To Do: Personal Kanban
To-do lists can be boring and ineffective. You’ve got your standard list of items — many are old, some were just added with eager anticipation, some are satisfyingly crossed out, and others will be crossed out eventually, some day, maybe. If you get fancy with it, maybe you use an app or a whiteboard so you can cleanly remove and rearrange items and even add some flair. But in the end, it is still an unfinished, unprioritized list.
Personal Kanban ensures that your to-do list gets done
Using Personal Kanban, you still have to put in effort. No tool or process is a pure panacea, but this one is pretty close to magic in its effectiveness and simplicity. Kanban, an agile software practice, helps ensure a steady flow of task completion by adding some simple rules and organization to the standard to-do list.
To provide a little context, much of the software world has adopted agile practices during the past two decades, and with it, a lot of sticky notes and a lot of controversy on what true agility is. The debates can get pretty heated, even akin to religious arguments. It is tempting to click on those controversial headlines Agile makes no sense or Agile is ruining your product. As my colleague Jason pointed out, “The problem isn’t agile. The problem is not knowing how to catalyze and cultivate agile minds.”
