A Lean Journey: Kanban for Personal Management

Kanban for Personal Management

About a month ago I came across a great concept called the Personal Kanban that I wanted to share.  Taiichi Ohno created the first kanban to communicate with workers how much work needed to get done and how much got done.  Kanban is a Japanese term meaning “sign” or “signboard”.  A kanban does three main things:

1. Shows us the work we have in progress
2. Shows us all the work we haven’t gotten to yet
3. Shows us how efficiently we work

Personal Kanban is a personal productivity tool based on these principles to create a simple way to visualize and control your work. There are only two real rules with Personal Kanban:

1. Visualize your work 
2. Limit your work-in-progress

I think pretty much anyone can use this method for controlling your workflow. I follow this method, and have done it both in physical notes on the wall and also using www.tasksee.com to do it. Either way, it is simple to understand what all you have on the table but also how much progress you are making. It generally forces you to break things down into bite-sized pieces.

© StartupsHK. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit AND link of actual article is given to StartupsHK with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.