Making Your Work Visible with Personal Kanban
A phrase becomes a cliché when it's used so often that it loses its meaning. The cliché "out of sight, out of mind" is used to convey the idea that we quickly forget people, problems, and things that are no longer visible. Ideas drained of their significance are often ripe for reinvention. This article explores the benefits of making work both visible and invisible. Sometimes, out of sight, out of mind is a bad thing, sometimes it’s good: it’s all a matter of timing.
Tasks, Projects and Processes
Let's begin by clarifying three related, but different productivity concepts: tasks, projects, and processes. The definitions below define how these terms are used in personal productivity discussions. Like many concepts, these ideas have different meanings in different contexts.
Task - A task is a single unit of work, often completed in one work session.
Project - A project is a set of two or more coordinated tasks focused on the delivery of a specific outcome, usually by a specific date.
Process - A process is a set of two or more coordinated tasks that reliably deliver a repeatable result.
Personal productivity applications focus on helping you manage projects and tasks. Many include support for simple process management tools like checklists, but don’t go beyond the basics. The more robust process management tools are focused on documenting and facilitating complex business processes and aren’t a good fit for personal use.
A Brief Introduction To Kanban
You may already be familiar with Kanban—but even if you aren’t it's likely you've seen a Kanban board drawn on a conference room whiteboard or in a presentation.
A simple physical Kanban board with Post-it notes
The Japanese word “kanban” means “card you can see,” or signboard. The Kanban method was developed by Taiichi Ōno at Toyota in the early 1950s to help the company eliminate overproduction, respond more quickly to changing consumer demands, and eliminate the waste of keeping unneeded raw materials and parts on hand.
Every finished product had a card attached to it with an inventory number. When the product was sold, the card was sent back to the production team. The team collected the cards and began production again once demand reached an agreed upon threshold. All the materials and parts also had cards attached to them, which flowed back to the procurement department and their suppliers, ensuring that the necessary raw materials and parts would be on hand once the demand threshold was met.
Ōno’s system of visual signals (cards) gave Toyota the ability to avoid stockpiling unnecessary parts, optimize workflow down the line, reduce defects, and implement a culture of continuous improvement. His Kanban method is what we now call “Just-in-Time” (JIT) supply chain management.
Kanban is about making work visible. Today, the method is used in a wide variety of settings. It’s particularly popular in software development settings, where it's often difficult for teams and individuals to visualize the tasks that make up a project, track work-in-progress, and assess the team’s capacity to take on additional work.
Personal Kanban
The Kanban method is also useful for managing personal productivity. Making work visible helps maximize flow—an important benefit in a world of knowledge work, where each of us is in effect managing our own knowledge factory.
Kanban has two simple, essential rules:
Make your work visible - Each task is documented with a "card," so all the work required, including tasks often considered too small to track, are visible.
Limit your work-in-progress - The system requires set limits on the number of active tasks that any individual (or team) can work on at once.
Kanban cards are arranged on a board with three or more columns. In the simplest case the three primary columns are “To Do,” “Doing,” and “Done.” You can add additional columns if doing so helps clarify your workflow. There are many other ways to customize your personal Kanban boards and cards to make your work visible. Here are a few examples:
Use colors to distinguish tasks associated with a particular project or area of your life, such as “work,” “family,” or “health.”
Use “swim lanes” (horizontal lines) to organize and group tasks associated with a particular project or area of your life.
Add tags to your cards
Add time estimates
Add cover images
The key is to give yourself the information you need to see and manage your workload and flow.
Integrating Process Checklists Into Your Kanban Cards
Checklists are useful for managing processes. A Kanban card can contain a process checklist to help ensure a predictable outcome. For example, every time I generate an invoice, I want to follow the same steps so that all my invoices look the same and have the information required to ensure timely payment.
A task card with an integrated process checklist
Limiting Your Work-In-Progress
The second rule of Kanban is to limit your work-in-progress—the number of tasks that are underway at the same time. It requires limiting the number of tasks in your queue for the day or week. Limiting your work in progress minimizes multi-tasking, improves your ability to focus on finishing work, and helps you more effectively manage your time.
It’s up to you to set your limit for the number of tasks you can effectively manage at once. For most of us, the number is somewhere around five tasks. I find that my ability to manage multiple tasks changes from day to day. If I’m working on a large, complex project I may be able to complete several small tasks during the day, but won’t have the mindshare necessary to handle any additional mentally demanding tasks. On those days, I may be able to handle just three tasks.
Most of us have a backlog of projects and tasks. While it’s important to make your work visible, managing a large number of cards can be difficult. This is where your task management app can help. You can use your task management app as your collection tool and backlog binder.
If a new task is “important and urgent,” meaning that it needs to be done in the current week, add it to the To Do list on your Kanban board and prioritize it along with the other tasks in your Kanban queue. If it's not important and urgent, add it to your task management list. (See The Eisenhower Matrix for more on categorizing important tasks.)
Create your To Do list for the coming week during your weekly review. If you don't do a weekly review, create your To Do list at the beginning of each week. Limit the number of tasks you add to your To Do list for the week. Start with five to ten tasks. See how that feels.
Honor the limits you set on the number of items you allow yourself to add to your To Do list. You can always return to your backlog and refresh your list if you've completed all of the tasks you added at the beginning of the week.
Using a backlog to hide tasks that you’re not going to be working on reduces your cognitive load and the likelihood of feeling like you’re not making progress. This is the flip side of out of sight, out of mind—it’s a good thing when it reduces your cognitive load, and that only happens when you have project and task management systems you trust.
Digital Kanban Tools
The most popular tool for creating digital Kanban boards is Trello, and with good reason: Trello is easy to use, very customizable, and offers a free tier that includes the basic features you need to implement a simple personal Kanban system. PC Magazine has an up-to-date, comprehensive review of Trello.
KanbanFlow is another good alternative—also easy to use and powerful. Its free tier isn’t quite as feature rich as Trello’s, but the premium version is about half the price of Trello. KanbanFlow has a number of advanced features that I like (such as integrated support for Pomodoros) that make it worth a look.
Other tools worth considering:
There are literally dozens of other Kanban tools available and support for Kanban views is integrated in many popular task management and information management tools, including Todoist, Notion, and ClickUp. Check out a few and have fun playing with them. You’ll quickly figure out which tool works best for you.
I hope this brief introduction to personal Kanban has piqued your interest. Making your work visible is particularly helpful in the midst of the "blur." Personal Kanban boards can help reduce your cognitive load, enable you to visualize new ways of managing your projects and tasks, and help you maintain a healthy work/life balance. Not a bad return on an investment in a few sticky notes!
Related and Recommended
Want to learn more about personal Kanban? Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry is the classic book on the subject. The authors also maintain a blog with interesting productivity and Kanban related posts.