I recently read Personal Kanban: my experience by @tisquirrel a good post on how to use a personal Kanban board to reinforce the feeling of accomplishment that can sometimes be lost when things are hectic at work.

As a developer I use a Kanban board to keep myself organized and to help track the various tasks I have to work through from day to day. However this post isn’t about using a Kanban board for work, that’s something most people do anyway, this is about how I use a Kanban board to keep myself organized when I’m away from the office.

So here’s an example of how I set my board up;

From left to right here are the different lists;

• Long Term – This contains the long term goals, that I wish to accomplish. These are things that don’t get moved in to the To do, This week, Doing or Done lists, instead smaller tasks are broken out from these and added to these boards.
• To do – The dumping ground for anything I think needs doing or anything that relates to a long term goal.
• This week – The things I want to do this week. I usually limit this to about 10 things each week so as not to overwhelm myself. If I get through tasks quickly then I pull more things from the To do list.
• Doing – Things are in progress!
• Done – Things that are finished. Every week I make a point to review what I’ve done and then clear the list.
• Long Term Done – The long term goals that I’ve accomplished go here. This list only gets cleared at the end of the year. I find this helps to see how I’ve done each year!

That’s it! It’s a fairly simple set up but I find it keeps me organized and focused but most of all it gives me a wonderful feeling of accomplishment at the end of the week!