Personal Kanban Update

So I've been using my home Kanban board for about a month now. As I suspected, it is a bit of a challenge to use a physical board with as much travel as I do. My approach so far has been to review the board before I head out on a trip, figure out what will be in my working queue, and capture that electronically. When I get back home, I update the board. I think I have to go to an electronic version of a kanban board, but I haven't looked into that yet.

I've also started reading Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry. I'm almost done and it has given me some other ideas.

One idea is setting up a special flow for different tasks; in my case when I do writing. My writing takes on a different flow than just from doing to done. I found with writing articles or papers, I go through a step of laying out the outline, then I go through a first draft where I try to get my thoughts on paper, a second draft where I try to make my thoughts more coherent, and a final review to check grammar, punctuation etc.

I also like the idea of having a "Today" column. That gives me the ability to look at everything I have going on that day - tasks, meetings, work in progress - and decide what else I think I can get done.

One area I still need to improve on is capturing all my tasks. Right now I am only putting the bigger tasks on the board, not all the little tasks I have going on. I think I need to do this to really get the full effect. In general though, setting up my personal Kanban has helped me get more organized.

Personal Kanban - Week 1

So I'm in my first week of using a personal kanban board. So far I think it's a success.

I set it up last Friday afternoon. It was a good way to wrap up the week and make sure I wasn't forgetting any tasks that had to get done before I called it a day. It also worked well when I walked in my office on Monday morning - a quick, visual reminder of what I have going on.

Here's how I set things up;

• I have two swim lanes, one for work, the other for home/other projects (such as volunteer work). Within each, I set a limit of 2 items for work in progress. We'll see how well that works in a couple weeks when I'm running 2 different projects.
• I use small stickies for tasks that are small, around a couple hours or less. I have big notes for more involved work. On these, I jotted down important details. For example, the task to prepare for my presentation at PMI has key dates I have to meet.
• I'm going to keep things in "done" throughout the week and use this to help me do my timesheet at the end of the week.
• I am still keeping a "To-Do" list of short, quick things I have to do. I haven't made up my mind on the best way to handle these items.

I haven't figured out what I'm going to do when I'm traveling. I think I'm going to use a notebook to capture what I have to do when traveling and write things down that have to go on the board when I get home. Stay tuned for updates.