Thursday, January 7, 2010

Portable Personal Kanban

I organize my tasks using a personal kanban and since I move around the building a lot, I like to have my personal kanban with me.  So rather than trucking around a Franklin-Covey day planner all day, I truck around a manilla folder that is my Portable Personal Kanban.


Open it up and Shazam!  My kanban is right there in front of me to keep me focused on Getting Things Done!

 

For note taking, I've recently been using a Livescribe tablet.  It lets me annotate my writing with voice notes and then it syncs it to my laptop where I can transpose the voice notes into text notes or whatever.  I've been playing around with attaching voice notes to cards on my personal kanban when necessary.  Not sure if it's just a gimmick I'm enjoying or not, but it keeps me from packing a Franklin-Covey around all day.

How do *YOU* do personal kanban?  Please leave a comment - I'd love to hear more personal kanban stories.  For more on Personal Kanban, take a look at Jim Benson's Personal Kanban website.

5 comments:

  1. I love the low tech-ness.

    I did something like personal kanban when I rebranded my company. Rather than do everything at once, I updated my materials as I needed them. Website and business cards were first. I didn't update my presentation template until I started to prepare for my next conference. I didn't update my statement of work template until I needed to write a SOW. Deliverable templates were updated when I started working on the deliverable. This technique prevented me from creating assets that I didn't need - like a full proposal template, which I no longer use.

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  2. John,

    This is really fantastic. I love the simplicity and effectiveness.

    The thing is, people could certainly have a nice leather one - but kanban is all about DIY.

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  3. This is brilliant. I like how you have limited yourself on the WIP portion and made the "Done" portion so big.

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  4. Love how Personal Kanban is popping up everywhere. I've started using Personal Kanban at home with our kids. Our low-tech board is currently on the fridge!

    Just this weekend I decided to create a portable kanban for some projects that I need to keep working on over a few days, perhaps weeks. Max two value streams, with 1 card WIP in each phase. Will be posting some pics of this and our fridge board on our blog at http://scrumfamily.wordpress.com/

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  5. Right on! I've been looking at some things from Levenger and Moleskin but haven't quite found the right system. This is definitely a step closer!

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Please be professional.