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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

I actually ended up making a physical Kanban board at home in a central location. Relatively large corkboard using 3x5 index cards, with a few layers of backlog, in-progress lane with a hard cap of 2 cards, and about 1/3 of the space reserved for done cards. This last bit should be unnecessary in theory but I find psychologically satisfying to look at. This is for shared use by the family.

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I've not bothered with a physical board, but I have a massive Trello board. For teams I strongly recommend specialized boards for projects and processes -- the process to migrate a MySQL database will be dramatically different than building an LLM.

But for personal stuff, fitting everything into one work flow is fine. If folks are wondering how to use Kanban for personal needs, I currently have 7 columns:

Dumb ideas: 62 cards

Backlog of Doom: 100 cards

Not Yet: 38 cards

Weekly recurring: 8 cards

Doing: 4 cards

Review: 4 cards

It Is Done: 1 card

Dumb ideas is a holding tank for wild ideas, usually low priority or high risk. To pick a few examples: trial adopting tiling windowing managers, buying an IPv4 block, and terraform for social media profiles are all on there. Also: "self-hosted Trello alternative." Basically things go here so I can remember I decided that idea was _not_ a good one, so I dont get into any "I thought I had a card for this" create-delete-create loop.

Backlog of Doom is your standard backlog. Lots of video games, books and software projects here.

Not Yet is basically a way of hiding things that are scheduled for later. This is almost entirely TV shows awaiting new seasons, but also a few tasks filing taxes, selling shares etc.

Weekly recurring is essentially a tighter loop of that, plus some information gathering tasks ("look for new books at the library on $topic", "review the top posts for the past week on /r/$subreddit".

Doing is as expected.

Review is a catchall for things that benefit from double checks -- financial transactions, followup communications with insurance, etc. If I wanted I could also use it for book reviews.

Done is as expected, but has a butler cleanup task to archive cards.

I've also got labels for Games, Shows, Reading, Money, and a few others.

I hold strict to: Backlog, Next, Now, Completed

Yea, each addition was lined with good intentions -- I don't want to prioritize the entire backlog but do want to filter out the worst ideas and the "hurry up and wait" stuff.

Sounds like one of those places where adding a new category can solve all categorisation issues except having too many categories.

Same principle holds for layers (of management, abstraction), levels of indirection etc.

A category for everything, including categories.

Let me guess: When you have a task to start say filing a pile of unfiled mail, bills etc, you start by sorting it into other piles and then run out of time, over time those piles grow, then at some point get combined then (after a suitable grieving period) you have a task to tackle this pile, so you start by sorting it into piles...

I totally understand the concern about organization paralysis, but the point is to keep it simple, focused, and relaxed. By writing things and ideas down in an organized way I don't have to track it in my head, and I can get back to what's important. Or at least procrastinate on something useful. I suppose it looks complicated from the outside, but has really only grown slowly over a decade.

Also: I have most bills on autopay, and transactions created 90d in advance in GNUCash. I do also have piles of mail in the form of a filing cabinet and labeled folders. I've actually been experimenting with letting the mail pile up in an inbox and filing it away once a month just to prove to myself the system works enough that I don't have to monitor it daily.

I also use a physical Kanban board on my kitchen fridge with Post-its. I have four columns (To Do, In Progress, Blocked, and Done) and three swimlanes (Everything Else on top, Books in the middle, and a Recurring lane at the bottom, where some cards temporarily park in Blocked until needing to happen again). The Done column works a little bit differently from a traditional Kanban, where it's reaped on a rolling basis - e.g. I work my way down the fridge, then start replacing the post-its at the top.

An interesting feature-not-bug is that my In Progress column is capped at four tickets, physically, by the ice maker.

Can you take a picture of it maybe if not too personal... I was planning to do something similar but ended up using white board with grids I drew myself.

I have too much PII on the cards, but it's just a standard cork bulletin board (about 5x3 feet) hanging in landscape orientation, and then I used long strips of paper to make vertical lanes. The middle of the board is the in-progress lane and this is marked with a neon pink paper to stand out, and a big bold note at the top "In Progress - 2 Max!" . To the left are backlog cards, to the right are finished cards. The kids enjoy moving cards from lane to lane, and we also enjoy looking at the left side together and moving cards around according to priority. Just like PMs at a prioritization meeting :-)

So far it's worked out OK but I feel it's because I am the primary user. When the kids get older or to get the SO to use it more I feel we might need to come up with private sections, or color code the cards or similar and change the in-progress rules. It's still a very fun physical activity kind of like browsing books at a brick-and-mortar store or library.

Thank you for the visualization. I will test this out, maybe with magnet board. :)

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