Watch for cards that stay in Doing without moving
A card that hasn’t moved in several days is a signal about a real obstacle — examine it rather than adding more work.
Why it works
Stalled work cards are diagnostic data: they indicate a blocker (missing information, dependency, unclear next step, avoidance) that is invisible when work is managed mentally. The visual board makes stalls obvious without requiring active tracking. A well-functioning Kanban board has consistent left-to-right flow; a card that stops moving is a system signal that something needs to change — adding more cards to Doing in response is exactly the wrong reaction.
How to do it
- Review the Doing column daily for cards that have not moved since yesterday.
- For any stalled card, ask: what is the actual next action? Is there a dependency I’m waiting on? Am I avoiding something here?
- Either identify a concrete next action and write it on the card, or move the card back to To Do and add a specific unblocking step to the queue.
Evidence
Bottleneck identification is foundational to the Theory of Constraints (Goldratt) and Kanban method: the system’s throughput is limited by its slowest constraint, and identifying the constraint is the first step to improving it. Application to personal work is a practitioner extrapolation. (mechanistic)
Theory of Constraints is well-supported in manufacturing; its application to individual knowledge work is conceptually coherent but the dynamics are different.
Sources
- Goldratt (1984), The Goal (Theory of Constraints — applied in manufacturing; principle adapted to knowledge work in Kanban)
Common mistake
Treating a stalled card as a planning failure and adding more tasks to feel productive — this is the classic bottleneck mistake: adding work upstream when the constraint is downstream.
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More practices for Personal Kanban, Made Practical
- Set up a simple To Do / Doing / Done board
Three columns and sticky notes (physical or digital) are all you need to make your work visible at a glance.
- Set and enforce a WIP (Work In Progress) limit
Limit yourself to two to three tasks in the Doing column at any time — never more, even when starting a new task feels easier than finishing an old one.
- Pull work rather than having it pushed to you
Choose your next task when you have capacity, rather than accepting whatever arrives first.
- Use the Done column to learn about your work patterns
Periodically examine completed cards for patterns in what gets done, what gets stuck, and how long things actually take.
- Only put tasks on the board that you’ve explicitly decided to do
Your Kanban board is not a wish list — only tasks you have consciously committed to belong in To Do.
Related concepts
- Getting Things Done (GTD), Made Practical
The five steps, the next-action habit, and the science of offloading your mind
- Essentialism, Made Practical
Less but better — the disciplined pursuit of less, trade-offs, and the mechanisms
- The Action Method, Made Practical
Action Steps, References, and Backburner — a three-bucket system for turning creative work into progress
- Deep Work, Made Practical
Focus blocks, attention residue, and the shutdown ritual — with the evidence