my personal life on a kanban board

Software is the business of hitting a moving target from a rotating platform. There’s so much planning to needs to happen in order for a team or even multiple teams to sustain enough vision, effort, and focus to get somewhere near the customer’s vague understanding of what it is that they asked for. I’ve seen it happen, it’s fine.

Learning to Run My Leisure Time and Interests Like a Software Team

In the process, tasks are tracked and time is documented. It’s super easy to write this kind of stuff off as “some admin BS” or TPS reports or whatever.

However…

The truth though is somewhere closer to things getting done, reasons for delays and changes and questions are all documented, the customer is shown that they’ve gotten what they said they wanted, and everyone involved sees proof of all the work that they all did.

The shit gets done.

I work in software development and have worn a few of the hats a few of the times. It’s a lot of these things:

• decoding what is meant to be done or produced as told by the client
• designing the look and feel of the new features as best understood from the client’s wishes
• looking at the designs, and making intelligent decisions about the structure of the data that this client application would best be provided with
• writing up a synthesis of a smaller chunk of a larger task, or many tasks, into a work ticket, aka “actionable”
• asking questions and making clarifications on that ticket as far as certain details: edge cases and assumptions being brought to light and questioned and finally clarified
• completing that work to spec or more or less as details and decisions are made on the fly and recorded on that ticket
• checking that work and proving that it indeed does what you said it would do, often in a short video demo
• moving that ticket into a DONE column (finally, yessss)

Which again, seems like so much shit that doesn’t have to happen.

BUT! There is one detail that matters:

That shit got done.

How did you last set out on your last set of New Year’s goals? Your chances of accomplishing all that shit got wayyyyy higher the more closely you did a lot of the above, in some form or other.

“Oh, I’ll remember it. This time, it’s in this bobblehead, for real!” If this was as far as you got into goal X, no big, just let it go, that shit’s whatever. Move on, it’s chill, no big. I’ve been there, and that’s why I’m gonna try something different.

Wikipedia: Kanban board is the true internet gateway drug to getting organized in a pretty nerdy, but serious way. Reading about AGILE is like the second hit.

If you were to work with this concept month in and month at, at first it would feel like a funny inside joke with yourself that you’re gonna optimize and all this in your personal life but then, when no one’s looking is when you start making lists, and not just regular grocery shopping lists. I’m talking some detailed ass tickets with shared labels, and discrete checklists and shit.

But it still sounds too much to do for me. I’d rather just spend that energy getting it done.

But you won’t. And that’s why it’s been dawning on me that all the ceremony carries the task past the finish line.

Notion (my favorite right now) has a pretty slick kanban board, Evernote has one, Trello has one, and there’s a few others too.

Try it out, fill in a bunch of details and refer back to it often. When you write the tickets, try to fill in as much of the extra stuff as possible. Again, it’s gonna seem overkill, but each little detail is like another small part of things getting done.

It can become like a steam roller! Flattening out all of your idle time with a more focused and rambunctious energy to get it done, click the box, and move that ticket to done.

Conclusion

Just make sure that tracking adds to the fun. Yeah, you could immediately start with steps and other important things too, or you could go straight to the thing that you want to see some improvement in. Don’t be scared to be honest with yourself about it! You’re going to have to dissect it though, in order to break down these feelings into concrete and actionable steps that you can communicate are either DONE, IN_PROGRESS, or in the BACKLOG.

Now go get it 🤙