Jim and Tonianne give a much better explanation of Personal Kanban, but the basic idea is that if you can visualize your work and limit how much you're attempting to do at once, you'll be much more effective and efficient.
I'm a visual person, and I'm also the kind of person that needs to write things down, or I forget them. I've tried over and over to write a simple "to do" list every couple days in my notebook, but I'd always lose track of them, or miss items when I copied them over to a new page, or forgot them completely. But using my own simple Kanban sticky board... I don't know... its working for me.
Here's my current personal kanban system. It's a simply the back page of the notebook that I tote around at work (this way I can tote around my sticky board with me). I've given myself a "WIP" limit of two (in other words, I should only ever have two things in the "doing" column -- cause really, can I do more than two things at once?).
As silly as it sounds, there's something to be said for the tiny bit of satisfaction you get for moving a sticky note to the "done" column. And I can easily reorder the priority of the to do list by simply moving the order of the stickies on the left.
Overall, I'm really liking using Kanban to keep myself on track. I'm sure I'll change it here and there as I go along, but that's all part of the process.
How do you visualize the list of things you need to do everyday?
