One of the biggest things I struggle with is a way to manage what I need to do. I do a pretty good job of that at work, but in my personal life, things tend to get dropped. And at work, I feel that the amount of overhead I spend tracking what I need to do is too cumbersome. I've tried many different methods to track this stuff over time: Tasks in Outlook. Tasks in Gmail. To do list applications. Remember The Milk. A Todo.txt file. A personal Wiki. Evernote. One Note. Email. I even tried Paper once (that didn't end well. I can't read my own handwriting!). I'm sure there are others too.

How did that work out? Well, none stuck, so now I have tasks and notes about tasks all over my hard drive, notebooks, and spread throughout the Internet. Not exactly ideal, that's for sure. And because I tried new methods all the time, finding details about those items was tough, because I had to remember what the tool of the month (week!?) was when I was working on that particular item.

About a month ago, I saw a tweet from Joey Beninghove about PersonalKanban.com. That prompted me to read just about everything on that site. And it really got me thinking about how I could use this. I considered using an actual board, but ultimately decided to go with an online solution, since I wanted to be able to use this for more than just what I'm doing while I'm in The Dungeon.

The best online solution? Zen! It's a great Kanban solution built by Nate Kohari (author of Ninject) and his wife, Nicole. They've done an awesome job with the site. Adding tasks is about as frictionless as you can get, and moving them around is as simple as dragging them around.

The first step for me was to determine what stages my work goes through. In a typical project, these would be things like Backlog, Needs Defining, Ready to Build, Building, Testing, Waiting Deployment, etc. But for a personal board (at least for me), it felt more natural to define my stages as rough timeframes. After thinking about it for a while, I eventually settled on a set of "swim lanes".

• Far: This is my backlog. I could have left it as back log, but I felt Far fit better with my naming. This is where the whole universe of everything I need to do is stored. If I'm talking to my wife about something I need to do next Spring, I put it in here. If my boss says I should do something in a couple of months, I throw it in here. This way, it's tracked, and I don't have to remember it. It basically holds tasks that are more than a month away or I haven't had a chance to prioritize. I'll talk about how tasks get moved out of here later.
• Near: This is for tasks that I expect to start working on within the next month. By the time the task gets to this point, it should be fairly well defined. Any last details needed before work can begin should be figured out, and once it's ready, it gets marked as such. If it can't be defined, or it's waiting for another task to complete, I'll mark it as blocked so I know not to pull it forward.
• Here: Tasks in this lane are ones that could be done at any time - I expect that most tasks in this queue will be worked on in the next week. They should be defined and ready. If they aren't, there should be a reason - like it's due soon or it's blocked by something that's currently being worked on.
• Now: This is what I'm currently working on. It's fully ready, shouldn't be blocked, and just needs my focus to knock it out.
• Done: Once a task is done, it gets moved here, freeing me up to move onto another task.
• Archive: I have different criteria for how a task moves from Done to Archive, but basically, once a task is confirmed done, it gets archived.

So those are the steps my work goes through. It was nice to define that, but I didn't realize one of the biggest values of a Kanban board until I got everything entered and started using it for a little while. This screenshot illustrates it fairly well.

Can you see it? It has nothing to do with what the actual tasks are either. It's the visualization of my work. I use colors to tell me how tasks are categorized: orange ones are work tasks. Yellow are blogging activities. Teal are for Develomatic tasks, and blue are personal ones. I can, with a quick glance, get a good feel for what type of activity I need to focus my time on. I could never get that with any other task management applications.

So how does work go from one swim lane to another? It's a little different depending on what the task is for. Personal tasks are a bit different than work tasks, and Develomatic tasks are different than blogging activities, but the process is similar. I make a point to review the board on Sunday night, and get ready for the next week. This works out well, since at TrackAbout, our iterations are Monday through Friday. So tasks that I complete during the week get moved to Done, and on Sunday night (when we branch and update our staging site), I move the tasks completed in the last iteration to my archive. Personal tasks get Archived whenever I feel the job is done (read: The Wife tells me it's done!). Develomatic tasks get archived once it's been tested / deployed.

Any left over tasks that I'm still working on stay in the Now column. Since I don't usually have time for major personal tasks during the week, a lot times they'll get moved back to Here, or if I know I won't get to them the following weekend, back to Near. Any work in Here that I know I will do on Monday will get moved into Now, and any work that needs to get done the next week will get pulled from Near to Here. At that point, I check Far and look for things that are ready to be pulled out. If there's planning that needs to go into a task that I know will be coming up, I might create a task to handle the planning and drop that in Here. Basically, by the end of Sunday night, I like to have a rough plan for what my week will look like. Work tasks are usually the most up in the air because I don't totally control the priorities, but it's usually pretty stable for 2-3 days worth of work.

This review process happens a lot of nights, but Sunday is when I do a more thorough review and look into my backlog. Most of the other times it's simple a matter of moving more work into Now if I know I need more because something was completed that day.

For anyone familiar with Kanban, you'll notice one thing lacking on my board: WIP limits. That's work-in-progress limits, for those not familiar with Kanban, and the idea is that, in order to focus on the tasks at hand, you limit the amount of work you're doing at any stage, and you don't pull something else into that stage until there's a free spot. I haven't found a good balance here, and I think that's because of mixing different types of tasks. If I set a WIP limit of 2 for Now, and have two work tasks going, I have no room for anything else. While that may be just fine with my boss, I still have other commitments in other areas. So either I'm constantly moving tasks in and out based on what type of task I'm trying to do, or I do without hard limits. Moving them around all the time means more administration. Too much friction from the tool, and history tells me I'll eventually stop using it. So far, it's been a couple months and I haven't missed a day without checking my board. Ok, I may have missed a Saturday here or there, but that's about it. And I'd say I haven't been dropping tasks like I used to, which is the main goal of all of this, right? I do have soft limits in my mind. I try to limit work tasks to 2, personal tasks to 2 or 3, blogging to 1 and Develomatic tasks to 2. Although, even that's not a hard limit because a lot of times I try to batch up a bunch of small unrelated tasks and just knock them out.

Anyway, that's how I've been doing Personal Kanban. Doing something similar, but better? Let me know in the comments!

Full disclosure: As a member of The Lounge, I received a free Personal membership to Zen. Having said that, everything I'm doing for my personal kanban board can be done with the free account.