CHALLENGE DAY 1

Welcome to Day 1 of the Kanban Mini-Challenge!

Today, you’ll discover:

→ Two powerful principles that promote exceptional results

→ How Personal Kanban Works: The board explained!

→ #1 thing you MUST DO first (hint: it’s my favorite stress-relieving, clarity-driving exercise ever!)

Reading time: 10-mins
Doing time: 50-mins
Action Item: Perform your 50-minute Focus Finder

Instead of staring at a list of undone tasks on a device full of distractions…

What if you could use a visual, tactile system for managing your work and client projects?

Instead of adding new to-do items to a random task list or jotting down ideas on (homeless) post-it notes…

What if you knew exactly how to record a new task (so it gets done) and precisely where to put it (so you can attend to it when the time is right)?

Instead of rifling through your notes and (potentially multiple) project-management apps to get clarity and set priorities for the week…

What if you could glance at the wall next to your desk and, in 30 seconds, see precisely what’s important this week, what you must do next, and how you’re tracking so far?

I can tell you it’s a tremendous improvement for managing your work (and life).

Particularly when you work for yourself and with clients.

Introducing… Personal Kanban!

Officially, Personal Kanban is a method for visualizing, mapping, and managing your personal tasks and projects.

In action, it involves using sticky notes or other visual cues (that represent your tasks) and structuring them on a board or wall so you can easily see what you have to do and when you have to do it.

Most importantly, it can revolutionize the way you work. And help you drive significantly better results.

Personal Kanban works unbelievably well for anyone who:

Procrastinates getting started with tasks that test their skills
Switches tasks often and usually before finishing something important, or
Never sticks with a digital to-do list or tool (they’re perpetually ‘just testing it out.’)

Why?

Because it promotes more intentional use of your time, energy, and attention.

It’s a system that keeps you focused. And geared toward following through.

Helping you sharpen these vital self-management skills that allow you to flourish.

Not to mention, it’s delightfully simple.

It’s so easy to set up that it will quickly become your most potent personal habit.

Two powerful principles that promote exceptional results

The reason why Personal Kanban is so remarkably rewarding is because it encompasses two core principles:

Visualizing your work; and
Limiting your work in progress

According to Personal Kanban creator Jim Benson:

“Visualizing work transforms our conceptual and threatening workload into an actionable, context-sensitive flow. Limiting our work-in-progress helps us complete what we start and understand the value of our choices.

Combined, these two simple acts encourage us to improve how we work and make choices to balance our personal, professional, and social lives.”

For me, grasping these two principles (and putting them into practice with Kanban) transformed two major things about how I operated as a freelancer trying to grow my business:

I became laser-focused and
I started finishing things (I’m a natural “self-starter,” not a natural “finisher”)

While I can still succumb to procrastination (especially with creative work), I’ve learned precisely what I need to overcome that failure to follow through. And I owe that to the profoundly exceptional feedback loop from using Personal Kanban every day.

So, without further ado…

Get Started with Personal Kanban: How to Build Your Tactile To-do List

The beauty of Personal Kanban is in its simplicity.

Once you’ve got your supplies, it takes less than 30 minutes to have your new task-management system up and running. And with daily use, you’ll be a pro in no time!

Today, we dig into the details of how it works, and then I have a homework exercise for you to do.

Tomorrow is when you’ll set up your board.

Let’s walk through the board setup, and then I’ll share a stress-relieving, mind-clearing exercise that will set you up for success.

The Personal Kanban Board Explained!

Personal Kanban boards are divided into five sections that look like this:

The idea is to use Post-it notes as tickets for every job you have to do. Then, you move the tickets around the board as you work through each task.

The following is what each section of the board represents and how it factors into the overall system.

Options: Your ongoing list of tasks

Your Options are your ongoing to-do list. It acts as the “catch all” for your ideas, projects and individual tasks you want (or need!) to complete.

At the beginning of your work week:

Brain dump all the tasks inside your head,
Write out your tickets (on post-it’s),
Stick them in the Options column and take a good hard look
Decide what needs to get done.

Then, move your priority tasks to the “Ready” column.

Ideally, you don’t need to look at ANYTHING in your Options column until you’ve finished what’s in your Ready column.

🚩 If you find you pull more tasks from your Options column without finishing what’s in your Ready column, you need to pay attention to why. You’re either procrastinating with the tasks you leave behind, or your priorities are off at the start of the week.

Ready: Your must-dos for the week

Whatever tickets you pull into your Ready column, you’re intentionally committing to these tasks at the beginning of your week.

You have the capacity for them.

You know “what done looks like.”

You have the ability and resources to follow through.

They will be a mix of important and urgent jobs, and they are your focus for the next few days.

A good rule of thumb is six tickets to start your week (more on managing capacity overload later).

🚩 If you overstuff your week, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. You don’t need to add every task you’re thinking about into this column at once. Err on the side of fewer tickets so you can FINISH things. You may need to break tasks down more to see what the work entails.

Today: The “one thing” you need to get done for the day

The Today column is reserved for your next most important task. It’s your focus, your “frog,” your thing to finish.

Nothing else on your board gets so much as a glance until this task is complete. The trick is to ensure you only have one ticket in this space. If you add more than one, the indecision sparks, and procrastination strikes.

Every morning, consult your Ready column and pick the one task that will have the most impact.

Decide once. Then execute.

🚩If you find you can’t finish tasks within a day or the set time you have, they need to be made smaller. Create one ticket for each individual task (I’ll share more tips on writing better tickets in the later stages of the challenge.)

Done: All your completed tasks for the week

The feel-good element of your new analog system is the Done column.

It’s a beautiful feeling to “pull” a task into the Done column and have it live there for a while so it’s not forgotten! This visual scoreboard increases your motivation (through momentum and personal satisfaction) to repeat the effort.

Now, you don’t just leave all our tickets here to pile up. At the end of each week (or beginning), you review your Done column and file away (or bin) last weeks tickets.

This is the section that powers your weekly retrospective. So you can:

reflect on your progress,
use that progress to inform your next moves, and
decide what to pull into your Ready column for the following week.

We’ll cover the all-important retrospective on Day 3 of the challenge.

🚩If your Done column is filled with low-impact tasks that haven’t moved the needle much, you’ll want to dig into why you’re putting off the important work for the lower-value items. Busy work has its place, but meaningful results come from meaningful actions. Set your board up accordingly.

The Pen: A holding bay for unfinished tasks or works in progress

Ideally, this area on your board stays empty.

If you work on breaking your tasks into manageable, doable chunks—work gets finished rather than put on hold.

Of course, some tasks will take longer than you think, or you may find you need to hit pause for another piece to be finished. And naturally, some of your tickets will filter here.

But the goal is to limit your work in progress as much as possible. To shift your focus to shipping—not storing—your unfinished tasks.

🚩If you find a backlog of tasks being added to your WIP space, you need to better understand what “done” looks like. Know exactly what each tasks take to be considered “finished” and chunk your tasks down so that you can mark off smaller pieces as you go.

That’s a wrap on Day 1 theory!

I know you must be itching to get your board up and running, but I need you to do something first.

It’s a mental relief exercise that will make it so much easier to get your board up and running tomorrow.

Don’t skip this!!!

We all create to-do lists in our heads. Because whether we like it or not, each day brings something new for us to do.

But if you never sit down to capture these tasks and ideas, they continue to swim around your brain, holding your energy hostage and taking up headspace better used for other things.

This exercise calms all that (potential) chaos.

Action Item: The 50-minute Focus Finder

Whether you’re aware or not, keeping a mental to-do list destroys your progress.

Having all these incomplete tasks and new ideas rattling around in your head is a direct path to overwhelm and the fastest way to procrastination and inaction.

By performing this simple exercise, you can significantly reduce the overload of information your brain experiences daily. And gain the much-needed clarity for figuring out your next move.

Here’s how the Focus Finder works:

With this exercise, you’ll learn to close the loop on all those thoughts, things, and jobs to be done by dumping them onto paper.

Yes, it sounds simplistic.

But it’s super effective.

And if you’re rolling your eyes right now saying, “Duh, Claire. It’s called a brain dump. I’ve done it before.“…

Let me tell you; this is not like that. Cos tomorrow, we’re actually going to do something with the list you create!

Five steps to remarkable focus:

Grab a pen and piece of paper
Create a distraction-free zone (you need 50-min)
Set a timer for 50-min
Write down any and every task that comes to mind
Use the full 50-min to review, dissect, and add to your list

Here’s what’s involved:

You set a timer for 50 minutes and literally do a brain dump of everything you’ve got on.

When I say everything, I mean everything. Include personal, family, health, business, library books you’ve got to return, whatever it is — write it down.

The key is that you have to do it for 50 minutes.

You’ll find that you go through an emotional roller coaster as you go through these 50 minutes, and it’s always the same:

You’ll write frantically for the first 10 to 15 minutes — getting everything out of your brain.
Then you’ll notice a lull period where you think you’ve got everything out and start reading back through the list. You might get a couple of little prompts.
Then suddenly, about 35 minutes in, this second wave of stuff hits you, and you’ll write flat out, unaware of where the 50 minutes have gone.

And I can guarantee you’ll feel so much better after you’ve got it all on paper.

However, we want to avoid doing what most people do: leave it at the massive brain dump and do nothing else with the list. Because all those good feelings will turn to overwhelm as soon as that list gets lost or filed away somewhere you can’t remember.

But don’t worry, we’re going to change that.

Tomorrow, I’ll show you how to use Personal Kanban to transform that boring old to-do list into a fun, visual, and tactile task management system.

Coming Up on Day 2

You’ll discover:

→ A Kanban board in action + my own personal board explained!

→ The biggest mistake to avoid when usig Personal Kanban

→ 7 Steps to getting set up and using Personal Kanban in your daily work life

Looking forward to it!