Did you ever notice how digital task boards are suddenly all the same horrid thing. Heavy engines of compromise that are as happy to supply a Gantt chart and resource plan as they are to give you a Kanban board.
Slow and steady, not slow and heavy
That moment of realization happened for me a few months back and I spent a great deal of time playing “Crossy Road” by jumping between all the available tools to find a new home for my work. I hated them all.
The thing that I found really disappointing was that the Kanban board felt so much like it was tagged onto something else. Something big, greasy, and hostile. Like when you realize that “Scrum Master” has decades under their belt as a pathological project manager. They will happily rename all their PMBOK shenanigans to remain employed, but their approach hasn’t changed a bit.
Finish the good stuff and let mediocre ideas fall away
My work method merges ideas from Getting Things Done at the big-rock level, and Personal Kanban to slice things up and stay focused on what really matters. That lets me apply Pomodoro Technique at the smallest scale to build up chunks of focus time that move things forward.
When it comes to a task board, that means creating a big-rock card with loosely formed ideas that I might choose to never work on. In fact, most of the ideas will be superseded by newer better ones and that’s a good thing. If the idea survives, I’ll slice chunks out of it and flow them across the board to get them done.
My up-next and in-flight columns need limits. These are the areas I need to carefully weed. Other columns tend to have their pace set by those two handling-time columns. Sometimes I like to break rules, so WIP limits are a visual thing, not an enforced policy.
Because all my work tends to happen on a screen, I like prominent links on the card, so I can teleport to where the work is without opening up the card. While I reject the idea of a due date, I do like to have my tasks wake up at relevant moments, so a next-action date is useful.
To reflect on my work, I like to review my completed items each week. If I can tag the crucial stuff, I can see if it’s making it all the way to “done”. A few tasteful charts can be useful in checking myself when I go off the rails. They help direct me to areas that need improvement, which is helpful.
A certain level of polish
There also needs to be a certain level of polish. The user interface doesn’t have to spark a new trend in app design, but what I can’t tolerate are paper cuts. A small irritation that I scrape past every time I check in on my work is a sure-fire productivity killer.
When I was trying out all these “productivity tools”, I kept finding blatant, reproducible, and distracting issues. Like one tool where I added a new card to the board only for it to vanish as I was typing in the title. The steps to reproduce this involved moving a card that triggered an automation, then adding a new card before the automation completed. This would be a forgivable edge case if this wasn’t one of the most common moments you might add a new card.
Or maybe it’s the tool that only let you add links to the rich-text field. Copy. Type. Locate icon. Click. Paste. Nope. On top of this, you could only see the link by opening the card. That’s too much friction when I have links on around 60-80% of my cards.
A tool you use occasionally can have a rough patch or two, but one you use to orient your day and manage your energy has no room for splinters.
Calm, slow, smooth, fast
The thing is, we’ve all seen someone trying to achieve something under pressure. They transform from a sentient human into a comedic slapstick actor. You know what I mean! They are baking a cake and it’s boring to wait for stuff to happen, so they start doing other things at the same time. Maybe they wash up some of the bowls and spoons. No big deal.
But then they catch a hint of that unmistakable burning smell. Oh no! The cake is burning. It’s not just that their calm has gone, the whole chain of calm-slow-smooth-fast has collapsed.
They whip their hands out of the washing up bowl, splashing water over the kitchen floor. They make an urgent grab for the oven glove, but knock it off the worktop. They pick it up, pull open the oven door, and use the half-on glove to grab the baking tray. The start to pull the cake out of the oven, burn the bit of their hand that isn’t in the glove, and just before the cake gets flopped upside down on the floor they realize that the burning smell was just a thin edge catching.
As the cake splatters on the floor, they realize it could have done with another ten minutes. Now it’s ruined. They should probably run their hand under a cold tap, but before they get to the sink they’ve slipped up on the wet floor.
It’s ridiculous. I agree. But this is how most people approach their work. They are over-burdened and their response is to make the work harder.
That’s why your Kanban board needs to be a source of calm. Calm is slow. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
Fin
And that’s it. That’s the thinking. I didn’t build a Kanban board. I created a calm space to think about my work, my energy, and my impact.