The Kanban Board: Organization Simplified

As writers, there are many tasks to keep organized. Writing tasks, publishing tasks, and marketing tasks abound. How are we supposed to keep track of everything and make sure we don’t let any of those millions of balls fall?

If you are a visual person who loves checking things off, I present to you:

The Kanban Board!

Typically done in a left to right fashion, (though mine moves from higher to lower) a Kanban board is an organizational method that was developed for teams to keep track of projects. As I’ve read about the corporate use of Kanban boards, it gets a bit complicated (at least to my brain), but you can simplify it to make your work-flow system easy to use.

My board has 9 sections. The top three are all the tasks I plan to do in each quarter, though you could make the board for whatever time period you choose. Deciding on how many tasks are reasonable in a three-month period can take some work, so be aware of not overloading your project list.

The smaller, middle section is for the tasks I plan to do that week. Again, be aware of your available time.

The final section is the party section of the board. These are all the tasks I have completed. It feels good to move those sticky notes down and to keep moving through my projects.

Each sticky note has a small task. Having big jobs on a sticky note could be discouraging, but you know yourself, so break down jobs accordingly. If I had, “Write Book 1,” on one sticky note that stayed in my “weekly task” section for two months, it wouldn’t be very motivating. But if I break down writing a book into 2,000 word chunks, moving down those sticky notes every day becomes extremely satisfying. As you decide on your projects for the quarter, or month, or whatever time period you decide, think through what size tasks would be motivating for you and put one task on each sticky note. Once you’ve put everything you want to accomplish on your board, decide on your first couple of tasks to get you started.

It might take some experimentation to figure our what works for you, but I hope you’ll give the Kanban board a try to keep your writing tasks organized and moving forward.

A huge shoutout to Sarra Cannon who first taught me about the Kanban board.

Happy writing!