Personal Kanban
A guide to organizing our daily life using a Kanban board
What exactly is Kanban?
Kanban in Japanese literally means billboard/signboard. It is designed to help you be agile, visualize your work and maximize efficiency.
The easiest way to understand Kanban is to imagine it like a water pipe, they have water going in and out. Similarly, Kanban has tasks coming in and going out through each step of the workflow(e.g. Todo, Doing, Done).
Just as water pipes have a limited amount of water that they can allow to go through at a time, Kanban has that as well. Using Kanban we can limit the number of tasks that goes into each step of the workflow. Also, Kanban helps us visualize our work and break it down into a prioritized list of tasks instead of just one big task which would then promote procrastination to our brain, and our brains tend to quite easily fall into that trap.
From my personal experience and from what I have read from others, using Kanban for managing our to-do list is a great idea and has many benefits. Let us go through them together.
Helps us overcome procrastination
By breaking our work into smaller tasks, we overcome procrastination.
Procrastination tends to happen when our brain sees some task as a complicated and time-consuming task. One of the ways to minimize our exposure to procrastination is to break our tasks into smaller, meaningful tasks. By doing that, our brain is tricked into thinking that each task is a simple and does not consume time that much, which as a result makes no sense to procrastinate, why keep being worried with a task when it literally takes minutes to be done?
Breaking the tasks into smaller, meaningful pieces is beneficial even if we do not use Kanban.
Makes prioritization very easy
After breaking down each task, we need to prioritize the tasks.
This step is very important because we need to know which task to move from Todo/Backlog to In Progress/Doing. Instead of just picking randomly, we need to follow a procedure to make sure that the most important tasks are done first, so that if we do not achieve to complete every task, we will be left with some less critical tasks.
Visualizes the work we have to do
After you break down each task and have a plan of what needs to be done, it will be very easy for you to see what your current status is, what you have completed and what are the upcoming tasks. However, this tends to be overwhelming, so that’s why we need the next benefit.
Improves focus
Limit WIP(Work in Progress) in DOING Column. This column would have a limited number of tasks to improve our focus. KANBAN is like a pipe, only accepts a limited number of tasks as input(into DOING) and as a result it gives the finished tasks, which are better in quality because you are more focused while doing them, and also you have prioritized the tasks, so this minimizes the risk of procrastination and gives you a feeling of success when you see all those important tasks being completed.
Helps us find a balance
Avoid overload by keeping WIP limit very low, so that you don't feel overwhelmed with the amount of tasks you have to do, but you also want to find a balance between overloading yourself and not doing the work you are expected to do. Personally, I like to keep only one task in the DOING column, so that I only focus on one thing at a time. If there is something I need to do urgently, I add that to DOING, and move the current task into the top of the TODO list(which has tasks ordered by priority).
Example Board
A great board that helped me start using Kanban for my daily life is this:
https://trello.com/b/lZmvFcpe/cause-if-anyone-can-tash-kanban
It has 6 columns: Backlog(Work), Backlog(Personal), Prioritized(This Week), Doing, Done.
- Backlog(Work) contains a prioritized list of planned work-related tasks
- Backlog(Personal) contains a prioritized list of planned personal life-related tasks
- Prioritized(This Week) contains a list of tasks that are taken from the backlog and are planned to be done within a week
- Doing contains only one task at a time which is in progress
- Done contains all the tasks that are done
From my experience using this board as a template, I find that the Done column tends to get populated quite quickly, so I added another column for the older Done tasks.
Of course I could just archive the cards that are done, but having many tasks in the Done column gives you a great sense of achievement and motivates you to move all your cards to that column, and we should use every opportunity we get to trick our brain into working harder!
Feel free to respond if you have anything to say or you can reach out to me privately on Twitter(@KelmendiDhurim) or via email(dhkelmendi@gmail.com).
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Thank you for your time!
