Weekly Planning: Setting Up and Planning My First Week

“The cobbler’s children have no shoes.” – Old Spanish proverb

I often mention this proverb to clients and friends. It’s the fastest way to explain to someone skilled at something that they are too busy helping others and don’t care for their own needs. This proverb painfully illustrates how professionals often neglect their families or needs while focusing on their work. It’s even more powerful when you turn it on yourself!

As a coach for 20+ years, and the last 8 years developing a Kanban software, you would think that I apply all my bag of skills to myself… Well, I do for many aspects of my life, but I have completely missed having a board to manage my life. The reason is precisely what’s in this old proverb: I am a Kanban expert and love helping others with their workflows, but I have not consistently managed my own.

That’s changing today, and I am also leveraging this idiom to “kill two birds with one stone” by developing the habit of blogging regularly.

Setting Up My Board

One of the first board templates I created for Kanban Zone was the Weekly Planning template, which I wrote about in this blog post in 2018. The template still exists and has been slightly improved since then because the board is meant to be simple. All the magic is in the cards.

So, I logged into Kanban Zone and added a new board using the Weekly Planning template. Two clicks later, I was ready to add cards, but I didn’t because I needed inspiration. Instead, I started thinking about what brings me great joy. The answer for me is always chocolate, so I selected a background for this board that would bring me joy just by looking at it.

Adding Cards (goals, tasks, etc…)

Before creating cards, you must have card labels. When building a new board, we always start by asking the following questions: What are the work types (card labels) you will be tracking on this board? All the board templates in Kanban Zone come with predefined card labels, but you should review these and ensure they work for you. Here are the ones I set up:

All the card labels above serve as clear categories for each card, but the last one, called Weekly Planning, is for recurring weekly cards that will hold my standard tasks in a checklist within the card. If you look back at the board I created, I have two lanes under Work In Progress (WIP), one for Weekly cards and one for individual cards, just called In Process. 

I chose this approach because I wanted to start my weekly planning by always having a card template to guide me through all the necessary tasks to be successful that week. Every other card will use a specific label to track significant pieces of work.

Weekly Planning Card 

After years of using different planning techniques, I always resonated with Steven Covey’s concepts in the Weekly Compass. As a master facilitator of this program, I trained hundreds of people on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and I still find this approach the most effective – pun intended! So, for my personal needs, I have adapted my Weekly Planning card to use it.

As you can see in the actual screenshot of my first Weekly Planning card, I created four checklists under the Tasks section of the card. These will evolve, but my first attempt includes the following:

• Exercise – First, I wanted to focus on my health and what I could do every week.
• Big Rocks – These are the standard tasks I want to get into the habit of doing every week. I hesitated with creating cards for each of these, but for now, I will try as tasks inside the Weekly Planning card.
• Roles – This is one of my favorite ways to plan my week. I focus on my roles (father, son, brother, business owner, and lover – I am French) to ensure that I always do something good in each of these roles every week.
• Dimensions – These are from Covey, and I have always struggled to develop good ones that don’t keep repeating themselves every week. I will need to try this for a few weeks and see how it goes.

This is a good starting point. I always tell clients to start with something and then flow a few cards to see how it works. After the first week, I will see how it goes and will make adjustments. I will also wait to complete this card before saving it as a card template with a weekly recurrence, so it magically appears every week.

Adding Cards

I will have only one Weekly Planning card per week with a bunch of tasks on it, but now I need cards (not tasks within a card) to flow on this board using all the pretty card-label colors.

In the screenshot above, I added a few cards to get a feel for the work flowing on this board. I have two upcoming travel cards in pink, multiple green cards, and one purple card. I already moved some into In Process but left most in the Backlog and To Do so I don’t have unrealistic goals for this first week.

Informational Cards

You might have noticed a column to the right of the board called Notes. I intend to add cards here that will never flow on the board but stay there to capture the information I need at my fingertips. I need to think more about what other cards I might add here.

I love having these information columns in the Kanban Zone because they serve as information radiators next to the Kanban columns. Leveraging our grey “None” column state, these cards are excluded from factoring in the board metrics.

WIP Limits

When doing Kanban, you will want to set WIP limits to limit the work you have in progress. Since I am the only user of this board, I must set very low WIP limits. These will help me stay focused and prevent task switching, so I don’t feel like I have too many things going on simultaneously. There is great research about multitasking and why it doesn’t work for humans versus computers which are built for that purpose. As a human I stick to one task at a time.

In the screenshot above, you can see the “Execute” column with a minimum WIP of 1, so there should always be at least 1 card in this column. I also set a maximum WIP of 2, so I don’t take on more than 2 cards at a time in this column. On the right side, I show you how simple it is to edit WIP limits under the Board Designer.

Don’t forget that Kanban is about visualizing work and limiting WIP. You will not benefit from Kanban if you don’t limit your WIP. As soon as you limit your WIP, you will improve how you prioritize your work, break it into manageable pieces, and ultimately create a pull process to work at your ideal capacity.

Recap for Week #1

I have a board. To get started, I mainly focused on creating good card labels and adding a few cards. I will see how the first week goes before making more changes. It’s important not to try to be perfect with your first board because it’s only once you flow cards that you see where you can improve.

I like that I don’t yet have many cards, especially in WIP. Protecting my WIP so I stay focused and get cards delivered to Done every week will be critical. Let’s see how the first week goes!

Weekly Planning Series:

• Week 1: Setting Up and Planning My First Week
• Week 2: Week One Challenges and Getting Better in Week Two
• Week 3: Improvements And Unplanned Work – I Bought A House
• Week 4: Coming next week…