Personal Kanban board

October 1, 2009 12:12 PM

This relates a bit to my previous post, I suppose, but I ended up setting a personal task board up last week. Mike, Cicelie, and I had a lot of success doing this with IncaBlocks (although we also used Zen).

I've put my task board within view of my computer workstation. Literally, I can't miss it. The purpose is for me to organize all of this nebulous "stuff I need to do" (around the house, on projects like IncaBlocks, for other people, etc.) into an easy-to-maintain, prioritized list.

Kanban board

I'm hoping it also motivates me a bit more--most of the stuff I need to do could be knocked out in anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours. However, I'm usually reluctant (especially after working all day) to tackle it unless I'm completely relaxed and have a large block of free time. These things just seem bigger if you don't define them.

To that end, I've set up five categories: "NOW" (the stuff I can do right now), "LATER" (the stuff that's lower priority), "PROBABLY NEVER" (the stuff I say I'm going to do but probably won't), "NOT MY PROBLEM" (the stuff that I'm waiting on other people for) and "DONE."

"Not My Problem" is a bit harsh, but you have to understand my personality. I've found that lately I have approximately zero capacity for cognitive dissonance; I tend to throw myself in (at least mentally) pretty deep when people start tossing valid, doable ideas around. And then I get run down and impatient when I realize they're not serious. So I need "Not My Problem" as a reality check. (If you heard some of the project management and organization discussion on early episodes of Feel The Func, this shouldn't surprise you.)

Also, the currently-empty "Probably Never" column has prompted my roommates to put up their own interesting and amusing items on my task list. (Let's not discuss just how interesting and amusing they were.)

Success? Well, I've only finished one task so far.