When I go out with my children we sometimes pop into a sweet shop where I offer to buy them sweets or some kind of treat. More often than not, they lose their minds with so much choice. They decide on something and then see something else and drop the one in their hand in favour of the new shiny thing. This can go on for some time. I sometimes find myself doing the same thing when working especially when new ideas pop into my head. I’m currently developing a concrete planter as my first product, I’ve never done this before so it’s taking a some time and I find myself half developing the product, seeing something awesome and dropping the old one in favor of the new shiny thing. I sound like my children.
At work (my day job), we sometimes fall into the same trap where we keep chasing the shiny new thing in favour of developing the old “shiny new thing” which seems better and more awesome. To ensure we work on the right thing we use the Kanban process. We add ideas to the Kanban board, prioritise and work on the top priority until completion. With the number of things I want to do it can be overwhelming and sometimes difficult to focus while still trying to remember ideas that I’ve had and keep track of progress for each idea.
At work we use Trello, to track progress and priorities, I want to use something similar to that but not Trello. I didn’t want to spend too much time searching for an alternative as the tool is not that important, the process is.
I did a quick search “trello alternatives” and fond these
Airtable, Asana, Avaza, ClickUp, Kanban Tool, Yalla
Given that I wanted to be up and running fast, this ended up being the success criteria. Also, it had to look pretty too. This being said, the pace I wanted to move at, I quickly settled on Asana. Job DONE!
Kanban is super simple to use and fast to implement (fits the velocity criteria) I created five columns, Backlog, InProgress, Running activities, Done and Will not do.
Backlog: A list of all my ideas and tasks that I want to do, prioritised and labelled.
In Progress: Highest priority items pulled in from the backlog, something that I can actively work on and I AM working on. I try to keep the number on this list low. As I can only give my full attention on a few things at a time.
Running activity: Things that will be ongoing for a long time eg, writing two blog post each month.
Done: Completed items.
Will not do: Crazy idea’s that seem great but i’ll never do, It helps with reducing noise in the Backlog column. It may pull it back to backlog in future.
Next, I started adding my ideas and tasks to the backlog, some tickets have one activity and some have multiple activities until I can move them to DONE. For example, in the Running activity column, I have a task called Medium Blog that has 24 subtasks, one for each blog post that I need to write as well as due dates.
Once I had a complete list of my tasks I could then prioritise, label and then move some items to the In-progress column and start working on them. I would not move anything else into the In Progress until these tasks have been completed and moved to the DONE column,
From start to finish I was up and running with Asana in 20 mins and I look at it daily, it keeps me focused and keeps me in check! I only have three items that I’m working on at any given time and I’m secure in the knowledge that all the idea that I have are safely kept in the backlog.
The tasks that I’m working on can also be loaded up with notes and links so I can come back to the task knowing that my research, thoughts and notes are safe.
Asana offer loads and loads of features that i’ve not even looked at, I’ll update here if I find something interesting.
