Personal Kanban

This week something for Japan lovers. It won’t be sushi. It will be Kanban. To be more precise: Personal Kanban or how you can use a method designed for the automotive industry to increase your own productivity. But let’s start from the beginning.

Limit work in progress tasks

It started in Toyota Motors back in the ’90s with lean manufacturing. The goal was to minimize waste without impacting productivity to improve manufacturing efficiency.

It is also a very popular buzz word in the software development world. Kanban helps manage work by balancing demands with an available capacity, which means: limit of work in progress tasks.

Everyone can apply Kanban

How can you apply it to your day to day life, even if you don’t have anything whatsoever to do with automotive or software development? The key is to limit work in progress. You cannot do more than allows your physical capacity. Your capacity is obviously also limited by several other factors like, for example, the amount of sleep needed.

While working on Time Continuum, I have set a limit of tasks that are in progress to 3: I work on a maximum of three tasks at the same time. It’s as simple as that. The power of simplicity. Japan seems to be a tremendous yet not enough appreciated source of simplicity in our life.

I use Trello in the Time Continuum project. Here you can find a list of apps you can use together with Personal Kanban. They will help you visualize workflows and monitor the progress of your projects.

This week’s challenge

It’s time to limit work in progress and truly get things done! Review your existing projects and try to limit the amount of tasks you are working on at the same time.

I would like to know how many tasks you have set as your work in progress limit. Drop me a line! Leave a comment below.

See you next week! Cheers!

Mariusz from the Time Continuum App