Red yellow green

I've started using an interesting technique that I thought I'd share. I wrote previously about the psychological impact of being ahead vs behind, and about asking "what changes?" to analyse motivation in terms of what you expect to be different if you succeed. Ages before that I wrote about the idea of a fail scale, breaking down success into comfortable success vs just-barely-success. To some extent, all of these ideas come together in the red/yellow/green board.

Basically, you categorise all the things you're working on as red (failing), yellow (at risk of failing) or green (succeeding). The exact distinctions between those statuses really depends on the project, but the rough intuition is that red is behind, green is ahead, and yellow is hanging in there. How exactly you represent these probably doesn't matter that much, but I have each project as an index card on a whiteboard with one column for each status.

The nice part about this is it gives you an at-a-glance picture of where your work is, and what's most at risk. The even better thing is it makes it much easier to visualise what will change as a result of your efforts. So maybe my writing is a yellow at the moment, but it will become green if I write a new post today. Alternatively, my writing is currently green, but it will become yellow if I don't write today. I've taken to visualising these potential transitions by drawing arrows between the status columns while planning.

As per my anti-snake-oil commitment, I'll follow up in a week and in a month with how I'm finding it, but so far I've been doing it for a few days and it's been very useful.