Pretotype a Kanban whiteboard

,

I’m constantly looking for ways how can I improve my productivity. If you are working in IT, you probably heard about scrum or kanban. It works great managing projects in small increments. But what about using them outside of your workspace?

Some topics that came to my mind while wondering this question.

  • They are project management tools.
  • I don’t need them while I’m not working.
  • Why should I subscribe to a service to manage my personal time?
  • How am I gonna share it with my loved ones?
  • Will it interfere with my job duties?

Story

I’m good at solving problems and doing my work in agile ways. At work. At home… well, I feel like a mess. I don’t have time for hobbies, friends, enjoying a book, planning a holiday, and so on.

This is why I decided to make some changes. I’ve dedicated a kanban board in my Obsidian and started to create notes and tasks about things that I would love to do. But some issues arrived.

  • First, how I’m gonna share it with my wife?
  • Second, I’m a geek, but sometimes I’m offline. And this is typically true for the tasks that I would love to have more control of.
  • Third, when I’m in a flow, I need three monitors. One for research, one for the development tool, and one for checking the output. So should I buy a fourth monitor for constant reminders?

Actually, It is two additional monitors, because I recently switched to a Mac mini and this way I lost my laptop monitor as a working area.

The good old whiteboard

I loved using whiteboards. Picking up sticky notes and moving them around when a task made some progress.

So after a quick Google search, I found some really good-looking whiteboards, with magnets and board pencils as a gift. And I almost ordered them right on the spot. And here comes the catch.

  • It’s a 2m x 1m board; how are they gonna deliver it to the x story of the flat?
  • It is not that cheap. Do I really need it? Yeah, I could use it for other kinds of stuff as well, like mind mapping and planning.
  • Will it solve its goal? Visualizing and sharing tasks with my family?

Trying out a theory

If you haven’t heard about it, there is a great book about pretotyping. No it is not a type o. If you are interested, you can learn more about it at: https://www.pretotyping.org

I enjoyed the story about how PDA came to life. Originally it was only a pocket-size wooden brick with paper on it. Fascinating. And from there now, we have smartphones.

Let’s pretotype a whiteboard, shall we?

Cheaper alternatives

I need a big flat area on the wall which is always visible to me. I could achieve this by sticking a big piece of paper on the wall, but fortunately, I have a big white door next to my home office. And it happens to open in my bedroom.

So I went shopping for manual office tools.

The notebook and pen are for testing out; do I need a whiteboard for drawing and writing out ideas?

And the whiteboard pretotype looks like this:

Why pretotype good for?

Ok, I made a cheap alternative. So what?

The goal of a pretotype is to figure out ways to improve a system or a product without investing much time and resources to try out a theory. And improve on it with your findings.

What are my findings so far?

Well, I should have washed the door before putting notes on it because the notes do not stick for a long time if the cards are moved. :)

Second, the typical Kanban board is not ideal for family todos. Do you really want to show if a task is inprogress? Or what about done?

Next iteration based upon my findings

I’ve got rid of the inprogress and the done columns… okay so it is a todo list. Great, but I already have a bunch of todos, and only having one column leads to todo overwhelming. How about adding different titles?

This led to adding priority to tasks based on time.

What about the feeling good about finishing a task?

I can collect all my finished notes in a pile on my desk for now. And I can feel happy about it. :)

Final thoughts

I still think I need a whiteboard, but now I can experiment with using it without the actual product.

And a plus one discovery. I can link tasks together. I only need to stick two sticky notes together. :D

Isn’t it obvious? :D