How I use my personal Kanban

Last week I posted about my Friday rituals for staying productive. A few people were intrigued how my personal Kanban board system worked, someone else said Kanban had been life changing for her, so I thought I'd write it up.

 First up, you should read the book, Personal Kanban: Mapping work - Navigating life by Jim Benson.

Next you need to understand that I work in an engineering world and Kanban is basically a way of life for so many of the people I work with. Kanban boards are used to manage all the work in a team, they litter the walls of hallways around Microsoft campus. For those with no knowlage of this, a Kanban board is a left to right board - usually a whiteboard - with columns. Those columns show the status of work items, each column representing a stage of the process and each task represented as a card - often a sticky note. When an item is worked through the process it moves left to right until it's done.

My personal board isn't physical, imagine me trying to carry the whiteboard around the world. Cumbersome. I use Trello and I find that works really well for me:

My board has 5 columns, from left to right:

• Incoming which is for new work
• Next up allows for minimal prioritization
• Waiting on others is where I place tasks that I can't work on until someone else does something
• Doing can contain a maximum of 3 items (except on Fridays)
• Done is everything I have done. I move this to a separate trello board each week and I can go back for a couple of years now, week by week.

Here's how it works. Say I read something in my email that I need to do. I'll turn that into a card in Trello, often using the Outlook add-in (which because Outlook is awesome is on every operating system and device I use). I'll add everything to that list, small things, big things, personal things, work things. I have labels that I use to categorize the tasks.

Every week I carve up my time into "chunks" for specific types of tasks and reserve the times on my calendar. That's critical. Then at those times I go to the Incoming column and move 3 of those items into Doing. I'll work them until completion and move them to the Done column. If I have to get someone else to do something, I'll move it to Waiting on others. When I have space in Doing I'll move another item from Incoming.

That's the system.

This is why I have a memory for tasks like an elephant (my wife will disagree)

This is why I don't lose track of work.

This is why I know what work I've done and what others are doing.

This is not rocket science* and you can do it too.

The only other thing that's needed is discipline to not step outside the system.

*If you happen to be launching a rocket, you too can use this system, which I guess does make it rocket since, in that case.