Does your kanban Ready column look like a junk drawer? Do you have tasks in the Ready column from six months ago that say “Urgent!” (and have since the day they were created)? Guess what? You’re learning something about your work.

We have a lot of urgent tasks that strangely don’t get done and no one gets hurt. We might miss an opportunity or need to do something different in the future, but we don’t complete a lot of tasks that we would describe as urgent.

In the first article in this series, I mentioned that at Modus our kanban board had built up an unhealthy backlog. It was gigantic. Why did this happen?

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