Personal Pull System — Intro — 1
The most basic duty of a person is to fulfill their responsibilities, but at the same time, we live in a very fast world. The question is: how can we fulfill our responsibilities properly in a fast-moving world? For example, we grapple with many types of work, such as daily chores, hundreds of incoming emails, steps to be taken towards goals, issues, and habits to consider. In order to fulfill these responsibilities properly, we need an agile and stable system that we can rely on. Today I will try to tell you how you can create this system for yourself.
We can’t keep our entire to-do list in mind. The mind is not good at remembering, the mind is designed to do things. Just like a lever, an effective system can enable us to use our minds better and get more effective results. Today, I will start by giving you a visual summary of the Personnel Pull System approach. My goal is to show you how to get effective results as stress-free as possible.
You can see the summary of the Personnel Pull System in the image above. You should read this image from left to right. Basically, the Personnel Pull System consists of two parts. The first part is the “External Brain” part. The “External Brain” part consists of 3 sub-stages.
Basketing Phase : The phase where things are caught and placed in the basket.
Parking Phase : The stage where the items placed in the cart are parked in the appropriate places in the external brain.
Deciding Phase : The phase where decisions are made on the jobs parked in the external brain.
In the Orange Post-Its, a simple story is told from left to right using past language. For example, incoming jobs are thrown into the basket, then parked in the appropriate place, and then these jobs are decided on.
At the end of the process described so far, the “External Brain” begins to form. Actually, what is called “External Brain” is nothing but an archiving system. For example, it could be a filing system, such as Google Keep or Apple Notes. Or the external brain could be only physical paper and a filing structure. In summary, we can say External Brain is a streamlined archiving system.
The Pull System has its origins in the Toyota Production System, but before that, it was based on the logic of the supermarket. The reason why it is called a supermarket is based on putting a new one on the shelves as the product is purchased by the customer. Just like the supermarket system, to increase personal productivity, we need to pull new jobs from the external brain as we finish them, because the more jobs started at the same time, the less likely they will be finished.
In the Pull System, the previously decided jobs in the external brain for the “Options” phase are sorted by context. As the name suggests, work in this field may be advanced, held on hold, or not done at all, depending on the situation. The last stage in the pull system is the “Committed” zone. The work up to this stage must be pulled and completed definitively.
Not every work item is the same. In other words, we cannot take every work item and finish it easily, so there are basically 2 types of work items in the Pull System. Big work items and small work items. It would be appropriate to divide big work items into smaller parts during the deciding phase within the external brain. In the following sections, we will look at where to focus our attention when categorizing work.
To be continued…
