Explained

What is personal kanban?

Kanban began on factory floors as a way of pulling work through a system only as fast as it could be finished. Personal kanban is the same idea applied to one person's desk. It has exactly two rules, and most of what follows is about why two is enough.

The two rules

1. Visualize your work. Every commitment becomes a card on a board, and the board has columns for the states a piece of work passes through. The point is not tidiness. A thing you can see is a thing you can decide about, and a list in your head is not a thing you can see.
2. Limit your work in progress. Put a cap on the Doing column, and when it is full, finish something before starting anything. This is the rule people resist, and it is the one that does the work. Starting is cheap; finishing is what clears the desk.

Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry set the rules out this way in their 2011 book Personal Kanban, and the phrase has meant that ever since.

Where it comes from

The kanban system was developed at Toyota in the 1950s under Taiichi Ohno, as a way of signalling that a workstation was ready for more parts, so that nothing was made before it was needed. Software teams borrowed the idea in the 2000s, most visibly through David J. Anderson's work, and turned it into a board: columns for stages, cards for tasks, and a limit on how many cards a column may hold. Personal kanban strips that down to what a single person needs, which turns out to be the two rules and almost none of the ceremony.

Setting up a board

• Three columns. To do, Doing, Done. Add a Waiting column if a lot of your work stalls on other people. Resist a fourth beyond that until the board demands it.
• A limit on Doing. Three is a reasonable start. If you find yourself wanting five, that is information.
• Cards small enough to finish. “Write the report” is a project; “draft section two” is a card. A card that sits in Doing for a week is usually two cards.
• A daily glance. Not a review meeting with yourself; a look. What is in flight, what is late, what next.

What happens after a week

The Done column becomes a record, which is oddly reassuring on a day that felt like nothing got finished. You notice which cards stall and why. You learn your actual capacity, which is smaller than your ambition and larger than your fear. And the board becomes calmer than a list ever was, because a list grows while a board flows.

Common mistakes

• Too many columns. Each one is a state you now have to maintain.
• Cards too big to move. If nothing moves, the board stops telling you anything.
• No limit on Doing. Without it, a kanban board is a to-do list with extra steps.
• Never pruning. A card that has sat in To do for a month is a card you have decided not to do. Let it go.
• Moving a personal board into a team tool, and inheriting a login, a server copy and a subscription for a board with one person on it.

Doing it in Kaniban

Kaniban is a personal kanban board and not much else, so the mapping is direct. Columns are yours to name and reorder; cards drag between them. On Plus, a column can carry a limit, and the board marks it when it is over, which is the second rule made visible. A timer on every card says how long a thing really took, and the summary's cycle time says how long cards take from start to done. Due dates put cards on a calendar and a timeline. Setup is about thirty seconds, there is no account, and the board stays on your machine.

Questions