The Kanban Board: Organization Method of My Dreams

Historically, I am incredibly unorganized about my writing. I have notes on ideas everywhere: word files, on my cell phone, on random scraps of paper, scribbled in the margins of notebooks, and in my blue book—the notebook I have designated for anything to do with my writing. For projects that I am actively working on, I never know where I am in any given project. I start them and rarely finish them because I get sidetracked by something new and shiny, or hung up on typing up edits, or stuck on a section etc. etc. As someone who is extremely organized in every other aspect of my life, not only does this not make sense, but it also drives me a little nuts.

I have been writing for twenty plus years, but it has only been in the last couple that I’ve gotten serious about it. One of the issues that plagues me is I don’t finish projects before moving on to a new one. My lack of organization has played a huge part in this. I knew I needed to get organized, but I didn’t quite know how to go about it. I was starting from scratch. I’d never tracked projects before. I had no system in place to help me schedule and manage my projects through competition, or to limit how many projects I had going at a time, or even to organize potential future projects.

Over the last several months, I am happy to say, I have done a little research and have created some systems that will help me with all this. Most of those systems are housed in my bullet journal but my newest hangs on the wall next to my desk. It is perhaps the most powerful and provides an overview of what all is going on in my writing life at any given time. Say hello to the Kanban board.

see all the post its? That's a Kanban board!

The Kanban system was introduced in the 1940s by Taiichi Ohno, a Japanese industrial engineer who worked for Toyota. He was attempting to make production more streamlined and the ordering of supplies more efficient. The method he developed was a simple signal and response system, which as evolved into a board with columns representing the steps/stages of the process and cards representing projects. Kanban means ‘sign’ or ‘billboard’ in Japanese. As each stage is completed, the card is moved to the next column to mirror the workflow.

I’ve worked in distribution centers and office positions my entire adult life, so I had seen these boards before. But I didn’t know what they were for, what they were called, or how they worked. It wasn’t until watching a Plant Based Bride video on YouTube that I learned the name of it. She uses a mini board in her bullet journal to track her progress on the creation of her YouTube videos. It got me wondering if I could use the method for my writing projects.

While the system was originally designed for the automotive manufacturing industry, it can be customized to work for any process or methodology. It can also be implemented on top of any existing organization system. As such, it can easily be applied to nearly any project-based work. The board provides a visual for both the workflow and the actual work that is passing through the system. Issues are readily identifiable, no deep analysis needed. For example, if a particular stage is causing a bottleneck, attention can be immediately diverted to that area and becomes a temporary priority to get the workflow moving smoothly again. If it is a continual issue, steps can be taken to modify the stage to prevent problems it in the future.

In 2004, David J. Anderson applied the system to IT, software development, and knowledge work for the first time. In knowledge work, its primary purpose is the continual self-improvement of one’s own work process. For more information check out Anderson’s book Kanban: Successfully Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business. It is a comprehensive guide about the specifics of his method.

The Kanban system thrives on simplicity. The simpler the better. This is an example of an extremely simple board that I whipped up on my desk to demonstrate.

The basic tenets are as follows:

1. Start where you are now: don’t change your current method, simply lay the Kanban framework over it, and allow the method to do it work. As the board identifies problem areas, tweak the system. Allow your changes to happen organically, which helps to eliminate resistance.

2. Put set limits on your WIP (works in progress). By doing this, you can avoid overloading the system (and yourself). Once your WIP limit is reached, you must finish one project before you can begin another.

3. Mange the flow as bottlenecks become evident. Think about why the bottleneck occurred and determine whether a change in procedure must occur to eliminate problems in the future.

4. Be specific with policies. Know what must be done to complete each stage in the process.

5. Be flexible with the process. If something isn’t working, experiment until it does. Scheduled periodic reviews of the system will help with this. And if it’s broke, don’t fix it.

That’s about it. So, I thought about this for a while and then I got busy making my Kanban board. I have checklists for certain stages, like editing. I have hard WIP limits, so I can’t overwhelm myself. And I have protocols in place that expedite certain projects over others. For example, if I am in the publishing phase, and an editor asks for changes to be made, the project goes back to the editing phase, but it becomes a priority. A fast lane as it were.

One of my favorite aspects of the Kanban board is the concept of a ‘backlog’. These are projects that have not been started yet, but that are on the books, or in my case, story concepts that I haven’t gotten much past the idea stage. Because I have been writing for so long, I have dozens, if not hundreds of these. Because there are so many, I decided to use an index card holder that has been divided into genres. That way I don’t lose any, I have them handy for perusing when I have a spot available on my on-deck position, and all of them have an equal chance at being chosen. I had some really good ideas ten years ago that I never turned into stories, but they were lost in a file somewhere never to be seen. Now (once I get them all pulled out of the folders, envelopes, files, and off various hard drives, and out of various notebooks, etc. and on their own cards) I will have easy access to every idea I’ve ever saved over the years. Yay organization! No doubt, this will take a long time and it is a continuous thing. Like I said, I have them everywhere.

I have already started using the board for projects I am currently working on…there are too many. I can see that already. Putting them on the board let me SEE and internalize that. I am making decisions about which ones I am going to focus on RIGHT NOW. It doesn’t mean they won’t be worked on. But for now, some will have to be put on the back burner to make it possible for me to complete projects. Here is what it looks like in my office.

I have high hopes that this will help me. It will bring awareness, which is always the first step to solving any problem. In a few months, I’ll give you an update on how its going.

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