and help you uncover the core personal insights that are the ultimate goal of the whole endeavor.
The Tool
It sounds like a lot, but a relatively simple Kanban board can do most of the heavy lifting for us.
A Kanban board is a tool that helps you visualize work and the various states in which it could be. The simplest version has three columns: To Do, Doing, and Done. We aren’t going to complicate it much more than that.
Our Deliberate Experimentation Kanban is going to have the following columns: Inbox, Backlog, Active, Done, and a separate, but related, area called the Insight Library.
Inbox
This is the list where you can throw any vague idea or intention to ensure you won’t lose it. You haven’t committed to anything that’s on this list. It’s simply the top of the funnel for things you might want to potentially do. Anything can go in here. Musings, questions, thoughts, a word or two... anything to get the thought off your mind and into the system.
To Do
When you move something out of the Inbox because you’re pretty sure you want to do it soon, you move it to the To Do list. Here you’ll fill out the Basic Experimentation Template and make sure you’ve thought through the details. These ideas are ready to go... but aren’t active yet.
Active
This is where you put the experiment you are currently doing. Every day you’ll check-in and add relevant data or reflections to the card. Ideally you won’t have more than 1 or 2 experiments active at a time (remember, limit WIP!).
Done
This is simply where you put the experiments you have completed. In order to move an experiment from Active to Done you need to fill out the End of Experiment Retrospective questions. This is where you’ll make sure you extracted all the lessons — and maybe even extract an Insight or two!
Insight Library
The last part of the system actually lives outside of the Kanban board itself as a separate document that I call my Insight Library. The whole reason we’re doing personal experiments is to uncover these key insights about ourselves. We’re systematically trying new things so that we can systematically explore our beliefs, assumptions, and abilities — all the stuff that makes up who we are as people. It’s about uncovering, discovering, and maybe even changing, more and more of our identity over time. As we do more experiments we will capture new insights about ourselves or adjustments to insights we’ve made in the past. This slow but deliberate accrual of our own personal Insight Library is personal development.
The Routines
A Kanban board is not enough... it must be paired with a few key routines related to how we use the tool.
First, there’s the ongoing habit of throwing ideas into your Inbox as you come across them. It’s being able to notice when you’re thinking, “I should try...” or, “I wonder what it’d be like to...” and capturing those ideas into your system as soon as possible. Sometimes these ideas will pop up out of thin air and other times you’ll capture them as you read a book, watch a YouTube video, or have a conversation with a friend. They can come from anywhere and the more you practice the better you’ll get at capturing them right away.
Second, there’s the daily routine of reflecting on how your active experiment(s) is going. I usually do this in the evening before I go to bed. It’s as simple as logging into your Kanban and tapping out a sentence or two about how it went today. Sometimes, if the experiment is extremely cut and dry, logging the day’s data is as simple as writing “Yes” or “No.”
Third, there’s the weekly routine of retrospecting on the whole experiment (assuming you ran the experiment for a week — some experiments are longer than that). This is where you pause and ask yourself some general questions about what went well, what didn’t go as well, and what you learned.
Finally, there’s the trimesterly(ish) routine of going through all your completed experiments and mining them for potential Insights and new experiment ideas. Sometimes you need to accrue many weeks of experiments before patterns and themes start emerging. A lot of the time you’ll notice them without having to do this quarterly routine but I like to schedule some time every 4 months or so to do a deep dive into my completed experiments to see what I can find.
It sounds like a lot, but generally each of these can be done in only a couple minutes. Setting up some automatically recurring reminders and building them into your overall routine makes them something that you’ll learn to look forward to over time.
What else do you want to know about this system? What isn’t clear? What doesn’t make sense? I intend this to be the beginning of a lengthy series expounding on this approach and your feedback will help me better understand where I’m not clearly describing what’s in my head. Let me know on Twitter (@samspurlin) or in the comments below!
Curious to learn more about this system as I experiment with it in real time? Join my newsletter, aptly called The Deliberate, to get behind-the-scenes writing and thinking.