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Personal kanban: a simple board for your work and your life

Personal kanban is a way to manage your own work on a board instead of a long list. The whole method rests on two rules: see all your work, and limit how much you do at once. I think both rules are right, and Morrow is built on them. Where I part ways with the classic setup is the board itself, with its columns for To do, Doing and Done.

By the designer who makes Morrow · 17 October 2026 · Updated 18 October 2026 · 7 min read

What is personal kanban?

Kanban is a Japanese word for a card or a sign. At Toyota, cards were used to show work moving through the factory, so that nobody made more than the next step could use. Software teams later took the idea and turned it into boards with columns.

Personal kanban brings it to one person: your work, your home and your plans, on one board. Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry described it in their book Personal Kanban (2011), and they boiled it down to two rules.¹ Part of why I like the method is how little it asks of you. It doesn’t need an app at all. A whiteboard and a pack of sticky notes would do, which is an odd thing to admit when you make an app, but it’s true.

Rule 1: visualize your work

Write every task on a card, and put all the cards on one board. Not in your head, not spread over three apps, not on scraps of paper at the bottom of your bag.

Seeing all your work at once does two things. You stop holding it in your memory, which is tiring. And you see the real size of your load, which makes it easier to say no to new things. If your head is too full to know where to start, a brain dump is a quick way to get every card out.

Rule 2: limit your work in progress

Work in progress is everything you’ve started and not finished. The more you have open, the slower each thing goes, and the more you switch between them. Switching has a cost: part of your attention stays with the task you just left.²

So you set a limit. Only so many cards may be in progress at the same time, and when you reach it, you finish something before you start something new. It’s the less exciting of the two rules, and in my view the one that does most of the work. Without it, a board is just a very visual to-do list.

How to set up a personal kanban board

The classic board has three columns: To do, Doing, Done. Cards move from left to right as you work on them. It’s a fine place to start, and it may be all you ever need.

1. Have one place where new things land. A first column or list where every new task goes. It doesn’t need sorting yet.
2. Keep cards small. “Plan the holiday” is a project. “Book the ferry” is a card.
3. Set a limit. Start with three cards in progress. Lower it if things still pile up.
4. Look at it every day. Five minutes in the morning or evening to move cards and choose what comes next.
5. Group by area when life gets busy. A separate project for work, home or a side project keeps one big board readable.

Why many personal boards get messy

It’s easy to keep the first rule and lose the second. The board fills up, the Doing column grows to twelve cards, and the whole thing starts to feel like the inbox it was meant to replace. Usually there’s no limit, or a limit nobody keeps. Often everything sits on one long board with no groups, so nothing can be found. And the Done column grows forever: it looks like progress, but it’s clutter on the screen you use every day.

Why Morrow has no Done list

This is where Morrow parts ways with the classic board. There’s no Done list, and no set of lists that cards travel through from left to right. My rule for it is blunt: “Never create a list called Done. We don’t encourage dragging things to a done list, we encourage ticking it off.” I wanted to move away from traditional kanban, and these are my reasons, as a designer.

Three columns in a row are a conveyor belt, and every card has to travel along it. That suits work that really does pass through stages, like a feature going from design to build to review. Most of what one person carries isn’t like that. A grocery run or a call to the dentist is either done or not done, and walking it through Doing first is ceremony.

So in Morrow a list names a kind of thing, never a stage. A new project starts with two lists, On my plate and Background. The Client project template has On my plate, Waiting on them and Background, which is about who a thing sits with rather than how far along it is. The Home template has To fix, To buy and Someday. Nothing in those names implies an order, so there’s no rail for a card to move along.

Finishing is a tick rather than a drag. You tick a card and it leaves the board. Morrow keeps every finished card, and Progress reads them to show your pace and when you tend to finish things. They just don’t pile up on the screen you plan from, which is exactly where a Done column keeps them.

And the limit moves from a column to the day. Instead of a Doing column with a number on it, Today holds the cards you chose, up to five by default (there’s more on how many tasks fit in a day). When the day is full, Morrow says so, and adding another means taking one off or raising the number on purpose. That’s rule two, and you don’t have to police it yourself.

Once a tick is the way work leaves the board, it has to mean one thing only. A tester pointed out the gap: “If I press the checkmark, it means I’ve completed it. But I haven’t completed it, I’ve simply removed it.” He was right. A card you drop wasn’t finished, and counting it as finished quietly made the progress figures lie. Now a card can be deleted without counting as done.

Both of Benson and DeMaria Barry’s rules are still there. You see all your work on one board, and you limit what you do at once by keeping today small. A small, chosen set is also what helps your mind shield your main goals from everything else.

When the classic columns are the better choice

None of this makes To do, Doing, Done wrong. If your work really moves through stages, or you share a board with people who need to see what’s in progress and what’s finished, the columns carry real information and I’d keep them. Some people like the drag to Done for its own sake, as a small physical sense of finishing, and that’s a fair reason too. Morrow can’t share a board at all, so for a team’s kanban it isn’t the tool. I built it for one person’s work and life, where most things are simply open or done.