Drag tasks across columns, cap your work in progress, and it all saves in this browser
| Board Type | In-Progress Limit | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Personal board | 3 | The classic personal kanban number; enough to juggle, few enough to finish |
| Solo + lots of interruptions | 1–2 | Every extra open item multiplies restart cost |
| Team of N, shared column | N + 1 | Everyone can work, plus one item ready to pull |
| Review/approval column | 2× reviewers | Reviews pair poorly with queueing |
| Done column | no limit | Archive periodically to keep the board readable |
| Metric | Measures | Healthy Signal |
|---|---|---|
| Throughput | Cards finished per week | Steady or rising |
| Cycle time | Days from start to done | Short and predictable |
| Blocker age | How long stuck cards stay stuck | Days, not weeks |
| WIP utilization | How often the In-Progress column is full | Occasionally full, rarely overflowing |
You don't need all four. Pick throughput if you want output, cycle time if you want speed, and blocker age if things keep stalling.
Three columns, To Do, In Progress, and Done, with an optional work-in-progress limit on the middle one. Type a task, pick a column, and it appears as a card. Drag cards between columns, or use the arrow buttons, which exist for touch screens and for anyone who finds drag and drop finicky. The board writes itself to your browser's local storage after every change, so a closed tab doesn't lose your work.
Write tasks small enough to finish in a sitting or two; anything bigger becomes a fog that sits in progress forever. Keep the WIP limit on, and when the In Progress column fills up, respect it: finish something instead of starting something. The Done column is your diary; clear it weekly and you'll have a natural record of what the week actually produced, which is usually humbler and more useful than what the plan said.
Monday: five tasks entered, WIP limit 3, first three pulled into In Progress. A fourth idea arrives mid-morning; the limit says no, so it waits in To Do. By afternoon one task crosses to Done, the new one pulls in, and the board ends the day with two done, three active, two queued. Friday looks similar, and that's the point: steady finishing, no pile of half-work.
Visualize the work, limit work in progress, and manage flow. In practice: every task gets a card, cards move left to right through a few named columns, and you finish work before starting more. That's the whole method at personal scale; everything fancier is optimization on top.
Start with three: To Do, In Progress, Done. Add a fourth only when a real bottleneck demands it, like Waiting on Review or Blocked. Boards accumulate columns the way closets accumulate boxes; every extra column costs scanning time, so add them reluctantly and remove them eagerly.
A work-in-progress limit caps how many cards can sit in a column at once, forcing finish-before-start. For a solo board, 3 is the classic personal-kanban number. For a team column, use the number of people who touch that column, plus one. If the column is always full, the limit is doing its job: it's exposing a bottleneck.
Yes, completely. The board saves to your browser's local storage on your device; there is no account, no server, and no sync. Two practical consequences: nobody else can see your board, and clearing your browser data erases it, so export anything you need to keep.
A to-do list answers "what could I do"; a kanban board answers "what am I doing right now and how much of it". The WIP limit is the real difference: it turns the list into a system that finishes things. If your to-do list has 40 open items and nothing ever crosses off, that's the problem a kanban board exists to fix.