PDF Summary:Personal Kanban, by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry

Your life is too complex to organize with a to-do list and too dynamic for a complicated productivity system. That’s where personal kanban comes in: a visual board where you can easily see your workflow, keep track of your work-in-progress, and make flexible plans for the future. In Personal Kanban, Agile productivity experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria teach you how to use kanban boards—a management method that keeps automakers efficient and software developers productive—to organize your life.

Our guide explains what personal kanban is, what its benefits are, and how to start organizing your life with your personal kanban today. Our commentary complements Benson and DeMaria’s ideas with those of other productivity experts, like David Allen (Getting Things Done) and Brian Tracy, (Eat That Frog). We also offer context for understanding how kanban fits within the umbrella of Agile methodology.

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(Shortform note: While there are countless kanban apps on the market, including some that are specifically for personal use, Benson and DeMaria appreciate the physical nature of a whiteboard and sticky notes. Other productivity experts like Ryder Carroll, creator of The Bullet Journal Method, also suggest you avoid technology when trying to organize your life. According to Carroll, research has shown that we’ve become less productive with the rise of technology. Technology has overloaded us with information, resources, and connections. With so many things fighting for our attention, we can’t possibly focus on all of them. As our attention scatters, our productivity plummets.)

Step 2: Set Up Your Ideal Value Stream

Your value stream refers to the stages your tasks usually go through as they progress from idea to accomplishment. The most basic version of this is Ready, Doing, Done. If your tasks require other steps, or if you want to get more specific, you can add more stages to your value stream. Once you know what your ideal value stream looks like, draw one column for each stage and label them. It should look something like this:

Ready	Doing	Done

(Shortform note: Agile methodologies emphasize the importance of identifying your value stream because doing so helps you understand how your work creates value for the customer. Mapping an organization’s value stream makes it possible to identify and fix bottlenecks, eliminate steps that don’t create value, and connect teams whose work contributes to the same value stream even though they’re working separately. In your personal kanban, identifying your value stream helps you make your workflow more efficient, and focus on the steps and tasks that create the most value for you.)

Optional Add-Ons

The authors emphasize the flexibility of personal kanban, and playing with the layout of your kanban allows you to take advantage of that adaptability. Benson and DeMaria share two add-ons you might consider:

Today: This add-on can be an intermediate step between “Doing” and “Done”. You can pull a certain number of tasks from “Ready” to “Doing” at the beginning of the week, for example, and each day pull the specific tasks you’ll work on that day from “Doing” to “Today”. This allows you to plan for the day and get data on how much you’re able to accomplish in one day.

The Waiting Space: This add-on can house tasks that you’ve started working on but are on pause because they require action from someone else. You can add a row at the bottom of your kanban, for example, and leave those tasks there until they’re ready for you to continue working on them. Make a note on the sticky note or card specifying the action you’re waiting for so you know where to pick it back up. To ensure that it doesn’t get out of control, set a limit to how many tasks you can confine to the waiting space at one time.

Leverage Add-Ons to Increase Efficiency

Take advantage of personal kanban’s adaptability to plan as you work. This will help you increase efficiency because you won’t have to spend too much time each day or week deciding what to work on. For example, consider making columns for each of the four lists Brian Tracy recommends in Eat That Frog:

• Master list: This contains everything you want to do. Any time a new idea or task comes up it's added to the master list. It can also hold tasks you’re waiting on.

• Monthly list: Each month, move items from your master list to your monthly list.

• Weekly list: Build the weekly list as you work. This way, at the end of each week you will already have your next week roughly planned out.

• Daily list: This list serves the same purpose as the Today column.

Step 3: Get Your Tasks Out of Your Head

Now it’s time to populate your kanban with all the tasks you need to complete. This can feel overwhelming but getting every task out of your head and onto your kanban is the first step to getting organized. It means you no longer need to hold all that information in your mind, and you can start to prioritize, strategize, and get your tasks all the way to “done.”

Write down every task you can think of so they stop being background noise in your mind and start being actionable items. Benson and DeMaria recommend listing all your to-dos, whether they’re work or personal tasks. If you’re using sticky notes, make sure to only write one task on each note so you can easily visualize how many tasks you have to complete.

(Shortform note: Getting all your tasks—work or personal—out of your head and on your kanban is what makes Benson and DeMaria’s approach to kanban different from its predecessors. Organizations like Toyota have been using kanban since the 1950s, and individuals have been using kanban to organize personal projects like weddings and road trips. Benson and DeMaria were the first to recommend putting everything on the same board, dismantling the idea of work-life separation, and arguing for a holistic approach to productivity.)

Step 4: Decide How Much You Can Work on at a Time

Now that you know exactly how much you need to do, you might be tempted to put everything in your “Ready” column and get to work. However, the authors warn that there’s a limit to how much work you can handle at a given time. If you overload yourself, you’ll create stress and become less efficient. Instead, limit the number of tasks you’re tackling at a given time and leave the other tasks in a backlog. This can be the edge of your whiteboard, for example, or you can add a column before “Ready” to house all the tasks you intend to complete.

You won’t know yet how much you can handle per day or week, so for now, just pick a number that feels realistic. As you use your personal kanban, you’ll start to notice how many tasks you can work on without getting overwhelmed, and you can adjust your limits accordingly. Also, the authors remind you that you’ll be more productive on some days than others and that some types of tasks are completed more easily than others. So you shouldn’t expect the number of tasks you’re able to tackle to remain static.

Make sure to leave some wiggle room for yourself between tasks. Keep in mind that setting a limit isn’t as simple as quantifying how much time you have. Having three hours available doesn’t mean you can complete three tasks that each last approximately one hour. They will technically fit into your schedule, but that won’t leave any time to rest, switch between tasks, or tie up loose ends if a task takes longer than anticipated. Instead, consider how many tasks you can complete without overwhelming or overextending yourself.

Size Up Your Tasks

If you’re still tempted to pull an ambitious number of tasks to your “Ready” column, consider that humans are famously bad at estimating how long something will take. In Scrum, Jeff Sutherland argues that, when determining the amount of time a task will take, we can underestimate or overestimate by a factor of four. In other words, the task can take four times as long as expected, or a quarter of the time expected.

To pull a reasonable number of tasks to “Ready,” Sutherland suggests using comparative sizing when estimating the difficulty of a task instead of estimating by time. He argues that our brains are able to compute these estimations much more easily. Try to estimate task sizes according to a scale that’s easy for you to visualize, such as t-shirt sizes (XS to XXXL), or dog breeds (Chihuahua to Great Dane). For example, sending an email might be a Chihuahua task, and painting the kitchen cabinets might be a Great Dane.

Step 5: Choose Your First Tasks

Now that you’ve set your task limit, choose the tasks you’ll work on and place them in the “Doing” column. These are the tasks you’ll work on today or this week. As you choose your tasks, take advantage of the freedom personal kanban gives you. Contrary to other situations where a task will be assigned to you by someone else, your personal kanban is a space where you can decide what to work on according to your priorities and what you feel comfortable tackling.

(Shortform note: The freedom to decide what to work on for yourself can feel overwhelming. In Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy offers a formula to make sure you focus on the tasks that will have the most impact: the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule states that 20% of your tasks and effort will account for 80% of your results because some things are more impactful than others. It’s the difference between the “vital few” and the “trivial many.” If you have 10 things to do, identify the two tasks that will have a greater impact than the other eight combined.)

Benson and DeMaria have some suggestions on how to prioritize your tasks effectively. As with everything else in personal kanban, choose the approach that makes the most sense to you in your current situation:

Urgency and Importance

The authors derive inspiration from the time management matrix Stephen Covey presents in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey’s matrix helps you differentiate between urgent and important tasks. Benson and DeMaria take Covey’s categories and make them more flexible to fit personal kanban:

High importance Low urgency Continuous improvement tasks	High importance High urgency Urgencies
Low importance Low urgency Rest and leisure	Low importance High urgency Connection with others

According to the authors, you should prioritize continuous improvement tasks. These tasks include learning and making projects more efficient. They’re not urgent, but they can help you avoid future emergencies. Urgencies, on the other hand, should be few and far between. Don’t get into the habit of putting tasks off until they become urgent.

Rest and leisure include the tasks you want to do. They might not directly contribute to your goals but they give your mind the rest and stimulation it needs to tackle the other quadrants. Finally, connection tasks include, for example, favors people ask of you and social gatherings that you feel obligated to attend. They’re urgent in the sense that they’re happening now, but they won’t necessarily move the needle for your current priorities. However, that event you attend tonight might help you strengthen connections that help you in a future project.

Develop Time Management Skills to Complement the Tools

Covey’s matrix—and Benson and DeMaria’s remix of it—is useful for understanding what kind of tasks you’re facing, but it doesn’t ensure you will then manage your time effectively to accomplish them. Research shows that three skills are necessary for effective time management, each of which is equally important:

• Awareness that your available time is limited—the matrix doesn’t measure the accuracy of your time estimates for tasks, nor does it improve how you allocate your limited time.

• Arrangement of your time through goal-setting, planning, and scheduling—the matrix is most effective in this category because it helps you prioritize the most important tasks to schedule accordingly.

• Adaptation of your time while carrying out tasks, particularly when you’re interrupted and have to shift priorities—the matrix potentially improves adaptation by providing a system to gauge priorities on the fly if your work is interrupted with an urgent request.

Presorting by Priority or Task Type

The authors suggest that you can also sort tasks by priority before choosing what to work on. To do so, you can add a series of columns between “Ready” and “Doing,” each labeled Priority 1, Priority 2, and so forth. Each priority column should have a limit to how many tasks it can hold, with fewer tasks allowed at higher priority levels. Then, as you pull tasks from Ready to Doing, they get filtered to those priority columns. By presorting the tasks, you make it easy to see which ones you've deemed most important. But because your prioritization doesn't rely on set criteria like importance and urgency, you have more freedom to start where you want and reprioritize as needed.

Alternatively, if there’s a type of task you want to prioritize or make sure you don’t ignore, you can color-code them or use a special shape of sticky note to make them more noticeable.

The Six-Level Model: Put Your Work in Context

Priority filters and special formatting are useful stylistic choices, but only after you’ve thought about what kinds of tasks you want to prioritize and highlight. In Getting Things Done, Allen offers a six-level model to prioritize and contextualize your work that you can embed into your personal kanban. There are six levels of perspectives to determine your priorities:

• The ground level is immediate actions, like a call you have to make.

• Level 1 is current projects with short-term timelines.

• Level 2 is areas of focus and accountabilities, from job duties to maintaining your health and family commitments.

• Level 3 is goals for the next one to two years.

• Level 4 is vision, or your goals for the next three to five years.

• Level 5 is purpose and principles. All your actions, projects, focuses, goals, and visions are defined by and also lead you toward your purpose and principles.

Once you’ve thought about your tasks within the greater context of your life, you can create priority filters or special formatting that corresponds to each level. That way, you can make sure you’re staying on top of your immediate tasks without losing sight of, for example, your goals for the next 3 to 5 years.

Step 6: Observe, Learn, and Adjust

After a week or so of using your personal kanban, take a step back and reflect on what you’ve accomplished so you can continue improving. Continuous improvement is at the core of kanban, and the way you achieve it is by observing your work, asking questions, and trying out new ways of doing things.

(Shortform note: Continuous improvement is a marker of success. In Minimalism, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus share their Simple Success Formula: Success equals happiness plus constant improvement. They argue that you’re successful in any area if you’re happy with where you are and constantly improving. And if you’re not happy but are constantly improving, you’re on the right track. To strive for continuous improvement, focus on how questions to find the opportunities to improve. In The Magic of Thinking Big, David J. Schwartz explains that successful people know they can always do better, it’s just a matter of how. Ask yourself, “How can I be a better student?” “How can I be more efficient at my work?”)

Benson and DeMaria suggest three ways to embed continuous improvement into your Personal kanban practice:

Retrospectives

In organizational contexts, retrospectives are meetings where a team looks back on a project and reflects on what went well and what went wrong. They’re opportunities to celebrate, vent, and identify work habits or methods to keep or discard. In the context of personal kanban, you can have a retro with yourself by looking at what you did or didn’t accomplish and thinking about why.

The authors recommend you hold retrospectives regularly, such as every week, and that you don’t wait until the next scheduled retro if you get derailed. It’s better to stop, conduct a retrospective, and start fresh. To remind yourself, you can add a “Retrospective” column to your kanban where you put completed tasks. Each week, before planning the week ahead, look at this column to reflect on your wins and losses and see what you can learn from them.

(Shortform note: Agile teams conduct retrospectives at the end of a work cycle to ensure they’re constantly giving and receiving feedback and finding ways to improve. Consider incorporating some agile techniques to ensure your retrospectives help you improve. For example, at the end of a work cycle, choose one new thing to try, one thing that’s not working and you’ll stop doing, and one thing that’s working well and you’ll continue doing. Then, make a note of the changes you’ll make to your work process and be specific. What will the change entail, and how will you know if it worked? Revisit the note at the end of the following work cycle to see if you’ve made progress.)

Observe Patterns

Visualizing your work and its flow allows you to identify the usual patterns it follows. The patterns you identify inform how you plan ahead, helping you make adjustments to make your work more efficient. Paying attention to patterns also helps you be alert to disruptions so you can deal with them early.

Here are some patterns the authors suggest you pay attention to:

• How much time and energy different kinds of tasks demand of you
• Which tasks you enjoy doing, and which feel like drudgery
• Which tasks you usually complete successfully and which waste away in your backlog
• Which kinds of tasks tend to get stuck in the Waiting Space
• How many tasks you can confidently plan to do in a typical day

(Shortform note: An additional pattern you can observe to become more efficient is where your attention is at different moments of the day. In Hyperfocus, Chris Bailey explains that, by focusing on a single task, you are better able to defend against distractions, you refocus your attention faster when your mind wanders, and you make better decisions about your task. In other words, you become less distractible, and you work more efficiently. He suggests setting an alarm on your phone to go off every hour. When it rings, note where your attention is at that moment. Specifically, Bailey recommends asking yourself questions like: What am I doing right now? Is this what I want to be working on?)

Metrics

Sometimes you need hard data to prove the patterns you’re observing. That’s where metrics come in. The authors suggest that you carefully choose metrics to measure and act on so that the act of measuring isn’t a waste of time. These are two metrics you can keep track of:

How tasks make you feel: When you complete a task that made you feel, for example, excited or upset, make a note of it. You can collect those completed tasks in a special section of your kanban and go through them during a retrospective. Look for patterns to identify the kinds of tasks you might want to steer clear of or tasks you want to prioritize.

How long tasks take: On the same card or sticky note where you write down a task, log the date you created it, the date you pulled it from your backlog to “Ready”, the date you pulled it to “Doing”, and the date you pulled it to “Done”. Doing this for several tasks will give you an average to measure your workflow, which will allow you to plan more accurately and find opportunities for improvement.

Create a Metrics Tracker

To dig even deeper into the patterns of your workflow and make the most of kanban’s pedagogical nature, consider adapting the “distraction tracker” Nir Eyal outlines in Indistractable. A distraction tracker raises your awareness of your distraction patterns, helping you better control your actions in the future, but you could adapt it to learn about your work patterns more generally.

In a distraction tracker, you note the time of day, who you were with, where you were, your emotions, what you were doing when you felt distracted, and the distracting action you took. For example, you might note that at 2:15, you were home alone (where/who you were with), studying (activity), and feeling overwhelmed (emotions), so you reorganized your bookcase (distracting action).

You can adapt a distraction tracker to complement your personal kanban. For example, each task might have space to write your emotions, and the challenges, distractions, bottlenecks, or procrastination you encountered. Or you might create a chart like the one above to see all of your metrics at a glance.