Personal Kanban

Kanban is a project management framework that focuses on workflows and moving tasks from “to-do” to “completed”. Personal Kanban is a modification of Kanban system for managing team and individual tasks.

The primary goal of Personal Kanban is to give people a system that helps them prioritize their work in a way that promotes productivity and balance. Its biggest benefit is that it helps you avoid taking on too much at once, and always gives you a visual, at-a-glance look at your work. Unlike other complicated frameworks and productivity techniques, personal Kanban has two essential rules:

Visualize Your Work: You should be able to, at any time, look at your overall workload, be able to determine quickly what you should work on next, have visual cues for priority and time to complete, and that system should be easy to add, remove, and re-organize.

Limit Your Work In Progress (WIP): 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. Second, it also helps you avoid the dangers of multitasking while managing the workload.

The simplest way to set up a Personal Kanban board is to create three columns:

To-Do | In Progress | Complete

Once you have created Kanban columns, you can begin to prioritize them. The easiest way is to label each one either “High,” “Medium,” or “Low” priority. Next, determine how many tasks you’re comfortable working on at one time. Ideally, you’d only tackle one activity at a time. But, if you have bigger tasks that will stretch over hours or days, you may be okay having 2–3 tasks in progress at one time.

Focus on completing the tasks you have started. Once a task is finished, you can move it to the “Complete” column and then add another task to the “In Progress” column.

For the most effective Kanban personal productivity tool, consider the following tips:

a. Tasks related to different parts of your life should be on separate boards. (I.e., have a “home” board and a “work” board).

b. Break activities down into separate concrete tasks that take a few hours to a few days each.

c. Limit the number of tasks that can be in the “In Progress” list at once. Start with 1–3; then add more if you find yourself having too much downtime.

d. Stay flexible. Kanban is meant to be adaptable, so feel free to change your personal Kanban tool to meet your needs. If you need another column, such as “In Review,” go ahead and create it.

Ref: www.lifehacker.com, www.wrike.com