Simple Kanban Board

Personal kanban

Personal Kanban board

Four columns and one rule: no more than three things in Today. This board is set up differently from the plain one — Today has a live work-in-progress meter that turns amber the moment you go over your limit.

Backlog

2

  • Everything you might do, eventually

    This column is allowed to be long. That is what it is for.

  • ARenew the passport

This Week

1

  • The realistic shortlist

    Pulled from the backlog once a week, not once an hour.

Today

2/3

  • BOne thing you have actually committed to

  • Keep this column at three or fewer

    The meter turns amber the moment you go over.

Done

1

  • GFinished today

Drag a card by its grip, or focus a card and press ← → to move it between columns. Enter edits, M opens the move menu.

Edit card

Colour label

Import boards

Merge adds the imported boards and leaves everything you already have untouched. Replace all swaps your saved boards for the ones in the file — useful when you are restoring a backup onto a new device. Either way you can undo it straight afterwards.

Rename

Are you sure?

Why this board has four columns instead of three

To Do, Doing and Done is the right shape for work that arrives in a queue and gets done in order. Personal work is not like that. Your list of everything is permanently longer than any week, and the thing that actually breaks a personal system is not forgetting tasks — it is that the list becomes so long you stop opening it.

Splitting the pile into Backlog, This Week and Today puts a decision between "I might do this" and "I am doing this". Backlog is allowed to be enormous; that is what it is for, and nothing about it needs to feel like debt. This Week is the honest shortlist. Today is a promise, and a promise you can keep is worth more than a list you can't.

The limit on Today

Today has a work-in-progress limit of three, and the meter under the column header fills as you add cards. Go over and it turns amber and says so. It will not stop you — a tool that refuses to record what is actually happening just gets worked around — but it will not let you pretend either.

Three is not arbitrary. Most people can genuinely finish two or three non-trivial things in a day alongside everything else that a day contains. Committing to six and finishing three feels like failure; committing to three and finishing three feels like a good day. The work done is identical. The difference is entirely in what you promised yourself in the morning.

When a fourth thing genuinely becomes urgent, move something back to This Week rather than just adding to Today. Making that swap explicit is the entire mechanism — it is what turns a list into a decision.

No assignees, on purpose

There is no assignee field on this board, or anywhere else on this site. There is no "assigned to", no avatars, no mentions and no concept of a team member, because there is no server and no account for another person to have. Everything here is one person's board on one device.

That is a real constraint, so it is worth saying plainly rather than hiding: if you need two people looking at the same board at the same time, this is not the tool. What you get instead is a board with nothing to log into, nothing to configure, nothing that expires, and no one else's notifications in it.

A weekly rhythm that makes it work

A personal kanban board goes stale for a predictable reason: everything gets added and nothing gets reviewed. Fifteen minutes once a week is enough to prevent it.

  • Empty Done. Read it first — it is the only honest record of what you actually did — then clear it. The menu in the column header has "Delete all cards", and undo is there if you clear it too eagerly.
  • Refill This Week from Backlog. Five or six cards, not fifteen. This is the only moment in the week you should be looking at the backlog at all.
  • Delete things honestly. A card you have moved past four weeks running is not a task, it is a reminder that you feel bad about something. Delete it or write down what would actually make it doable.
  • Export a copy. Export → All boards (JSON) takes two seconds and is your only backup, because nothing here is stored anywhere but this browser.

Days when the board is wrong

Some days the plan does not survive the first hour. The right response is to change the board, not to abandon it — move the cards you did not touch back to This Week so that Today reflects what actually happened. A board that quietly records the real day is more useful in a month than one that records the day you intended to have.

Frequently asked questions

How do I use a kanban board?

Put every task on its own card, move each card to the column that matches its real state, and move it again when that changes. Then keep the in-progress column short — finish something before you start the next thing. Once a week, clear Done and refill from the backlog. The weekly rhythm spells that out.

Is kanban good for ADHD?

That is a question about you, not about the tool, so here is only what the board mechanically does. It holds the list outside your head, so nothing has to be kept in working memory. It shows one short, visible commitment — three cards in Today — instead of an open-ended pile. And it sends no notifications, because there is no server to send them.

Related

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