For those who are not working in the IT world, or maybe they are not aware of Kanban, you can read this short introduction from Wikipedia. Basically it is a methodology used to organize IT projects using a queue of tasks. The revelation I had a while ago is that Kanban can be used for more than just IT projects.
I am not sure how many people are using Kanban daily to improve their life. I have to say that both my husband and I have been using it for a very long time and we definitely made our life easier.
Daily you have lots of extra work to do. You have a job, but also you have a family, a house, a life to live. The best way to achieve a balanced life and to have more free time to spend with your loved ones is to become more organized.
To be able to achieve all these with Kanban we chose a tool that was developed to support this process. Now we use Trello (thanks to a colleague of mine who recommended it), but we started this journey using KanbanFlow. I am pretty sure there are more tools of this type, but Trello seems to be the best choice for us for now. It has both web and mobile support.
After you chose the tool you want to work with you have to understand a little bit how this works, and what’s the best way to use it for your needs. You will need to understand few terms and principles:
- What is a board? Is there a need to share my board with other persons? How to organize my board (the workflow)?
The board is the place where you can view and manage all of your tasks, and workflow. You can share your board with other persons (for example both my husband and I chose to share our personal boards with each other). Sometimes doing this brings value to your process and the most important visibility. Of course it depends also how much your time depends from others.
Related of workflow, it is better to follow the process, but to adapt it to your needs. Below you will see how I decided to organize my Kanban workflow.
A task (in Trello it is called card) is simple a thing you have to do in a certain day. For example, you need to make an appointment to the doctor, you need to research some products etc. When you add a task try to make it very simple. If you have a big task try to split it in small parts and file multiple cards for it. If this is not possible, then you can add a checklist to the task.
If you want you can subscribe multiple people to a card, you can add comments, and many other stuff that will make the interaction with the Kanban process much more easier.
This is actually the list with all the actions you need to complete at some point. The most important thing is to prioritize your items based of their importance. The first card in the queue has the biggest priority, the bottom card is the less important one.
It is very important to limit the number of tasks you are working on. If you are not doing that then you will see your list full of items for lots of days. Believe me, this is true. I tested it myself 🙂
Try to have 1-3 cards in progress to make sure you finish them and that you will advance in workflow (moving them in done).
First of all you will need to identify how many boards do you need. From my experience it is best to have only one board per person (I strictly refer here to boards for your personal use. If you want to use it for work, for school etc. then you will need to create one board for each domain). It is much easier this way. I tried to have multiple boards for my personal stuff at some point but it did not work for me.
After that you will have to define a flow for your board. My flow has the following lists (displayed in the same order as below) :
– To Do (actually this is the queue with all my tasks);
– To Do This Week (here I define the tasks I need to complete in the current week);
– To Do Today (the queue containing all the tasks to be done in the current day);
– Doing (tasks in progress);
– Done (completed tasks).
Every week I reprioritize my cards and move the ones I have to solve in the current week in the “To Do This Week” list.
Every morning I add the items to solve in that day in the “To Do Today” column, and when I start a task I put it in progress (the “Doing” column). Once it is done I make sure I move it in Done.
Make sure you find the flow that works best for you. For example, my husband used the “To Do, To Do Tomorrow, Doing, and Done” workflow, and recently he changed it with one that has all weekdays.
Consider sharing your board with your partner. It is not a must, but for my husband and I works very well and saves lot of time. You can add cards to your partners board (I truly enjoy this :D). For example, I realized today that our car needs to be washed so I added a task to my husband to fix this problem (of course, this is only a “primitive” scenario :D). Please make sure you add these tasks in the “To Do” column, otherwise you can destroy the power of this methodology.
It might seem complicated, but believe me it isn’t. It is actually much more easier than you realize. You have access on your board from every computer with Internet access or from your smartphone (of course after you install the app 🙂 ).
There are lots of things to write about the benefits of using Kanban in your day-by-day life, and of course about Kanban as a process, but I think this post is a good start. I will let you experiment, and maybe I will create a suite of posts about this subject.
Enjoy!
