The one tool that I use that transformed my to-do list
Simon Breakspear
23 July 2024
The idea: Track workflow with Kanban
Got a to-do list and five projects to wrangle, yet your desk is overflowing with Post-Its and you’re jotting tasks in a digital calendar plus emailing yourself ad-hoc reminders? Meet one simple system for tracking everything in one place that’s bound to make you and your team more efficient.
30-Second Version
- Kanban is a workflow management system that helps you to visualise your work in one place and make it tangible
- It helps you limit the number of items you are working on concurrently
- It also allows you to see meaningful progress across projects
The Full Read
Our work in educational change is often long-term, complex, and messy. I’m always looking for practical ideas from outside of education that can apply to our unique context and help us to structure that complexity. Enter: the Kanban approach to rapid action planning. The idea is that where our workflow systems have overrun and we’re juggling a sea of post-it’s, notes-to-self and calendar reminders, Kanban brings method to the madness – helping you to map all of your key tasks in one place, thus building a structured workflow to track progress.
Kanban is a Japanese term that translates loosely to ‘a visual signal’, and is an agile approach to project management that was originally made famous by tech companies. The approach is built around a board, which can be either analogue – set up on a window or a whiteboard – or digital, using a digital tools such as Trello, Jamboard or Microsoft Planner. You could use a Kanban board for your personal to-do list, and I’ve seen teams use Kanban project boards for everything from literacy improvement projects to their long-term curriculum implementation work. It’s a tool that can be used for any project, because it’s about structuring the way we as teams work together.
Image courtesy of Cambridge Park Primary School in NSW
The board is set up around three core columns. The first column is ‘to do’, the middle column is ‘doing’, and the third column is ‘done’. The goal of the first ‘do’ column is to build up a backlog of all the various tasks that you know need to get done within a particular project.
Each task should be given a different Kanban card, e.g. a post-it note for an analogue board, and a new card on your digital board. Each should have a title, description, owner and due date. You want the card to be small enough in scope that you can make progress on it in a reasonable amount of time so that you feel a sense of momentum.
The second column is for ‘doing,’ and the Kanban approach focuses on limiting the amount of work we do concurrently. If we try to do too many things in parallel rather than in sequence, we can often overload our own planning circuits, which results in getting fewer things done. The Kanban approach encourages us to be very disciplined about moving just two to four things from the backlog into the ‘doing’ column at a time. This is called the Work In Progress Limit (WIP). Having a WIP helps you and your team focus on the few things that matter most until they are executed.
Once a card is completed, you move it across to the ‘done’ column. This gives a satisfying experience of seeing the progress made, plus visual assurance for the broader team that things are moving, helping to keep everyone on the same page.
Challenge → Have you tried the Kanban approach? Heading into the second half of the year, now is a great time to resurrect the process or give it a try for the first time.
Want more? Here’s a great video overview of Kanban from Australian tech unicorn Atlassian. As always, I’d love to hear how you go applying these ideas in your context. Reply to this email and send me a photo of your own Kanban board if you’re game!
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