Parts Work Deck: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Parts Work Deck, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Practices that may help
- Deep Work, Made Practical
Cal Newport defines deep work as cognitively demanding tasks performed in a state of distraction-free concentration, and argues it is both increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. The practices — scheduled focus blocks, ruthless distraction control, and a shutdown ritual — rest on well-supported findings about attention residue and task-switching, plus practitioner structure for applying them. - Watch for cards that stay in Doing without moving
A card that hasn’t moved in several days is a signal about a real obstacle — examine it rather than adding more work.
Personal Kanban, Made Practical - Oscillate between effort and recovery
Pulse hard work with real recovery instead of grinding in a flat line.
The Power of Full Engagement, Made Practical - Use the Done column to learn about your work patterns
Periodically examine completed cards for patterns in what gets done, what gets stuck, and how long things actually take.
Personal Kanban, Made Practical - Trim components to find what you can remove
Systematically ask which components in your current solution could be removed if another component took over their function.
TRIZ: Systematic Invention and the Logic of Contradictions - Personal Kanban, Made Practical
Personal Kanban (Jim Benson & Tonianne DeMaria Barry) adapts the industrial lean-production Kanban board for individual and small-team use. Its two rules are: visualize your work and limit work in progress (WIP). The Kanban method in manufacturing has strong evidence; the personal adaptation is a practitioner system with mechanistic grounding in cognitive load and attention research but limited formal trials in personal productivity contexts. - SCAMPER: A Systematic Creativity Technique
SCAMPER is a structured brainstorming checklist that prompts you to Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify/Magnify, Put to other uses, Eliminate, and Reverse/Rearrange elements of an existing product, process, or problem. It is a practitioner-derived tool with no randomized trial evidence but a strong theoretical grounding in divergent thinking research — it works by forcing systematic exploration of an idea space that unguided brainstorming leaves partially uncovered. - Decompose tasks and sum the pieces
Estimate each sub-task independently, then add them up — the sum is closer to truth than a top-down estimate.
The Planning Fallacy — Why Your Estimates Are Always Wrong - Drain the shallows
Aggressively limit and batch low-value shallow work so it doesn’t crowd out deep work.
Deep Work, Made Practical - IFS Parts Mapping, Made Practical
Parts mapping is an Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz) practice of systematically identifying and visually or narratively charting the distinct inner parts — critics, worriers, peacekeepers, wounded exiles — and their relationships to each other. It is a diagnostic and orientation tool: it shows you the terrain of your inner system before you try to work with any single part. Evidence sits within the broader IFS and parts-work literature, which is growing but not yet on par with CBT or DBT.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- There’s this one task that’s just been sitting there untouched for days while I quietly start other things around it, and instead of facing why it’s stuck
- I push flat-out all day with no real breaks, treating rest like something I have to earn after the work is done
- I keep wildly underestimating how long things will take and overcommitting, week after week, because I have no honest record of how my work actually goes
- What I’ve built has gotten so complicated that it keeps breaking in new places, and I suspect half the moving parts are doing work something else could absorb
- I glance at the whole thing and go "yeah, a weekend" without ever listing out the actual steps
Related concerns
- Parts Work Activity
Before listing tasks, list your key roles this week and name one meaningful goal for each.
Plan from roles and goals, not from tasks
- Parts Work How To
Parts mapping is an Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz) practice of systematically identifying and visually or narratively charting the distinct inner parts — critics, worriers, peacekeepers, wounded exiles — and their relationships to each other. It is a diagnostic and orientation tool: it shows you the terrain of your inner system before you try to work with any single part. Evidence sits within the broader IFS and parts-work literature, which is growing but not yet on par with CBT or DBT.
- Parts Work What Is It
Parts mapping is an Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz) practice of systematically identifying and visually or narratively charting the distinct inner parts — critics, worriers, peacekeepers, wounded exiles — and their relationships to each other. It is a diagnostic and orientation tool: it shows you the terrain of your inner system before you try to work with any single part. Evidence sits within the broader IFS and parts-work literature, which is growing but not yet on par with CBT or DBT.
- Parts Work Cards
Periodically examine completed cards for patterns in what gets done, what gets stuck, and how long things actually take.
Use the Done column to learn about your work patterns
- Parts Work Cheat Sheet
Parts mapping is an Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz) practice of systematically identifying and visually or narratively charting the distinct inner parts — critics, worriers, peacekeepers, wounded exiles — and their relationships to each other. It is a diagnostic and orientation tool: it shows you the terrain of your inner system before you try to work with any single part. Evidence sits within the broader IFS and parts-work literature, which is growing but not yet on par with CBT or DBT.
- Parts Work Infographic
Parts mapping is an Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz) practice of systematically identifying and visually or narratively charting the distinct inner parts — critics, worriers, peacekeepers, wounded exiles — and their relationships to each other. It is a diagnostic and orientation tool: it shows you the terrain of your inner system before you try to work with any single part. Evidence sits within the broader IFS and parts-work literature, which is growing but not yet on par with CBT or DBT.
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.