If you’ve ever heard the word “kanban,” you probably remember it because it’s undeniably fun to say. It turns out that “kanban” is more than just a fun word: it’s a system for scheduling tasks in a highly productive way. It’s a visual method for determining what you need to do, what your team needs to do, and what your organization needs to do to achieve goals. It can get pretty silly, but you can do it all yourself on a smaller scale to maximize your own workflow and productivity.

Kanban was developed by an industrial engineer at Toyota. The word itself translates from Japanese as "signboard" or "billboard" and many kanban enthusiasts use whiteboards to display their kanban boards.

The idea of the methodology is that in order to get things done, you need to know where you are in a project at any given time. On your kanban board, you have three columns: one for work that has not yet started, one for work that is in progress, and one for work that has been completed. You can label these “to-do,” “doing,” and “done.”

When you use this system, all tasks start on the left side of the board and migrate across, giving you a visual representation of where everything is. In addition to the little bit of confidence you get when you see tasks in the “done” column, this can help you see how long certain processes are taking. Consider writing the date of each shift from column to column when you move something to one of the three.