Welcome to Design Your Life x5!

In this ongoing series, in each essay, we explore one different idea that helps you to design your life (e. g. productivity, goal setting, time management, mindfulness, tools, frameworks, etc.) in 5 main points.

Designing your life means holistically reflecting on and understanding your past, organizing and focussing on your present and shaping your future.

🏷️ Kanban Board

🗒️ #1 What is it?

A Kanban Board is a tool to visualize how items go through a process or workflow. You can use a digital (several apps allow you to use it, such as Trello or Notion) or an analogue Kanban Board (e. g. on a whiteboard or with sticky notes).

Another main purpose of the Kanban Board is to limit the items in progress to increase productivity.

The key aspects of a Kanban Board are columns and cards/items. Each column represents a possible state of the process.

Let's imagine the cards should represent tasks. In this case, common states and thus columns could be: Not Started, This Week, In Progress, In Review, Blocked and Finished.

So each item flows visually through the different columns aka states from the left to the right, until the item went through the whole process.

✔️ #2 How to use it?

• Think about the process and items you want to transfer into a Kanban Board. You can literally transform any process into a Kanban Board. In the context of designing your life, probably the most important one is to use a Kanban Board for your personal task management. But you could also use it for your goals or any other concepts.

• Determine the columns/states of the process. It's important to pick the states that are really relevant for the visualization. If I would like to put my goals into a Kanban Board, I would probably use the following states: Backlog/Future, This Year, This Quarter, Finished.
  The Key is that the items always flow from the left to the right.

• Define the relevant information for each card. Which information do you want to define on each card for the items? Information for goals could be the SMART Goal definition (i. e. the deadline, the specific definition of the goal, etc.), priority, relationships to tasks or habits, etc.

• Fill the Kanban Board. In the beginning, you need to fill in your cards (e. g. tasks or goals). When you have new tasks or goals, put them in there (usually in the first column).

• Update the Kanban Board. When the states of the cards change (e. g. a goal is completed, a task is finished), update the cards on the Kanban Board. So you are always able to see the visual progress of each card.

• Periodically, clean the Kanban Board and review. You can do this for example once a week. Check if every card is at the correct place, see what you have finished and think about how you can drive the cards not finished yet forward to complete the process for them.

🤔 #3 Why does it help to design your life?

Understand your past: Helps you to visually review what you have finished.

Organize your present: Helps you to limit your items in progress so that you can keep up the focus. When you have finished your tasks, you can keep grabbing the next one with the highest priority.

Shape your future: Helps you to have a central place to collect your items (such as tasks or goals). You can define them, add priorities and arrange them accordingly. You can use the Kanban Board for weekly planning and decide which cards you want to finish in the next week.

👍 #4 Pros & Cons

• ➕ Helps you to visualize your cards.

• ➕ Pretty flexible, you can use whatever columns/states and items/cards you want.

• ➕ Helps you to instantly see how many cards are in a certain state (e. g. in progress or blocked).

• ➕ Makes a great combination with the Sprint method.

• ➖ Limited for long-term planning.

• ➖ Sometimes it grows really fast and can become a bit chaotic. Filters and search options can help here (for digital tools).

• ➖ Periodic updates are important because the value of an outdated Kanban Board is not that huge.

💡 #5 Tips

• Limit the cards that are in progress in parallel, so that you can keep up your focus.

• Think about which states/columns you really want to make explicit (for example "blocked" often makes sense if there are dependencies).

• Keep your Kanban Board clean and sort the items according to their priority.

• You can even use multiple Kanban Boards for integrated processes. In this case, mostly the last column/state from Kanban Board #1 is then the trigger and the first column/state from Kanban Board #2.

• Kanban Boards become even more valuable when combined with the Sprint method.