I've not bothered with a physical board, but I have a massive Trello board. For teams I strongly recommend specialized boards for projects and processes -- the process to migrate a MySQL database will be dramatically different than building an LLM.
But for personal stuff, fitting everything into one work flow is fine. If folks are wondering how to use Kanban for personal needs, I currently have 7 columns:
Dumb ideas: 62 cards
Backlog of Doom: 100 cards
Not Yet: 38 cards
Weekly recurring: 8 cards
Doing: 4 cards
Review: 4 cards
It Is Done: 1 card
Dumb ideas is a holding tank for wild ideas, usually low priority or high risk. To pick a few examples: trial adopting tiling windowing managers, buying an IPv4 block, and terraform for social media profiles are all on there. Also: "self-hosted Trello alternative." Basically things go here so I can remember I decided that idea was _not_ a good one, so I dont get into any "I thought I had a card for this" create-delete-create loop.
Backlog of Doom is your standard backlog. Lots of video games, books and software projects here.
Not Yet is basically a way of hiding things that are scheduled for later. This is almost entirely TV shows awaiting new seasons, but also a few tasks filing taxes, selling shares etc.
Weekly recurring is essentially a tighter loop of that, plus some information gathering tasks ("look for new books at the library on $topic", "review the top posts for the past week on /r/$subreddit".
Doing is as expected.
Review is a catchall for things that benefit from double checks -- financial transactions, followup communications with insurance, etc. If I wanted I could also use it for book reviews.
Done is as expected, but has a butler cleanup task to archive cards.
I've also got labels for Games, Shows, Reading, Money, and a few others.
Yea, each addition was lined with good intentions -- I don't want to prioritize the entire backlog but do want to filter out the worst ideas and the "hurry up and wait" stuff.
Let me guess: When you have a task to start say filing a pile of unfiled mail, bills etc, you start by sorting it into other piles and then run out of time, over time those piles grow, then at some point get combined then (after a suitable grieving period) you have a task to tackle this pile, so you start by sorting it into piles...
I totally understand the concern about organization paralysis, but the point is to keep it simple, focused, and relaxed. By writing things and ideas down in an organized way I don't have to track it in my head, and I can get back to what's important. Or at least procrastinate on something useful. I suppose it looks complicated from the outside, but has really only grown slowly over a decade.
Also: I have most bills on autopay, and transactions created 90d in advance in GNUCash. I do also have piles of mail in the form of a filing cabinet and labeled folders. I've actually been experimenting with letting the mail pile up in an inbox and filing it away once a month just to prove to myself the system works enough that I don't have to monitor it daily.
But for personal stuff, fitting everything into one work flow is fine. If folks are wondering how to use Kanban for personal needs, I currently have 7 columns:
Dumb ideas: 62 cards
Backlog of Doom: 100 cards
Not Yet: 38 cards
Weekly recurring: 8 cards
Doing: 4 cards
Review: 4 cards
It Is Done: 1 card
Dumb ideas is a holding tank for wild ideas, usually low priority or high risk. To pick a few examples: trial adopting tiling windowing managers, buying an IPv4 block, and terraform for social media profiles are all on there. Also: "self-hosted Trello alternative." Basically things go here so I can remember I decided that idea was _not_ a good one, so I dont get into any "I thought I had a card for this" create-delete-create loop.
Backlog of Doom is your standard backlog. Lots of video games, books and software projects here.
Not Yet is basically a way of hiding things that are scheduled for later. This is almost entirely TV shows awaiting new seasons, but also a few tasks filing taxes, selling shares etc.
Weekly recurring is essentially a tighter loop of that, plus some information gathering tasks ("look for new books at the library on $topic", "review the top posts for the past week on /r/$subreddit".
Doing is as expected.
Review is a catchall for things that benefit from double checks -- financial transactions, followup communications with insurance, etc. If I wanted I could also use it for book reviews.
Done is as expected, but has a butler cleanup task to archive cards.
I've also got labels for Games, Shows, Reading, Money, and a few others.