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Personal Kanban: Organizing Your Professional Life with
Individual Task Boards
Jim Benson thinks a lot about improving knowledge work. His
consulting firm, Modus Cooperandi, specializes in building custom
processes that improve collaboration at knowledge work
organizations. Likely influenced by his former career as a software
entrepreneur well versed in agile methodologies, Benson’s processes
often make use of task boards. The photos featured on the Modus
Cooperandi website are filled with brightly colored Post-it notes
arranged in complex columns.
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In personal productivity circles, however, Benson is better
known for a slim volume that he self-published back in 2011. It’s
titled Personal Kanban, and it offers a seductive promise: the agile
methodologies that help teams make sense of complex projects can
be used to tame the complex mess of obligations in your individual
professional life.
The core ideas behind Personal Kanban are simple enough that
Benson can summarize them in a five-minute video that he features
on the book’s website.
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In the video, Benson stands in front of a large
white notepad mounted on an easel. He fills the center of the sheet
with a jumble of colored Post-it notes, which represent
“expectations” from family, friends, colleagues, bosses, and
ourselves. “All of these things become this big kind of congealed
mass in our minds that we have to pull apart every time we decide
something we would like to do,” he explains. This requires us to try
to pick this “mass” apart and think through all these different
obligations just to figure out what we should do next. “That’s not
fun,” Benson concludes.
The Personal Kanban solution to this problem is to organize this
mess of expectations with a personal task board. Benson suggests
using three columns. The first is labeled options, and it’s where you
arrange all your obligations into neat stacks of Post-it notes: one note
per task. “Now we’ve taken that horrible mass of work and turned it
into a very cognitively pleasing rectangle.” The second column is
labeled doing. This is where you move the Post-its corresponding to
the tasks that you’re actually working on right now. The key to this
column—and a big part of the secret sauce of Kanban systems in
general—is that you should maintain a strict limit on how many tasks
you’re allowed to be doing at any given time. In Kanban-speak, this is
called the works in progress (WIP) limit. In the video, Benson sets
this limit to three. As he explains, if you instead try to make progress
on dozens of different tasks all at the same time, you end up with a
“messy life.” He convincingly argues that it’s better to do a small
number of things at any one time: give them your full concentration,
and only when you finish one should you replace it with something
new.
Which brings us to the done column. This is where you move the
tasks you complete. In theory, you could just discard a Post-it once
you completed its task, but as Benson implies, the psychological
boost of physically moving the Post-it from doing to done is a
powerful motivator.
In the years since Benson published Personal Kanban, the
system has gathered a cult following. A YouTube search reveals
countless homemade videos from fans explaining their own takes on
Benson’s approach to personal productivity. If you assume that all
these fans strictly adhere to Benson’s original three-column design,
then you must not know much about the personal productivity
community. As you watch these fan videos, you’ll encounter many
intensely complex, custom-built variations.
One such video replaces the doing column with a ready column
divided into three sub-columns: cold, warm, and hot—allowing a
more nuanced take on the status of pending tasks.
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Another video,
recorded by a professor who teaches supply chain management,
demonstrates a personal board format so complicated that it seems
to require graduate training in supply chain management to even
understand. He divides his options column into color-coded rows
that he calls “value streams,” each dedicated to a different type of
task and featuring Post-it notes of a matching color. These rows are
further divided into internal columns. One column is a designated
“holding tank” of tasks that he cannot get to in the current semester,
while the other column is for tasks that he does hope to get done.
Each row has a “staging area” position where the next task of that
stream to be accomplished can be moved. From this larger number
of staging areas, tasks can then be shifted into the small number of
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