Parts Work Handout: 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 Handout, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Practices that may help
- 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. - 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. - Substitute
Ask: what component, material, person, process, or rule could be swapped for something different?
SCAMPER: A Systematic Creativity Technique - 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 - Classify pebbles and batch them into a defined window
Identify necessary-but-not-critical tasks (pebbles) and give them a contained, defined time block.
The Pickle Jar Theory of Time Management - Parkinson's Law, Made Practical
Parkinson's Law — "work expands to fill the time available for its completion" — was originally a satirical observation about bureaucracy, but it describes a real phenomenon: open-ended time allows tasks to grow through perfectionism, distraction, and scope creep. The practical application is setting tighter-than-comfortable deadlines to compress work quality without materially reducing output quality. Evidence is mixed and highly task-dependent. - Draw or sketch the inner system visually
Put parts and their relationships on paper — who is close to whom, who holds whom at arm’s length.
IFS Parts Mapping, Made Practical - Slowing down with handmade and natural materials
Spend time working with materials that resist efficiency — clay, soil, wood, tea — as a counter to the speed of optimised life.
Wabi-Sabi: Finding Beauty in Imperfection - Actively cut or delegate the trivial 80%
Systematically reduce or hand off activities in the bottom 80% of your impact distribution.
The Pareto Principle: 80/20 for Personal Productivity - The 25/5 cycle
Work in one 25-minute focus sprint, then take a 5-minute break — repeat.
The Pomodoro Technique, Made Practical
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I keep treating one piece of this as a given
- I push flat-out all day with no real breaks, treating rest like something I have to earn after the work is done
- The little necessary stuff
- I can sense my parts one at a time but I can never hold the whole thing in my head at once
- My whole day is fast, frictionless, on a screen, and my mind never actually lands anywhere
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
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 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 Graphic
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 Holmes
If a problem object looks like one thing, try perceiving it as separate parts with separate functions.
Break apart perceptual chunks that may be blocking you
- Parts Work Janina Fisher
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.