3 Ways to Use Personal Kanban to Manage Your Life

Kanban is a popular workflow management tool that’s used widely in business and organizational settings to visualize workflows and enhance productivity. Interestingly, you can use the same system to improve personal productivity too. You can build on the classic Kanban framework and find new ways to effectively manage your work and daily responsibilities using a personal Kanban approach. 

Kanban’s applications for personal use were first conceptualized in Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry’s book, “Personal Kanban: Mapping Work & Navigating Life”. The authors used this work to share their system for prioritizing responsibilities, managing time, and boosting overall productivity on an individual level.

Why Use a Personal Kanban Approach?

Research shows that up to 80% of working professionals experience stress in the workplace, with the primary causes cited as being family responsibilities and large workloads. When modified for personal use, the Kanban method can help you to manage both work responsibilities and personal tasks, saving you time, increasing your efficiency, keeping your life organized, and helping to prevent feelings of overwhelm and burnout. 

In this article, we’ll delve deeper into what personal Kanban involves. We’ll show you how you can use it to streamline your personal and professional lives, and the easiest ways to keep Kanban on hand to access it whenever you need it.

Using Personal Kanban

You can apply the principles of Kanban to virtually any situation to enhance your productivity and help you tackle multiple responsibilities. It can be easily adapted to users of any age, profession or learning style, and is especially well suited to people who have long and constantly growing to-do lists at work and at home.

Personal Kanban boards are also a great solution for people who battle to prioritize tasks. Options like a personal Kanban app provide visual to-do lists that you can prioritize by urgency or order of importance to stay ahead of your responsibilities.

How to Create a Personal Kanban Board

The simplest and most effective way to create your own Kanban board is to open up an Excel spreadsheet or Word document, use a whiteboard or a piece of paper, or use a Kanban management app to create three columns: 

• To Do
• Currently In Progress 
• Completed

Next, you can create individual ‘cards’ for each task you need to do, adding them into the To Do column. Once you have all of your cards at hand, you can label them according to low, medium or high priority, and then choose which high-priority task you’d like to start on first.

Some people like to multitask, and a personal Kanban board does help to make multitasking easier by allowing you to keep track of multiple projects at once. However, you are also free to address one activity at a time. When you start an activity, move its card over to the In Progress column, and then to the Completed column once it’s finished. 

How To Use Kanban to Manage Your Personal Life

1. Make a Daily To-Do List

You can use a Kanban board to keep track of all the things you need to accomplish on a given day. Creating a to-do list helps you to organize your tasks into categories, depending on how urgent they are and whether or not you have started on them yet. 

This gives you clear visual progress of how many responsibilities you’ve tackled each day. This could be anything from going to the store, fetching the kids from school, fixing an appliance or learning how to make an invoice or mastering another skill you need for work.

2. Take Notes of Great Ideas

When you have a good idea during the course of the day, noting it in your Kanban board helps to ensure that you don’t forget about it and encourages you to put it into action. 

Once you have a strong idea written down, you can then build on it, set goals towards it, and transform your ideas into reality.

3. Manage Your Family Life

If you have a busy and active family or social life, your personal Kanban board can help you to meet all of your personal obligations towards the people you care about. 

Create a family board with tasks like children’s play recitals and sports games, birthday parties, celebrations, family dinners, and other can’t-miss events to keep yourself organized and ensure that you don’t miss anything important. 

Using a Kanban board with your family will help to ensure that everyone’s needs are met and that you can build a stronger relationship with your partner, children, and extended family and friends.

Making the Most of a Personal Kanban Board

Use these tips to maximize the productivity boost you are aiming for by using your Kanban board.

• Create separate boards for tasks that relate to different parts of your life, like work, home, and family.
• Break down each task into smaller micro tasks that will take a few hours or days to finish. This approach makes it easier to finish large tasks without feeling overwhelmed by them.
• Consider adding extra columns to your board, such as “Being Reviewed”, “Approval Needed”, and others.
• Try to keep only a few tasks in the Currently In Progress column at any given time. Start with one, two or three tasks and only add more if you feel comfortable tackling them.
• Maintain a flexible mindset. The Kanban system is designed to be adaptable, so you can adjust your personal Kanban board at any time to better meet your personal management needs. 

The Bottom Line

A Kanban board is a powerful work management tool, designed not only for use in a professional capacity but for your personal life as well. You can either create your own board or use a personal Kanban app to design unique visual workflows and lists that are aligned with the way you think, work, and go about your daily tasks.

Personal Kanban boards offer a wealth of benefits too, including improved organization, less frivolous multitasking and stressful last-minute rushes, enhanced time management, and natural self-development. 

Once you learn to use the Kanban system effectively, you’re likely to experience improvements in your ability to get things done accurately, efficiently, and in good time.