The Kanban board
Some time ago I talked about the concept of work-in-progress, commonly called WIP. It is often very helpful to visualize this on a Kanban board.
To create your own Kanban board, draw three columns labeled
- TODO for everything not yet started
- WIP for things you are currently working on
- DONE for things that are done (or as I like to call it “done-done”)
The whole thing looks something like this:
| TODO | WIP | DONE |
|---|---|---|
| ~~~~ | ~~~~ | ~~~~ |
| ~~~~ | ~~~~ | |
| ~~~~ |
The squiggles represent individual items, in a real board often represented by index cards, which makes it easy to move them from column to column.
A Kanban board can be made more complex to represent your workflow in more detail, but this is the key principle.