Kanban emphasizes placing limits on the amount of work-in-progress in order to maintain velocity. IвЂ™ll be curious to see whether the visualization affects my decision making on what projects to tackle and what to set aside. IвЂ™m already using flags in OmniFocus to highlight task that IвЂ™d like to complete today, so this isnвЂ™t much of a change in that respect.

the Backlog area will show available tasks that arenвЂ™t in the Work-In-Progress area.

the Work-In-Progress area will show available tasks that are flagged or are due soon and.

the Done area will show tasks that I checked off in the past couple of days.

Rather than abandon my OmniFocus system, IвЂ™m thinking of using OmniFocusвЂ™s Applescript interface to create a Kanban visualization. Besides showing the size of each pile, this is supposed to help you visualize your throughput as tasks move from backlog to in-progress to done. They divide the board into areas representing your backlog, work in progress, and completed tasks.

They use post-it notes on a whiteboard for each task. Benson and Barry advocate a more visual approach. Allen focuses on acquiring that intuition through regular reviews of your lists. Both focus on knowing what is on your plate so you develop an intuition about what to do and what to set aside. Allen calls it your project and someday-maybe list. Both focus on getting ideas out of your head and into a trusted system. It seems like Personal Kanban and GTD have a lot in common. As a long time practitioner of David AllenвЂ™s GTD system using OmniFocus, IвЂ™m loath to abandon my fine-tuned system. This slide set gives a nice high-level introduction to the idea.ДЇor this book, each of us in the reading group is going to set up our own Kanban system, so we can live the ideas instead of just debating them.

(Big thanks to Liz Marley for starting that!) This week weвЂ™re starting on Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry. For the last few months weвЂ™ve been having a weekly book club at Omni.

Omnifocus kanban