Track Your Work With the Kanban Method
If you’ve ever heard the word “kanban”, you probably remember it, as it’s undeniably fun to say. “Kanban,” as it turns out, is more than just a fun word—it’s a system for scheduling tasks in a highly productive way. It is a visual method of determining what you need to do, what your team needs to do, and what your organization needs to do to achieve your goals. It can get pretty boring, but you can do it entirely yourself on a smaller scale to maximize your workflow and productivity.
What is kanban?
Kanban was developed by an industrial engineer at Toyota. The word itself translates from Japanese as “sign” or “billboard”, and many kanban fans use white boards to display their kanban boards.
The idea of the methodology is that in order to achieve the goal, you must know at what stage of the project you are at any given time. On your Kanban board, you will have three columns: one for work that has not yet started, one for work that is in progress, and one for work that has been completed. You can mark them as “to do”, “in progress”, and “done”.
When you use this system, all tasks start on the left side of the board and move across it, giving you a visual idea of where everything is. In addition to the slight confidence boost you get when you see tasks in the “done” column, this can help you see how long certain processes are taking you. Consider recording the date of each column-to-column transition whenever you move something in any of the three.
How to make a kanban board
You have a few options when you’re trying to use kanban: you can create a super-simple Excel sheet with the project name at the top and three columns for to-do, due, and due. Leave space for notes about delays, special requirements, or anything else relevant to the competition for this task. You can also use off-the-shelf kanban software from companies like Asana and Trello , which lets you add notes, files, and other important information, and syncs with your team so everyone is on the same page.
Typically, people use whiteboards to do this and write their tasks on sticky notes, making it easy to move them from column to column. Like a thermometer chart , it is displayed somewhere in the office and you can move the stickers that correspond to your duties as you progress through the workflow. If you’re just doing your own project and not a team project, you can use a small board like this one ($5.49) and keep it on your desk.
Or you can just commit yourself to this method and get a physical kanban board ready. This one from pmxboard ($98) comes with an extra column for “work in progress” or older, predefined tasks that don’t need to be done yet, as well as four markers, an eraser, and an editing kit. Try this simple folding board from Kling Magnetics ($24.95), which has dry-erase magnets that can be used in place of sticky notes.