I am a big fan of Kanban boards, and I am a big fan of the tool Workflowy. So I was delighted to see that Workflowy now supports Kanban boards.
I first came across the use of Kanban boards while doing software development. They are an effective way to plan and track work that needs to be done on a project. For software development, our Kanban boards often look like this:
But Kanban can be used by anyone, not just software development teams. For most people, a Kanban board for home or work projects might look like this:
As you can see (and as this Atlassian piece argues) Kanban provides the following benefits:
| Benefit | What it helps teams do | Why it matters |
| Planning flexibility | Reprioritize backlog work without disrupting active tasks | Helps teams stay adaptable as priorities change |
| Shortened time cycles | Move work through the workflow more quickly | Improves predictability and speeds up delivery |
| Fewer bottlenecks | Limit multitasking and surface blocked work sooner | Keeps work flowing and reduces delays |
| Visual metrics | Track cycle time, flow, and blocked work with charts | Helps teams identify issues and improve over time |
| Continuous delivery | Ship smaller increments of value more frequently | Helps teams deliver faster and respond to change more easily |
Kanban boards aren’t perfect. It’s easy to overflow your Todo column with so many tasks you don’t know what to do next. In that case you might create a Backlog column to the right of Todo, and then pluck a few things from that and move them to the Todo column. That way you don’t forget items (because they are still in the Backlog column) but you also get to focus on the things that actually need focus.
Perfection aside, Kanban boards provide many benefits. The next time you are trying to manage the many tasks on a project, consider creating using such a board and using a tool like Workflowy. You’ll be glad you did.
P.S. Images from Workflowy.com. Table from Atlassian.
