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What is Personal Kanban Board?
Personal Kanban is a productivity system and a unique way of thinking about planning and organizing work and life events. Personal Kanban board could be physical or digital. Their role is to transform our work and personal tasks into a visual workflow.
A basic Kanban board has a three-step workflow: To-do, In progress, Done. Personal Kanban is one of the best approaches to kill multitasking and increase the productivity of anything you do.
The visualization of our work with personal Kanban board is gaining significant popularity because it is a system, simple to use and easy to adapt.
How to Get Started with Personal Kanban Board
Personal Kanban is a philosophy of self-management — tasks and time. The two core principles we have to apply are:
· Visualise your work
Visualizing tasks and priorities is crucial in a Kanban system. The idea is that you don’t spend time making or reading lists or redefining priorities; you can see everything at a glance.
This is important because of the way the brain works. 90% of the information processed by the brain is visual. We process images 60,000 times faster than text. Images are stored in our long-term memory, while words are stored in our short-term memory.
By making your To-dos visual, it’s fast and intuitive to identify backlogs and priorities, re-allocate resources, and understand your workload comprehensively.
Also, the visualization of completed work helps you recognize your accomplishments and reward yourself for progress made.
· Limit your work-in-progress (WIP)
Limiting the current tasks to one at a time allows you to focus and complete the task more quickly and accurately than working on several things at once.
Kanban seeks to remove distractions, create clarity, and focus your many projects down into one simple step at a time.
The great thing about Kanban is that it’s compatible with other existing productivity and project management systems.
While you can create your first personal Kanban board using a physical board and some stickers, the best option is to use an online (virtual) Kanban board.
The online Kanban board is accessible from multiple locations, and you can always check your To-dos and in-progress tasks from wherever you are
Let’s Build Our First Personal Kanban Board:
1) Step 1: Map your workflow
Identify your workflow and start small. Create the three-step workflow columns:
· To-do;
· In-progress;
· Done.
2) Step 2: Visualize your work with Kanban cards
One of the primary purposes of representing your work/tasks as a Kanban card on the Kanban board is to track the progress of your work in a highly visual manner.
You can start putting tasks on your board where for each task a new Kanban card should be created. You can apply colors to cards and columns so you can easily differentiate between task types.
Then, add some additional information to each Kanban card, such as:
· To-do lists;
· Notes;
· Due dates;
· Descriptions;
· Events.
3) Apply work-in-progress principle (WIP)
Limiting the amount of work-in-progress (WIP) allows you to focus on the right task at the right time. The WIP principle eliminates multitasking because practically, you can’t concentrate on more than two things at any time with a productivity level of 100%, right?
We can also say that work-in-progress eliminates waste. For example, switching too often between multiple tasks creates time-waste, because each time you start a new task, you have to allow 5-10 minutes for the brain to adapt and concentrate on the new task again.
So, the primary purpose here is to have no more than two Kanban cards in the “In progress” column. You can pull a new card from the “To-do” column, only if you have pushed one from the “In progress” column to the “Done” column.
Personal Kanban Board Example
Let’s give you one example of a personal Kanban board.
This personal Kanban board consists of the primary three columns: To-do, In Progres, Done.
We create tasks in the left column and move them towards the right. Tasks are completed once they reach the final column “Done.”
From the example above you can see a simple personal Kanban board. From left to right – you can see the inbox feed, two tasks in “To-dos” column and only one task in “In progress” column (we apply the WIP principle).
There is one additional column collapsed, because the process of the example workflow requires it.
Flow-e allows you to create even more advanced personal Kanban boards. We will look into these examples in our next article from the personal Kanban series.
Here are some of the essential features a good personal Kanban tool should offer:
· Clean, streamlined interface
· Integrates with Gmail and Office365
· Allows easy organization of emails
· Simplifies task response
· Group cards into a conversation
· Set due dates
· Add To-do lists
· Add notes to your Kanban cards
· Built-in email/task delegation
· Integrates Kanban principles and workflow into email and time management
· Integrated timeline for your calendar and meetings
· Tagging emails/cards with folders and labels
· Assess the status of all your work and projects at a glance
· Available anywhere, on any device
The Benefits of Using Personal Kanban Boards for Work and Personal Life Events
· Visualizing work on a board makes time-management easier;
· Time optimization boost productivity by getting more things done;
· The Kanban method helps you avoid taking on too much work and prevents you from multitasking;
· The visual Kanban workflow allows you to focus on the right things that need to be done;
· It is easy to spot a bottleneck and analyze why cards are piling and not moving to the right;
· The personal Kanban can be adapted to your own needs—depending on the results that you’re getting and you want to achieve; you can make tweaks;
· Using the Kanban method in your life saves time that you can better spend it with your family.
Read also:
2) What is a Kanban WIP Limit and Why Do You Need It?
3) How Can a Personal Kanban Tool be Applied to Work and Life?
4) How To Select The Right Personal Kanban Software?
5) How to Apply a Personal Kanban System to Your Office365/Outlook Email?
6) How to Apply a Personal Kanban System to Your Gmail Email?
7) Personal Kanban Board Examples: Which Industries Can Adopt the Kanban Methodology?
Tutorial
Ready to get started?
Step-by-step instructions on how to drive a kanban project, prioritize your work, visualize your workflow, and minimize work-in-progress with Flow-e.
up next
Personal Kanban Board Examples
In the next article, we will present different personal Kanban board examples which you can copy and adapt to your personal and business needs.
