Kanban board examples

The problem with freelance work is rarely the work. It is that four clients each believe they have your full attention, and nothing in your inbox tells you how much you have actually promised this week. A board fixes that by making every commitment occupy physical space in a column.

The columns follow money, not effort: work that has been agreed but not started, work in flight, work waiting on the client, and work delivered but unpaid. That last column matters more than any other and almost nobody tracks it. An invoice sent six weeks ago is not "done", and if it disappears into a Done column you will forget to chase it.

The "Waiting on client" column is the one that changes behaviour. Work parked there is not your bottleneck, and seeing it separated from your own in-flight work stops you feeling behind when you are not. It also gives you an honest answer when a fifth client asks about capacity.

With two people there is no process problem worth solving and no shortage of things to do. The real risk is that both of you work on whatever felt most urgent this morning, and a month later the one thing that actually mattered has moved three days.

The columns here are deliberately biased towards finishing. "This week" is the commitment, and it is the only column with a hard limit. Anything not in it is explicitly not being worked on, which sounds obvious and is the hardest habit in a small team to hold.

Keep a separate Blocked column even at two people. When a card is blocked on a third party — a payment provider, a compliance review, a supplier — moving it out of the active column keeps your capacity honest. The alternative is a "doing" column of six cards, four of which nobody can touch.

Household boards fail for a specific reason: most of the work is recurring, and a board is built for work that finishes. Put "washing up" on a board and within four days it is either permanently in Done or permanently in To Do, and either way it has stopped carrying information.

The fix is to keep only non-recurring work on the board and leave the daily rhythm off it entirely. What belongs here is the stuff that genuinely gets forgotten: the appointment nobody booked, the thing that needs ordering, the repair that has been "on the list" since April.

Grouping by effort rather than by person avoids the other failure. "Quick wins" is anything under fifteen minutes, and having that column full is what makes an idle Sunday morning productive instead of guilt-inducing. Nobody is assigned anything; whoever has the time takes the top card.

Long projects fail at the front, not the end. Eight months feels infinite in month one, and the work that would have made month seven survivable — reading, note-taking, a rough structure — is exactly what gets postponed.

These columns are stages of a single artefact rather than a list of tasks, and each card is a section or a chapter. That is the important move: when the unit on the board is a chapter, the board shows you how much of the thing exists. A task list can be busy for weeks while the document stays empty.

Keep "Written — needs sources" separate from "Drafted". Writing a section from memory and then backfilling citations is a perfectly good technique, but the unsourced version is not finished and it will feel finished if you let it sit in the same column as the real drafts.

Event work is dominated by dependencies. You cannot promote a date you have not booked, and you cannot book a venue without knowing the numbers. A flat list hides that ordering completely and lets you spend three evenings on the fun parts while the venue stays unbooked.

These columns are a rough critical path. Anything in Locked in is a decision that other work depends on, and the goal early on is to empty that column into Done as fast as possible, because everything downstream is blocked behind it.

The Day-of column is worth building weeks in advance and then not touching. On the day itself you will not be capable of planning; you will only be capable of reading a list. Writing that list in advance, calmly, is the single highest-value thing on this board.

A support queue is the clearest case for a board, because the work arrives whether you want it or not and the only real variable is what you pick up next. The columns exist to make that choice fast rather than agonising.

Triage is a genuine stage, not a holding pen. A ticket sits there only long enough to be classified — reproducible or not, urgent or not — and then it moves. If Triage is growing, the honest reading is that intake exceeds the time you have allocated to support, and that is a scheduling problem rather than a personal one.

The Needs more info column is the counterpart to the freelancer's "Waiting on client". Roughly a third of any support queue is blocked on the person who reported it, and separating those tickets is what stops the queue looking twice as bad as it is.