Personal Kanban Board: A Guide to Help Boost Your Productivity

Kanban is a personal workflow management concept. It’s one of the tools project managers and individuals who want to visualize their workflow use to achieve a constant state of flow.

To quote David J Anderson, the creator of the Kanban framework, “At the heart of Kanban is the realization that we are better off using tools that help us focus on the things that really matter.”

Your personal Kanban board provides an environment that helps you do tasks easily and is a great place to begin.

Table of Contents:

What is Kanban?
What is Kanban Board?
What is Personal Kanban?
Why Do You Need a Personal Kanban Board?
Who Can Use Personal Kanban?
The Structure of the Kanban Board
Steps Involved in Setting up a Personal Kanban Board
Why Personal Kanban is an Effective Strategy?
Closing Thoughts
Frequently Asked Questions

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a visual board used to improve productivity in high-volume work environments. It’s called a “Visual Board” because its users often display it on large sheets of paper or whiteboards. The goal is to limit resources to a set number of tasks, or a “Backlog.”

What is Kanban Board?

Kanban stands for “Cardboard Brain” reflecting the notion that the method’s visual representation imitates the human brain and that it provides a mental roadmap for action. An important component of Kanban is the idea of a task board, where you list tasks and then move them to different stages as they reach completion.

What is Personal Kanban?

The book Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry was released in 2011. They presented an effective productivity approach through this book. A system for organizing individual or group tasks is a personal Kanban. It applies the same Lean principles to both individual and teamwork that helped the Japanese auto industry become a global leader.

Personal Kanban is a fantastic tool for organizing your workload and increasing productivity. It conceptualizes a more effective approach to handling work and personal tasks by building on the Kanban framework. Personal Kanban is also a way through which you can navigate your task flow.

Why Do You Need a Personal Kanban Board?

A Personal Kanban Board is a visual representation of the workflow process of an individual’s tasks. Entrepreneurs and managers use it to manage their workload. It’s an effective tool for executing the correct decisions and improving workflow. The flow shown on the board is generally divided into quadrants. The board uses the workflow process in prioritizing processes, using different shapes and colors to indicate process priority.

Handpicked Must Reads:

Who Can Use Personal Kanban?

Anyone can use a personal Kanban board for a wide variety of reasons. Families can divide and plan chores, students can organize their assignments and study for tests, and teachers can work closely with their pupils and deliver engaging lessons. In a professional setting, tracking bugs can help engineers create better software, Architects use them to compile specifications and create designs and executives utilize Kanban boards to arrange their professional and personal life.

Anyone managing numerous tasks effectively can benefit from using a personal Kanban board. Any user, regardless of age, circumstance, or learning preferences, can use it. A personal Kanban board is useful if you feel like you have a lot of tasks to complete at work or at home.

The Structure of the Kanban Board

Work items (represented as cards) and process phases are physically represented on a Kanban board, which can be physical or digital (as columns).
An individual task that needs to be finished as a component of the larger project is represented by a Kanban card. Any item that needs to go through a process to be finished qualifies, whether it’s a task, bug report, article, job candidate, job listing, or anything else.
A workflow phase is represented by each column on the board, where each Kanban card must move through from left to right. Workflow for simple Kanban boards is broken down into three steps: To-do, In-progress, and Done. However, complicated projects could require more workflow steps and special labels that correspond to the project’s chronological process.

Steps Involved in Setting up a Personal Kanban Board

Before you start working on setting up your personal kanban board, decide whether you need a physical or digital board. The below steps will describe both physical and digital kanban board setup.

1. Physical Kanban Board

If pen and paper are your favorite tools, then list out your tasks on sticky notes after drawing your columns on a whiteboard or a sizable poster board. As you move them around the board, place your sticky notes in the appropriate columns.

As the name suggests, enter whatever you need to do in the first column. You have two choices here: either list only the top three to five high-priority activities or list all tasks and use your own priority criteria to decide which ones to start working on first.
List the tasks that are already “In progress” in the second column, i.e., those that you are currently doing. If you feel there are too many, transfer some of them back to the “To Do” column so you can concentrate on finishing the remaining tasks. You might also move some jobs from your “To Do” column here if you don’t have any (or enough) tasks in the “In progress” column, but be careful not to go over the WIP limit you set for yourself.
As you begin to finish tasks, begin moving them from the “In progress” (or Doing) column to the “Done” column.

2. Digital Kanban Board

With only a few keystrokes and some drag and drop, you can easily create and manage your boards using a digital Kanban application. Using digital tools will enable you to view your boards from your PC and phone, share them with anyone worldwide, and communicate in real time.

A board can have as many columns or workflow phases as you like. You may use “To-Do,” “Doing,” and “Done” for broad and straightforward jobs.
The exact work items that pass through your predetermined process phases are represented on your Kanban cards.
Start by selecting a card in the board’s leftmost column and moving it to the right. To indicate that a task has been removed from a backlog or queue and is currently being worked on, for instance, shift a card from “To-Do” to “Doing.”
Move it back to the right, from “Doing” to “Done,” once you’re finished.
Continue until the rightmost column has all of the cards on your board. This denotes that all tasks have been finished.
You may keep moving your project forward by frequently evaluating your full board.

Why Personal Kanban is an Effective Strategy?

The Personal Kanban board provides a visual overview of the current priorities, the progress of each task, and what will happen next. Anyone can immediately assess the situation by looking at the board and determining what they should concentrate on. With this level of openness, your tasks go well and there are fewer back and forth.

Restricting work in progress is one of the main advantages of being able to view it as it is being done. Adding more work than you can handle can only lead to muddled priorities, tension, and overwhelm.
It is simple to observe which tasks are becoming stuck or where on board they are stacking up on the Kanban board. You can identify and address bottlenecks and obstacles before they cause a problem.
Any process may be mapped onto a Kanban board and you can get started by setting the workflow steps of your choice.
There aren’t any difficult rules or complicated implementations in Kanban. The cards are simply moved through the process by placing them where they belong.
A board will grow in size but not complexity.

Closing Thoughts

You will quickly discover that you are finishing the majority of the tasks you begin. You are concentrating on what is crucial. Additionally, you are surrounded by content workers, and feel content yourself.

The simplicity of the Personal Kanban Board is one of its major benefits. After reading this article, if you like the idea, you can immediately put it to use! Additionally, its visual component makes it much simpler to use, enabling you to see how our job is developing, what has already been completed, and what is coming up next right away.

Later, as you’re accustomed to it, you can expand and perform more complex tasks, including merging Personal Kanban with your other task management methodologies such as Microsoft Project, Jira, Monday, etc.

For more information on project management software and methodologies read our blogs.

For courses on project management and tools please check our course list.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Personal Kanban good for individuals?

A personal Kanban board is best for individuals because it helps contain the workload of the individual. It is best to have at least one person handling the day-to-day tasks by using a single board that monitors the work progress of that person and has the potential to bring points of focus to individuals. This allows the individual to focus on the task that they are going to focus on and not have to worry about the entire team’s progress.

Is there an app for Personal Kanban?

There are several software tools and software to create a personal Kanban board. Some of the prominent software are Trello and Jira. Microsoft Project, Monday which also includes phone application.

How can I organize my Personal Kanban?’

Organizing a personal Kanban board is made easier with sticky notes in case you are using a physical board. In digital boards, you have several views like boards, timelines, and calendars through which you can organize your tasks.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!