"Personal Kanban is a productivity system that's easy to get started with, only has two real ""rules,"" and is designed to give you a simple, visual look at what's on your plate, what your priorities are, and what you've accomplished."

"Personal Kanban, put simply, is a simple system for managing your to-dos. Its biggest benefit is that it helps you avoid taking on too much at once, and always gives you a visual, at-a-glance look at your work."

"Visualize Your Work. In short, you should be able to, at any time, look at your overall workload, be able to determine quickly what you should work on next, have visual cues for priority and time to complete, and that system should be easy to add, remove, and re-organize."

"Limit Your Work In Progress (WIP). In other words, limit the number of things you work on at the same time."

"First, it makes it easier to visualize your work, because you keep a lid on how much you have going on at one time."

"Second, it also helps you avoid the dangers of multitasking, not to mention burnout."

"From there, how you go about actually implementing Personal Kanban is mostly up to you. You can use complicated apps or tools, simple bulletin boards, post-it notes, or notebooks."

"Your ""Doing"" section consists of all of the to-dos you're working on right now, or plan to work on immediately. Ideally, they'd be further organized by priority, so you can glance at them at any time and see which ones to tackle first."

"Now, every time you look at your whiteboard, you can see what you have on your plate right now and which of those to-dos is most critical."

"Put a hard cap on the number of things you're willing to have in the ""Doing"" section at any time, or on the Kanban at all (keep anything that needs to move into ""Backlog"" in a binder, or on a Post-It pad until there's room for it.)"

"Trello: That's right, ever-popular productivity tool Trello is actually built around Kanban-style task organization."

"KanbanFlow: KanbanFlow may look a lot like Trello, but it's a bit more dialed in to the Kanban approach than Trello is."

"Evernote (with Kanbanote): Evernote alone isn't a particularly great Kanban solution. Its focus is far from visual, although you can tweak it to be a little more up front with the notes that you add."

"The key is to find a method that compliments your workflow instead of breaking it, and uses tools you'll return to instead of struggle with."

"We touched on this earlier, but another beautiful thing about Personal Kanban is that it works so well with other productivity techniques."