Personal Kanban: Using a Board for Your Own Work

Kanban for personal use means keeping your own work on a board, in columns such as To do, Doing and Done, and following two rules: put everything you have committed to where you can see it, and start only a small, fixed number of things at a time. It works because most personal overwhelm is not too much work but too much started work. A board makes that visible, and the limit gives you permission to finish something before you pick up the next. Below is where the idea comes from, a setup you can do in ten minutes, a weekly review, and when a board is and is not the right tool.

Where the idea comes from

Kanban started as a way of managing flow on factory floors and was later adopted by software teams. The phrase personal kanban is most closely tied to Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria, whose book Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life↗ (opens in a new tab) applies the same ideas to one person’s work and life. Other people use the phrase more loosely for any board kept by one person, and usage varies, but the book’s two rules are the part most people keep.

The two rules

1. Visualise your work. Everything you have said yes to goes on the board as a card: work tasks, household jobs, the favour you promised a friend. Anything that lives only in your head competes for attention without ever being weighed against the rest.
2. Limit your work in progress. Choose how many cards may sit in Doing at once, usually two or three, and keep to it. When Doing is full, you finish or deliberately park something before you start anything new.

Teams add more to kanban. The Kanban Guide↗ (opens in a new tab) also asks for explicit policies, flow measures such as cycle time and throughput, and a service level expectation. For one person those are optional extras. The two rules are the whole method; everything else is refinement you add once the habit sticks.

A ten-minute setup

1. Pick the surface. A wall and sticky notes, a whiteboard, or a digital board. Paper is hard to ignore; a digital board goes wherever your phone goes and survives a house move. Choose the one you will actually look at every day.
2. Make four columns: To do, This week, Doing, Done. To do is everything; This week is what you intend to get to soon; Doing is what you are working on right now; Done is the record.
3. Empty your head onto cards. Set a timer for five minutes and write one card per commitment, in a few words each: “Renew car insurance”, “Draft the quarterly report”, “Call Mum about Sunday”. Do not sort yet.
4. Choose this week. Move five to eight cards into This week: the ones with a deadline, the ones someone is waiting for, and one you actually want to do.
5. Set your limit. Write it at the top of Doing: two is a good start. Pull the first card across.

Keep cards small enough to finish in a sitting or two. “Sort out the garage” will sit in Doing for a month and teach you to ignore the board; “Take the old paint to the tip” moves by Saturday.

A weekly review

A board you never tidy becomes a second, larger to-do list. Fifteen minutes once a week, at the same time, keeps it honest:

• Look at Done first. Notice what you finished before you look at what you did not. Then clear it, or archive it, so it does not crowd the board.
• Check Doing. Anything that has been there all week is stuck or too big. Split it, park it back in To do, or note what it is waiting on.
• Refill This week from To do, starting with deadlines and whatever other people are waiting on.
• Prune To do. Delete cards you are never going to do. A card you have skipped for a month is a decision you have already made.
• Adjust the limit if it keeps being wrong. If two feels impossible every week, try three; if you routinely have one card in Doing, you may be avoiding something.

Personal board or work board?

Most people need two boards, not one. Your personal board holds everything you are responsible for, including the work tasks you have taken on. A work board is shared with the people you work with, and holds only the work, in a form they can read, move and comment on. Mixing them fails in both directions: your colleagues do not need to see “book the dentist”, and your personal board is not the place for a team to agree priorities.

The practical rule: if a second person needs to see or change the list, it belongs on a shared board. When a work task is yours alone, a one-line card on your personal board that points to the shared one is enough to keep it in your limit without copying it. Personal board vs team board sets out how fenbs draws that line.

Personal kanban vs scrum for personal projects

Some people run their side projects in sprints. It can work, but Scrum was designed for a team: the Scrum Guide↗ (opens in a new tab) describes a Scrum Team of a Product Owner, a Scrum Master and Developers, working in Sprints of one month or less with planning, a daily check-in, a review and a retrospective. One person holding every role spends a lot of effort on ceremony.

• Choose kanban when your personal work arrives unpredictably, mixes many small things, or you mainly want to stop starting and start finishing.
• Borrow from scrum when a personal project has a real goal and a date, such as a course, a house renovation or a launch. A two-week goal written at the top of the board gives it shape.
• Keep the retrospective either way. The weekly review above is a one-person retrospective: what went well, what got stuck, what to change.

For the full comparison of the two guides, see Kanban vs Scrum.

Personal kanban and ADHD

Kanban is not a treatment for ADHD, and nothing here is medical advice. What can be said is more modest. CHADD↗ (opens in a new tab), a US non-profit for people with ADHD, recommends external tools such as planners and lists to help adults with ADHD manage time and remember their responsibilities, rather than relying on memory. A board is one such tool, and some people find its shape suits them better than a list:

• Some people find a visible board easier to come back to than a list hidden in an app, because the state of things is obvious at a glance.
• A small limit on Doing can make it easier to resist starting a new thing when the current one gets boring. Some people set it at one.
• Moving a card to Done is a small, visible reward, and a full Done column is evidence on a bad day that the week was not wasted.
• Tiny cards help with starting. “Open the tax return and read the first page” is easier to pick up than “Do the tax return”.

Other people find any system hard to keep up, and a board is no exception. If it stops helping, simplify it, down to two columns if you need to, rather than abandoning it. Anyone looking for support with ADHD itself should talk to a GP or clinician.

A personal board on fenbs

Every fenbs account has a free personal board, yours alone, with four fixed lanes: To Do, Next Up, In Progress and Completed, which match the setup above with Next Up as This week. The lanes cannot be renamed, and there is no WIP-limit setting, so the limit on In Progress is a rule you keep yourself. Each lane has its own sort, and the hand-made order you drag is called Custom on a personal board. Every task is a feature, an enhancement or a bug, with a priority from 1 to 10, where 1 is most urgent; for household jobs those kinds read well enough as new thing, improvement and something broken.

If you already talk to an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT during the day, you can connect it to the same board, so a task you mention in a chat lands on the board rather than staying in the conversation. A shared AI to-do list shows how that works day to day. What fenbs will not do is plan your week for you: there are no due dates, reminders or calendar, so the weekly review is still yours.