For years I have been trying to find the perfect personal task management process that is easy, intuitive and effective. My friends and colleagues have witnessed the various techniques I have adopted over the years. “Hey Mike, why are carrying a stack of notecards?” they would ask. I have tried various GTD (Getting Things Done) (opens in a new tab) apps, to stacks of notecards, to Scrum boards at home, to giant lists…all of them failed.
Eventually, I settled on an implementation of Personal Kanban (opens in a new tab) using Trello (opens in a new tab). The beauty of this approach is it’s simple, free and easy to take with you.
Rather than share my actual personal kanban board (what, I like my privacy), I decided to create an example one to share (opens in a new tab). Here’s a screenshot.
Visualize Flow
My Trello board represents the steps I take to complete work. Work flows from left to right until it hits is complete. Work I have completed is moved to the Done column. I try never to move a card left.
When you first create a Trello board, you get three columns: To Do, Doing and Done. Simple, but I found that my workflow is more complex than that. In order to properly represent my workflow, I have the following columns:
-
Personal Backlog
-
Work Backlog
-
Priority
-
Today
-
Waiting
-
Doing
-
Done
I will discuss my two backlog columns more in a later section.
As work in my backlog becomes important, I will move it into my Priority column. This is curated list of things that I need to or should do in the near future. Ideally this is a fairly short list.
The Today column is my way setting the goals for the day. My day generally consists of a lot of meetings and context switching. I reassess my list before I start each day. Unfortunately, I don’t always get through my cards.
My Waiting column is something I added recently. Tasks that I did all the work for, but are waiting on some other event get stuck here. An example is when I schedule a meeting with somebody. I may have talking points in the Trello card for my meeting, so I want the card easily available during my meeting. I keep the card in waiting til the meeting happens.
The Doing column should be fairly straight forward. A card in this column is what I am currently focusing on. I only allow one card in the Doing column at a time. I will discuss why I limit work in progress later.
Priority
I denote priority of cards within a column based on their vertical position within the column. Cards on the top have the highest priority (and should in theory be done first). Interestingly enough, cards on the right of the board also have higher priority than cards on the left. If I am doing this right, I am always working on only the highest priority item at the time. Low priority items stay left and move down, and are eventually forgotten. (and this is ok)
Capture
One of the best features of Trello is the mobile app. It allows me to quickly capture new tasks (as cards) that I don’t want to forget. The mobile app is fast and stays pretty true to the web interface. Capturing tasks first, and then prioritizing them later is my approach.
When I capture a task, I should add it to the backlog first. Of course that doesn’t always happen. I will sometimes throw a new card right into Today or Priority. There is nothing wrong with doing that. Interrupt priorities are a common occurance for me, and I imagine I am not alone.
Prune
Periodically, I will go through my Priority and Backlogs columns to prune old cards. I will look at each card and ask myself:
-
Do I still need to do this work?
-
If so, is this work a higher or lower priority?
If the card is no longer relevant, then I will use Trello’s archive feature. This essentially makes the card invisible, yet in theory still available. Effectively, it’s out of the way.
If the card is still relevant, what is the priority of this card. I will move it to the top or the bottom of the column depending on how I feel it’s priority has changed.
Context
From the begining, I wanted to apply the concept of context from GTD (opens in a new tab) to my Personal Kanban Trello board. While with GTD, you can have a lot of contexts. For me, I only use two contexts: personal and work. I apply a context to a card through two methods: backlogs and Trello Labels (opens in a new tab).
In my Trello board, I have two backlogs, personal and work. I like using separate backlogs beause I prefer prioritizing my personal and work cards separately. When I am at work, the cards in the work backlog have a higher priority than the cards in the personal backlog. When I am home, the inverse is true. This approach may not appeal to everybody.
Once a card moves out of the backlog into Priority, Today, Waiting, or Doing, work and personal cards are mixed up in the same column. I still want to be able to switch contexts and filter out cards that don’t apply at present. This is where the Trello labels come in. I use labels to denote whether a card is personal or work. Labels are redundant while a card is in a backlog, but I am ok with thath. As it moves throug_ th_ flow, it is valuable to see this context. I chose red and green for contrast only.
Trello labels enable me to quickly filter out personal or work cards. I can filter out the personal cards by pressing 'F' and then selecting the work label.
WIP Limits
I have decided to apply Work in Progress (WIP) limits (opens in a new tab) to my Personal Kanban board. My Today, Waiting and Doing columns all have limits. I limit the number of concurrent cards in each of these columns. Why? Because while my Mac has quad core, I only have a single processor. I can only effectively do one thing at a time (hence a WIP limit of one for Doing). Since I have lots of meetings (lots), I usually only target 3 or 4 cards per day_ _ I am not going to dive too deep into this, but I definitely recommend further reading on limiting WIP. It is an important part of an effective Kanban process.
Reporting status
It is kind of hard to avoid an environment you don’t have to periodically report status. What I like about my Trello based Personal Kanban process is that it makes this easy. Whenever I need to report status, I just scan through my Done column. Once my status report is complete, I use Trello’s card archival feature to clean out all the cards in the Done column. This provides me with a simple method for denoting all the cards I completed in a given reporting cycle (assuming I capture everything). This works beautifully.
Would love feedback
There are numerous other features of Trello that I use, but didn’t touch on. I wanted this to be more about how Trello enables my Personal Kanban approach, rather than a full feature report. If you have any feedback for me on my process, I would love to hear it.
JK ·
Great minds, and all that. I've been trying something similar in Trello over the last month. Curious if you have a mental model of how you're tracking "things from my personal kanban system that I've moved into a more public system for work like JIRA or etc."? Obv. can just include a link to the relevant external conversations, but it's bugging me slightly that I've got duplicate data. ... And, I may have just come up with the cleverest solution of all. If it works, I'll get back to you.
jmcgarr ·
Dude, glad to hear you've settled on something similar as well. Trello is hard to beat for raw simplicity.
Regarding your question, I deal with the duplication (for now). I am "lucky" enough that I don't have too many other boards that steal my focus. When I do though, I duplicate cards and don't link. This is mainly because the details are less important on my personal kanban board.
I have looked into building a 'bot' to feed JIRA tickets or Github issues to a Trello backlog. Trello's REST API (https://trello.com/docs/) (opens in a new tab) would make this easy. Zapier is another option as well.
If you solve this problem, definitely let me know.
JK ·
So I've become a _huge_ Slack fan; my current hypothesis is that I can use Slack with Trello + other integrations (Github, Travis, JIRA, Drive, etc.) and a Hubot clone to basically act as my personal assistant. I'll let you know how it goes.
adrian contreras ·
so?
Brian P ·
Mike, love Trello and the web/mobile capabilities. At my new gig, I've built a Kanban board with Rational's RTC which does the job for a small team with a three column backlog/doing/done model. There are so many work tasks that I decided to segregate and only use Trello for personal. Works well for me and keeps the process light enough. Thanks!
jmcgarr ·
Thanks Brian. If you haven't already, pick up Personal Kanban by Jim Benson. Great intro to Kanban.
I haven't use Rational's RTC, but I honestly learned to hate Rational's product years ago for their bloat, enterprise targeting and how they missed the mark for developers. Would love to hear how well it's working for you.
Brian P ·
Mike, I read Personal Kanban after that Skype session we had at Bb with Jim Benson. It is a great read. I ended up standing up a Kanban board in Rational Team Concert for my team. We process a lot of tickets and use a basic three column configuration (Rational limitation) and design modules for as many swim lanes as we need. Total out of the box functionality with no customization but we've made it work and it keeps us very organized. I'd prefer another tool but Rational is what the government (our customer) paid for, so we're using it. :( I am actually presenting on our configuration to an internal development group today. Hope you don't mind if I use this blog post as a resource. Thanks!
jmcgarr ·
Best of luck Brian...and of course you can use this blog entry!
Danny Hyun ·
I love Trello, I'll be giving this a try!
drewa ·
Somewhat related to JK's question, but how are you tracking issues for others that aren't Trello users? Tags is a possibility but i'd like to have something separate and use tags for it's intended purpose. Anyone with a clever solution for this? Best i can come up with is a separate list for the people i'm waiting on the most (top3) and then a general waiting list for others with the persons name as part of the card title....but i don't love it.
jmcgarr ·
Thanks for the comment. To be clear, this is really only used for myself. Personal Kanban is intended for only one person.
That being said, the waiting column has worked really well for me. I don't use tags for people. I just put their name in the card title...and I limit the amount of stuff I am waiting for.
Pranay ·
Thanks, great help!
David Kuster ·
Mike, just wanted to say thanks for this. I started experimenting with a personal kanban board in Trello when I ran across this post as part of my Netflix interview research, and wanted to provide some feedback as to the process I've settled on.
I've generally followed the setup of your example board, but have 4 main GTD contexts - Essentialism, Tasks, Tech and Work, with separate backlogs and labels for each. There are 3 additional labels, which are sort of like sub-contexts - House and Financial (sub-contexts of Tasks) and one related to a remote team I manage which is a sub-context of Work. I originally had a Personal backlog as per your example but separated it into Essentialism and Tasks. Essentialism contains things like meditate, exercise, call old friends, etc, and is a bit of a nod to Covey's First Things First. Tasks is mostly the detritus of life - running errands and paying bills and whatnot. Tech is primarily things I want to learn and Work is a little duplicated from JIRA tickets but makes it easier to track things to the level of detail necessary for my needs, as well as whatever work happens outside of JIRA tickets.
The other change I made is renaming "Priority" to "This Week". I found Priority to be too vague (and too easy to consider too many things a priority), whereas This Week helped make it more concrete. Every Monday morning I spend maybe 30 minutes assessing what needs to happen for the upcoming week, grooming the various backlogs, archiving the done list, and putting cards in This Week. One subsequent win is that for the rest of the week I can generally ignore the backlogs, and primarily just look at the This Week, Today, Doing and Waiting columns. (I also moved Waiting between Doing and Done as if I'm waiting on something, hopefully I've already done my part of it and it's that much closer to going in the Done column.)
I'd hesitate to use Trello for teams but it's definitely great for a single user and a personal kanban board. I've certainly felt more organized and on top of things since getting into this rhythm. Again, thanks!
stevebanzai ·
David, I'm just starting to use Trello, Kanban etc for virtual teams. You said you would hesitate to use Trello for teams. Up to this point I've been able to run things with a local team at my office but now everyone is virtual with most outside of my local geo. Do you have a board up (example) that would work for a small guerrilla type team of maybe 10-15 tops, or alternative PM tool recommendation?
Ryan Malone ·
Steve - Did you ever figure out something to address this? I have the same issue.
Stevebanzai ·
nope
Magnus Nord ·
Give this Chrome extension a go: https://nordmagnus.github.i...
Gives you WiP limits, collapsed lists and more