Personal kanban: running a board for one

What personal kanban is

The term was popularised by Personal Kanban, the 2011 book by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry. Its co-author puts the method at two rules: visualise your work, and limit your work in progress. That is all of it. Everything below is just a way of keeping those two rules when nobody else is watching.

The reason it works better than a to-do list is that a list has no middle. A list of forty items tells you nothing about which four you are actually holding open right now, and holding four things open is the thing that makes a week feel bad.

The columns for a personal kanban board

Start with the three a new board gives you and rename the first two:

• Backlog — everything, unordered, no guilt attached
• This week — what you have actually committed to
• Doing — what is open right now, and nothing else
• Done — cleared out when you review

Resist adding more. On a solo board there are no handoffs, so extra columns are not describing a workflow, they are describing categories, and categories belong on the card as a colour. The one exception worth making is a Waiting column for things blocked on other people, because those are exactly the items that fall out of your head and resurface as a problem three weeks later. The general rule of thumb is in the guide to choosing columns.

Backlog here is a separate panel to the left of the columns rather than an ordinary column, which turns out to be the right shape for solo work: the thing you want to see at a glance is the small set you committed to, not the pile you did not.

The limit is the whole point

Pick a number for Doing and keep it. For most people working alone the number is two, occasionally three, and it is almost never higher than that honestly.

This board does not enforce a limit. It shows a count next to each column name, and that number is the entire mechanism. When Doing shows four and your limit is two, the correct move is to finish or explicitly park something, not to start the fifth. Some people put the limit in the column name — Doing (2) — so the count sits next to the number it is supposed to respect.

Parking is a real move, not a failure: drag the card back to Backlog. A board with three things in Doing and one honest sentence in the card description about why the fourth got parked is far more useful than a board that pretends all four are progressing.

Getting everything out of your head first

The first pass is a brain dump and it should take five minutes, not an evening. Open Create, choose Paste a list, and paste one item per line straight from wherever your notes live. Bullets, numbers and checkbox markers are stripped automatically, and up to 200 lines go in at once, all landing in the Backlog.

Then leave the backlog alone. Do not sort it, do not prioritise it. The only thing you do with the backlog is pull from it.

One card, one outcome

A card should name something that can be finished, not an area of responsibility. Taxes is a region of anxiety; send P60 to the accountant is a card. When a card genuinely has steps, put them in the description as markdown checklist lines:

- [ ] find last year's return
- [ ] export bank CSV
- [ ] email both to the accountant

Those render as tickable checkboxes with a done-out-of-total count, so a single card can carry a multi-step job without you having to break it into five cards that clog the board.

Dates, and when not to use them

Set a due date only when the date is real — a deadline someone else imposed, a flight, a renewal. Inventing due dates for everything trains you to ignore them, and the badge on the card turns red for anything due soon, which stops meaning anything if half the board is red.

With real dates on the cards, the calendar view becomes worth opening: it lays the same cards out by due date across a month, and dragging a card to a different day changes its due date. That is the fastest way to do a rescheduling pass on a bad week.

The weekly review

Fifteen minutes, once a week, is what turns a board into a system. In order:

1. Clear Done. Read it first — it is the only record you will get of what the week actually contained — then delete the cards.
2. Find what stalled. Open the terminal from the board header and run stuck 7. It lists every card that has not changed column in a week, skipping the backlog and the last column. Each one is either abandoned, blocked, or too big, and each of those has a different fix.
3. Look at what is coming. due week lists everything due in the next seven days; due overdue lists what you have already missed.
4. Refill This week. Pull from the backlog, up to the limit you set, and stop.

The Timeline and Pulse views cover the same ground with less typing if you would rather read than type: Timeline shows cards by most recent activity, and Pulse summarises what moved, what landed and what is stuck.

The expiry date is a feature here

Boards are deleted after the lifespan you choose — 14, 28 or 60 days — and the date cannot be pushed back. For a personal board that is genuinely useful rather than merely tolerable, because the failure mode of a solo board is not losing it, it is letting it silently rot into a four-hundred-card monument to things you were never going to do.

Pick 28 days and treat the expiry as a scheduled reset. Near the end, create the next board and move across only what you still actually intend to do. Whatever you do not carry over was answering the question for you. Duplicating the old board with Include cards switched off copies the columns and password for you, but a duplicate always starts a 60-day lifespan, so start from scratch if you want to keep the shorter cadence.

If you want the record, export to JSON or CSV from the board menu before the date. And keep the link somewhere: boards are not listed anywhere and cannot be searched for, so the only route back in is the link plus the password. The board list at /boards remembers boards you have opened, but it lives in one browser and clearing site data wipes it.

What a solo board is not for

• Long-term reference. Anything you will want in six months belongs in a notes app, not on a board with a deletion date.
• Habits and recurring chores. There are no repeating cards. A daily habit on a kanban board becomes a card you recreate every day, which is worse than a checklist.
• Anything sensitive. Passwords, account numbers and medical details should not go on a board; anyone with the link and the password can read all of it.

For everything else — a job hunt, a house move, a side project, a dissertation — one board with four columns and an honest limit on Doing does most of what a heavier tool would, without an account. What the tool does and does not do is the short version.