Overwhelmed at Work? A Kanban Board Can Help.

Among advanced countries, the United States ranks 28 out of 36 in work-life balance according to the OECD Better Life Index. Today, Americans have more access to housing and potential earnings, but need to work longer hours in order to obtain wealth. With more demands on your time than ever before, how can you accomplish more when you have fewer resources to do so? There are many great inexpensive tools out there that can help you do more with less and maximize your free time.

One of the tools that I have found invaluable is LeanKit. LeanKit provides the ability to develop a virtual Kanban board to organize work. If you’re not familiar with Kanban, it’s a principle that came from Toyota in their efforts to reduce waste by applying lean practices to the manufacturing process. With a Kanban board, work is organized into different stages with work-in-progress limits based on available resources. For Toyota, or software companies that use Lean-Agile methodologies, the purpose of the board is to make sure resources are maximized and that there isn’t a bottleneck somewhere in the process.

For an individual contributor, the Kanban board can also be helpful for managing workload. Instead of letting projects pile up, you can put limits on the amount of projects that you can have in progress at any one time. Ever have that day where you feel like you have so much to do, but don’t know where to begin? With a Kanban board, you can better organize your work so that you don’t feel so overwhelmed with your to do list. In addition, you can provide your boss visibility into your Kanban board so he or she will know your available bandwidth to take on a new project.

How does it work?

Using LeanKit, you can set-up a Kanban board for free and determine the stages (i.e. starting, active, finish, pre-production, etc.) you want and the limits of work for each stage. If you have an overflow of projects, you can send these to the backlog and then begin working on them as soon as a current project is finished. I’ve found a great way to manage work is to split larger projects into smaller chunks so that you can move a project through the process within two weeks. You can also use this added visibility to make space for more important projects, put projects on hold or send them to the backlog to start on in the future.

I am not associated with LeanKit or paid to endorse LeanKit. All comments made are my own.