Personal Kanban 101 | Hacker News Reader

Personal Kanban 101

personalkanban.com

170 pointsmartinlaz48 comments

While this is good, it goes into the mix with 100s of other similar or same apps (but with a different name). What I have yet to see is how to increase the motivation to actually close the things on the list. Anyone with hints?

I try to be mindful of the things on my list, especially when I add new items on to it, but closing it out is a different story.

I hate to be that blockchain guy, but using Ethereum might be fun for this.

Stake some amount of ETH for an issue and when it closes you get it back. If it goes over some time period, the staked ETH begins to burn.

Just a thought. Could make a fun hackathon project. :)

Beeminder already does this with normal money

Beeminder is cool, but have you seen the sister project Commits.to?

It's basically "Service Level Indicators" for your GTD queue

I like how the rate of BTCUSD directly correlates with amount of comments about crypto currencies across the internet.

It could be related to gameifying it. Finishing a task isn't simply a task, it's an item moved along the kanban board!

Astrid Tasks was the only one that really helped me get a lot of old tasks done, but Yahoo killed it. No to do list since really keeps me on task.

I've tried Habitica which attempts to gameify your tasks, but I dunno .. I just never got into it.

I have an OpenProject server running for myself, but I kinda forgot about it for a while and stopped checking in.

When I was a kid in the 90s, I found myself much more able to stay on tasks. Going into college, I could code for hours, building things, write things ... I don't even have kids/family as an adult, I just find my motivation waning.

I've taken sabbaticals in my life, which has helped me focus on some tasks and get some big things done, but even then there is diminishing return as I start to worry about money and look for work again: https://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/

I don't think a personal Kanban or anything else is a silver bullet solution. You have to hit a critical mass in the work you're trying to do, whether it's an open source project or creating videos or live-coding. I'm more impressed today by major YouTubers like 8-Bit Guy or Wendover Productions, and people like Drew DeVault who just write so much production ready stuff.

It's harder today because we have to fight greater distractions ... like browsing Hackernews when I really should try to get this regex working. :-P

I wanted to solve this problem for a while, but my learnings suggest that each person is so different it's hard to find products that generalize. What I'm building now is an app that logs over time many data points with tons of environment and personal status data, as well as how motivated you feel, so that it can process and find the reasons behind your personal motivation patterns so you can optimize them.

Habitica is really good for forming habits, but not really for completing your to-do lists.

It got me to floss everyday, which is actually a pretty big deal.

The small incentive from gamification works surprisingly well, especially for things where it's hard to visualise the net gains (Oral care, cleaning, etc).

For tasks though, I personally use Todoist, which I've haphazardly rigged via IFTTT and Microsoft Flow to sync through to Habitica. That way I get the organisation of Todoist, but the incentives from Habitica.

I find it helpful to split the tasks into smaller steps (often repeated advice). This does not necessarily lead to closing the main/parent task any earlier, but at least I can see some kind of daily/weekly progress on the larger stories.

I've been thinking about hiring a remote PA/product manager for personal projects - just someone who knows enough about the projects and is able to spend 15 minutes each morning on remote standups to kick them along with me.

I think social pressure is a very beneficial thing in getting things moving

Getting Things Done is probably a useful tool for you. One of the principles is that things on your list must be such small action items that you can do them without thinking

The principle is that you should do your thinking separately from your doing, so you think about what you want to do, write it all out in detail, and when it comes time to do your code refactor you're not looking at "refactor the code" but stuff like "move this function over to this file". A list of mechanical tasks instead of a set of puzzles for the mind

Concrete actionable tasks which can easily be delegated

I don't use this app, but I'm a big Kanban fan. For me the motivation to close items comes through WIP limits. For my personal Kanban setup, I have a WIP limit of 3 for active tasks, and three for "pending" tasks, by which I mean things that are blocked waiting for somebody else.

If I have 3 active tasks, that means I have to pick from among them to work on something. For me, that usually results in finishing what I've started in reasonably quick order. I also aim to favor closing an open task before pulling a new one from the backlog, which helps further.

Once I do this consistently, it generates motivation (or perhaps decreases the sapping of my natural motivation) in that I'm in the habit of getting things flowing through the system and minimizing WIP.

This is just uh, Kanban. The ‘Personal’ part is irrelevant in practice.

That being said, for both personal and professional projects of any scale, I’ve found Kanban with elements of GTD mixed in extremely useful.

GTD?

Getting Things Done is a time management method, described in the book of the same title by productivity consultant David Allen. The GTD method rests on the idea of moving planned tasks and projects out of the mind by recording them externally and then breaking them into actionable work items.

https://gettingthingsdone.com/

Here is a good summary of it.

https://hamberg.no/gtd/

Now that I’m more manager than dev, GTD is saving my butt.

As a dev it never really worked for me.

Where Kanban's main points are:

- Visualise work flow - Limit work in progress

Getting Things Done's main points are:

- Capture all tasks/notes in only a few central places - Have a process for processing/reorganising these tasks

Kanban's aim is to make it clear what's happening (and what's not being done). You'd hope to see why you're not finishing things which you're "doing".

GTD aims to reduce mental load (the tasks/notes aren't in your head, they're on paper).

Can you please elaborate? I have found I struggle with finding something that works. I usually end up trying something g but nothing sticks.

I've been doing the same for the past few years. I started with GTD in Org mode, than switched to Trello and Scrum, but I felt that it wasn't enough and I started mixing the both in Trello.

What are some things that you've learned combining the two?

Yes and no. Kanban's origin is in team practice, so most of the literature is about that. And I think there are substantive practical differences. A big one for me is that personal work items have a much greater variety in terms of topic, duration, complexity, place, and constraints. That means much less of a focus on standardized work and process improvement.

And since Personal Kanban is personal, I've had to find different hooks to hang the activities on. In a team context, I can use collective rituals like a daily stand-up to force grooming of the kanban and awareness of workflow hiccups. Personal kanban is harder for me to maintain unless I use something like calendar alerts.

I've been iterating on this with Trello in my personal life for about a year now. It's depressing to see all the things I intend to do and am not getting done for one reason or another, but I am dropping far fewer things on the floor than I used to.

I've been doing the same thing on "commits.to"

Here you can see all the things I haven't done on time: http://kb.commits.to/ and the backlog of things I already did, of course, too, but I like to focus on those red things at the top of the page.

This is a beta thing that will probably go 1.0(/2.0?) soon, there's no signup page, don't look for a signup page...

I've been using something similar and I've found it decreased my anxiety with the things I want to get done. I've found that splitting things based on the GTD philosophy helped me reach the right state of mind.

I've put all work and personal stuff into kanbanflow.com - I'm using several boards and attempt to do everything using their included pomodoro timer that also tracks the time for you. This is the only thing that worked for me to get myself to somewhat be able to account for works/tasks the I've done and it keeps me focussed on important but unpleasent todo-list issues. I didn't look very hard but I've found no self-hosted alternatives that offer the kanban/pomodoro/tracking aspects, if you know something please let me know :)

I've been using an open source Kanban webapp called Kanboard (https://kanboard.org/) for a while now, and I'm very happy with it. It's a cinch to self-host, and it has all the functionality I need with multiple boards, the option for multiple user accounts, visualizations, etc.

An alternative is Wekan (https://wekan.github.io/), which I use for my personal life. You can install it as a Snap package on a lot of Linux distros.

I also self host this with docker using a docker postgres backend to persist data and another container to dump, encrypt and upload to S3. You can also set it to store images and attachments in the database too which makes it easy to back up. It's a bit basic, but it's all I need for a few kanban boards. The mobile interface could use some love, but I tend to use it from my laptop anyway.

My workflow is an "eventually" column that I dump any idea I have for something I'd like to do. As soon as it pops into my head I capture it as a task. Once a week or two sort and expand on these tickets, or split them up if they are too big and pull the ones I want to work on into the "ready" column. I manually limit tasks to 5 in the "in progress" column, but it also contains tasks I'm blocked on.

I really recommend people try out Kanboard if they have the desire to self host. Once I set it up in a docker-compose file along with a backup container, it's needed no management since.

(The author also created an RSS self hosted reader which is also great if you like the idea of simplicity and self hosting / controlling your own data https://miniflux.app/ )

I've had good success with using Trello and Portable Kanban (http://edgars.lazdini.lv/portable-kanban/) for personal task management.

One advantage of Personal Kanban is that it is a native app, so there is no latency between writing something down, moving tasks across boards. Sadly, it is not open source.

"Take back your life with Outlook" is a similar book that outlines how you could make your email more actionable and stay on top of it.

Would anyone recommend this for a solo developer?

Personally I'm a fan of a mix of physical sticky notes and Trello, but I'm always open to new ideas. I could see this being more of a hassle than I'd like, but I could be wrong.

It seems like it's a book, not an actual tool.

If Trello or sticky notes works for you, then it's the best option.

As a solo developer, you should only be doing the things you are really excited to do, not waging psychological warfare against yourself.

I don't see how this is at all realistic. If it were up to me, I would just do all POC work and nothing else. But there are bills that have to be paid, so...

Ahah well written. And you're 100% on point.

Try out https://gingko.io/

When I was working solo it was really good, I used the top-level as a daily log and could easily tell what to continue working on, and what my major issues were each day.

(I used the other version at https://gingkoapp.com/)

BTW the scientific spelling is ginkgo :)

I think it is helpful to distinguish between tools and techniques.

Trello and Sticky Notes are tools. GTD, Kanban, Pomodoro etc are productivity management techniques/methods. I find it helpful to first pick the technique/method then figure out how to use the tools.

It is similar to programming languages and IDEs. First pick the programming language (methodology) then pick the tool (IDE). Good tools work with multiple methodologies.

Nitpick: I might argue that at its core, Kanban is a visualization tool. I think "agile Kanban for software" has some prescribed methodologies, but you're also free to tell them where to shove it and still call what you're doing Kanban as long as you have a board.

I think of kanban mainly as an analytical model for things represented in sticky notes or trello cards. The main things I think you'd find useful are a) making sure you represent your actual workflow, and b) setting WIP limits. You can see a (team) implementation of this using index cards here: http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/

I selfhost Kanboard for work and personal use https://kanboard.org/

It works with a SQLite db, so no migration issues. Highly recommended.

I am making a Trello alternative that tries to inculcate Kanban principles..

You can try it out and see if it works for you. It's at https://www.kanrails.com, and currently in Beta (no paywall). Hope to get some good feedback from HN!

It's cool that you're working on this! But piece of advice: It would be really nice to see the platform (a screenshot or video) before having to sign up.

Thanks for the feedback, I will act on this soon! For now, https://twitter.com/KanRails has some screenshots :)

Entire screen blocked by sign-up form? Closed so fast bits were flying off.

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