Productivity 101: How to Use Personal Kanban to Visualize Your Work

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Productivity best practices keep things in front of you and prioritize so you never have to think about what to work on next. Some are tricky, but others make it easy to see everything ordered by priority – so easy that you can use stickers if you want. Let’s talk about one of these systems: Personal Kanban.

Personal Kanban is a productivity-enhancing system that is easy to get started with, it has only two real “rules” and is designed to give you a simple, intuitive look at what is on your plate, what are your priorities and what you are. reached. This is a bit like the other productivity systems we’ve highlighted, such as Getting Things Done (GTD) and the Pomodoro technique . It has a general structure that you can follow and a number of tools to help you get started and stick with it. It’s not a philosophy like a kaizen approach , but there is definitely an opportunity to customize the system to work for you and build on the lessons learned from what you have achieved. Let’s start by looking at what Personal Kanban is and then figure out how to use it.

What is Personal Kanban?

Simply put, Personal Kanban is a simple system for managing your affairs. Its biggest advantage is that it helps you not to take on too much at once and always gives you a visual and quick look at your work. It is related, but not the same as the Lean planning and delivery Kanban method often used in manufacturing (in particular in the automotive industry). The idea for a “personal” Kanban originated when productivity experts Jim Benson and Tonyan DeMaria Barry wrote the book Personal. Kanban: Working with Maps | Navigating Life in 2011. The basic premise of Personal Kanban as a way to visualize and prioritize your work is much older, but the book outlines how the system works and offers specific advice for people struggling with overwhelming workloads and competing priorities.

Personal Kanban is based on two basic “rules”:

  • Visualize your work . In short, you should be able to look at your overall workload at any time, be able to quickly determine what you should work on next, have visual cues for priority and time to complete, and the system should be easy to add, remove, and reorganize. We’ve highlighted several ways to visualize your to-do list , including a personal kanban.
  • Limit your work in progress (WIP) . In other words, limit the number of things you work on at the same time. This does two things. First, it makes it easier to visualize your work because you keep secret how much you do in one go. Second, it also helps avoid the dangers of multitasking , not to mention burnout . Careful workload management will also teach you to say no without ruining your career .

From there, how you actually implement your personal kanban is largely up to you. You can use complex apps or tools, simple message boards, notes, or notebooks. There are no official tools or products (other than the book, of course). However, Benson and DeMaria Barry have a few tips to get you started, some of which you’ve probably seen before – both here at Lifehacker and on the internet.

How to get started with Personal Kanban

Getting started with Personal Kanban is easy. All you really need is a place where you can lay out your cases on a Kanban or Kanban board . The key is how they are organized. A simple board is nothing more than a diagram with three vertical columns: Backlog / To-Do , Doing, and Done .

Your Doing section contains all the things you are working on right now or plan to work on immediately. Ideally, they should be prioritized so you can take a look at them at any time and see which ones to tackle first. Your Backlog is all the things that you are not working on right now, but that need to be done at some point. “Done” is somewhat obvious, but it is important to maintain your Kanban as seeing how much work you have completed keeps you motivated and productive .

This is a simple Kanban. If this sounds familiar, you’ve probably seen some of the many workspaces and productivity posts featured in which we discussed the merits of using posters or similar boards to organize your affairs. Whiteboards are perfect for personal kanban. Easily draw columns and then quickly add and erase tasks. You can draw your columns if you like, and then use stickers for individual cases. This makes it easy to move them around without overwriting. Plus, sticky notes come in a variety of colors, giving you an easy way to prioritize your kanban. For example, yellow notes might have medium priority, purple notes might have low priority, and red notes might be most important.

Now, every time you look at the board, you can see what you have on your plate right now , and which of these K-DOS is most important. When you’re free, you’ll be able to quickly pick a task from backlog to go to “do it,” and it’s easy to see when your plate is full.

Kanban is important, but it’s really just a functional way to visualize your actions. The second rule, remembering to limit your current job, is also important. If you just keep adding notes to your tasks, you will be overwhelmed, and those visual benefits will be replaced by stress and anxiety. Benson and DeMaria Barry explain that it is very important to keep consistent work to a minimum . Set a hard cap on the number of things you want to have in the Doing section at any time, or on Kanban in general (save anything that needs to be moved to the Backlog, in a binder, or in a post. -This lays down until space.) That way, your Kanban stays organized and truly useful.

This slideshow (embedded above) is a presentation from the Personal Kanban website with more specific tips to help you get started.

Apps and tools that support personal kanban

If your workplace doesn’t have the luxury of a huge board that can be hung on the wall, or even a small tabletop or cork board that can be turned into a kanban, you have plenty of other options, including some familiar names. Whether you are surfing the web or prefer a downloadable application, here are a few productivity tools that use the Personal Kanban method:

  • Trello : That’s right, the ever-popular Trello productivity tool is actually about organizing tasks in a Kanban style. We highlighted it when it launched and we showed you how to organize your whole life with it . We even showed you how to integrate it into a system like GTD , but its visual design, emphasis on columns for organization, and a card-as-task approach make it ideal for Personal Kanban. All you have to do is define the columns and start adding tasks. You can even give them due dates, notes, reminders, visual cues for priority, images, and more.
  • KanbanFlow : KanbanFlow may be a lot like Trello, but it’s a little more tied to the Kanban approach than Trello. It adds an extra Today column so that you can separate the unfinished tasks from the ones that you intend to work on right now. Other than that, the other elements are familiar: you can add notes and reminders to your Kanban elements, keep them visually prioritized, limit your current work, and collaborate with others if you need to. KanbanFlow also includes a Pomodoro Timer to help you stay focused and get the job done. We’ll talk about this later, but the beauty of Kanban and its tools is that it integrates so well with other productivity methods. In addition, the site looks great on smartphones and tablets, no app required.
  • Evernote (with Kanbanote ) : Evernote itself is not a particularly good solution for Kanban. Its focus is far from visual, although you can tweak it to be a little more visible with the notes you add. However, its power lies in collecting and organizing information , not in visual presentation. Kanbanote changes that and turns your Evernote lists into a visual collection of items you can act on. It even adds three Backlog / Doing / Done columns for you. There’s even a companion Android app that you can use on the go.

Of course, there is nothing that says you need to use the app. This can be useful, especially if you rely on your equipment to get the job done. However, if you prefer analog techniques, you can always use a sketchbook and notes to create your kanban, or just an old pen and paper. You can even buy a Kanban for One chalkboard and whiteboards , all customized and ready to use, in table-friendly sizes. There is no rule that says your Kanban should be huge or that it should use Post-Its – they make things a little easier, but you should do what works with your flow.

How to make your personal Kanban work in the long run

The Personal Kanban approach is simple and flexible. You can use a piece of wall, download an app, or scribble in a notebook – and that’s the key to keeping it working for a long time. Pick the one that works for you and it will hook you. The key is to find a method that complements your workflow, rather than disrupts it, and uses the tools you come back to instead of fighting it. If you have access to a whiteboard in the office, being able to quickly find and see what’s on your agenda can be extremely helpful. However, if you travel a lot, using Trello or KanbanFlow is more convenient than lugging your board around.

We touched on this earlier, but another great thing about Personal Kanban is that it works so well with other productivity methods. If you are a GTD or Pomodoro fan, you can still use Personal Kanban. In fact, any system that uses a to-do list can benefit from the Personal Kanban approach. This means that if you are currently using a different system, you do not need to change the system or ditch the tools – you can just tweak your method a little.

For example, we recently noticed Chris S. Penn’s masking tape and sticky note board , which is based on the Eisenhower solution matrix . Although he mainly uses this single board, it can be easily incorporated into a personal kanban by turning his board into a progress section and adding backlog and done sections around it. Take a look at your own to-do list and how you organize it. Think of what you are actually doing in terms of this Doing board and the things you know you should do but are not going to do right now as your Backlog. As you sketch things out and gain traction, think of them as your Done board, not just tasks outlined. It is so simple.

Additional reading

From here you can get started with your personal kanban, but we’ve only covered the basics. For example, this method is as effective for organizing teams as it is for organizing personal affairs, and does not require much work to set up. Of course, you should start with Benson and DeMaria Barry’s comprehensive book on Personal Kanban , but if you want to learn more, here are a few resources worth checking out:

Personal Kanban may sound like the language of productivity, but the core principles are simple and hard to argue with: keep track of your work. Try not to juggle too much right away. The rest are details that you should translate into your ideal and most productive workflow.

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