There are many people who have problems with productivity just because they are unable to manage their time and attention. They cannot tune out the distractions that interrupt their work.
They can work 60-hour weeks in the hopes of finishing every last task, trying to “stretch” the time they have. What is worse, they cannot choose what exactly they should be working on.
Learning how to manage your time and attention wisely is a significant step to achieve optimal work productivity. To succeed, you’ll need to find an effective method and a tool that will accelerate your productivity and enable you to manage your focus, pointing to the important tasks to your attention. One of these tools is a simple Kanban board.
Understanding Kanban boards
Kanban boards provide users with convenient cards, columns, labels, and other visual indicators that help to comprehend and retain information.
Many teams use Kanban tools to develop their own unique configurations. It makes it easier to manage processes and workflows that are important to help their businesses run smoothly. Project teams that are most productive with Kanban tools are those that customize their boards to not only improve efficiency and productivity but also to help them spot opportunities for improvement.
You can get access to a Kanban board from any location with an internet connection. This is especially important in the age of the pandemic.
How to Use Kanban Boards?
To be able to use a Kanban board, you only need to know a few basic things:
1. Create a board and specify it to your needs
Starting a board, split it into columns that will match your work stages. You may base it on completion state, using phases like in progress, waiting for approval, in review, done, and so on. One more option is to base your Kanban board columns on a time frame – as in today, this month, this week, etc. Thanks to Kanban’s low initial requirements, the determination of the work stages is entirely up to you.
2. Share it with your team members
Provide all the team members involved in the project with easy access to the board to let them update their work activity on it.
If you have a distributed team that is scattered around towns or countries, you will benefit more from using a digital Kanban board than any physical collaboration tool.
3. Track the results
When you move your tasks through all the stages, you recognize if there are any problems within the process. One of the most essential challenges is when tasks accumulate in a given column. This is a vivid sign of trouble.
It means your team has a hard time with one of the tasks, and it’s making them unable to move on to new tasks arriving below it. In order to keep a healthy process and a happy team, deal with such inefficiencies timely.
4. Use additional benefits of Kanban
A digital Kanban board may provide a lot more information than a physical board. It can keep automatic Work In Progress limits, automate your processes, send notifications about key events, generate metrics of the project performance, etc. Do not hesitate to apply all these opportunities to increase your team’s performance and productivity.
Today you may choose any Kanban tool you like. Some of them are free to use, while others propose advanced features as part of paid subscriptions.
The functionality of Kanban software varies widely. Make sure you clearly understand what you’re needing out of your tool before choosing one.
Choosing an online Kanban tool, consider the following questions:
- Is your company planning to practice Agile or simply looking for ways to increase team productivity?
- Are you planning to use Kanban boards within your team or across multiple teams?
- What type of workflows do you need?
- What level of reporting do you require?
- Will you need to connect cards across multiple boards?
- What integrations with other tools are you expecting?
Considering these questions, your team will be able to identify all success criteria when choosing an online Kanban tool.
