The quickest way to organize your week with a kanban board is a two-stage layout: a column holding everything you have agreed to do this week, and a smaller column holding what you are doing today. Each morning you pull a few cards from the first into the second, and nothing else moves. The four other layouts below solve narrower problems, and all five depend on the same weekly reset.
A personal board usually fails for one reason. Nobody set a time to look at it, so it drifts out of date within a fortnight and becomes another thing to feel bad about.
The reset that makes any layout work
Pick a fixed fifteen minutes once a week. Sunday evening and Monday morning both work; what matters is that it is the same slot every week, because a habit tied to a time survives and a habit tied to good intentions does not.
In those fifteen minutes you do three things. Clear the Done column so the board shows this week rather than the last four. Move anything that did not happen back to the backlog instead of letting it sit in Doing looking active. Then pull the work you are actually committing to into the week column.
That last step is the one people skip, and it is where the honesty lives. A week column with eighteen cards in it is a forecast you already know is wrong.
1. The week and today board
The default layout, and the one to start with:
Backlog | This Week | Today | Done
Backlog holds everything you might do. This Week holds what you have committed to. Today holds the two or three cards you are working on now.
The friction is deliberate. Moving a card into Today is a small decision, and making it every morning is what stops a to-do list from turning into a wall of equally urgent items. Keep Today capped at three cards. If a fourth needs to start, something has to come out first.
2. The commitment board
A variation for weeks that are already overloaded. Instead of columns by stage, the columns are levels of commitment:
Said Yes | Doing | Waiting On | Done
Waiting On is the useful column here. Work that is blocked by someone else stops occupying space in your head once it has a visible home, and a card sitting in Waiting On for nine days is a prompt to send a chasing email.
This layout pairs well with a strict limit on Doing. WIP limits explained covers how to pick a first number and what to do when the column fills up.
3. The energy board
Some work needs a clear head and some does not, and treating both as interchangeable is why the hard task keeps sliding to tomorrow. Sort the week by the attention each card needs:
Deep Work | Shallow Work | Admin | Done
Deep Work holds the two or three things that require an uninterrupted hour. Shallow Work holds meetings, reviews and anything you can do while half-distracted. Admin holds expenses, invoices and email.
Then match columns to hours rather than to days. If you think clearly before eleven, Deep Work cards belong there and Admin belongs in the flat part of the afternoon. The board stops being a queue and starts being a rough plan for when things happen.
4. The context board
Best for weeks that are fragmented rather than full. Columns become places or modes:
At Desk | Phone | Errands | Quick Wins | Done
Quick Wins holds anything under five minutes. The value shows up in the gaps: ten minutes before a call is enough for two cards from that column, and a Saturday with the car out is the moment to clear Errands in one trip.
This layout suits people whose day is broken into fragments by other people. It suits deep project work badly, because sorting by context hides how far along anything is.
5. The Friday review board
A second, small board rather than a layout for the main one:
Went Well | Got Stuck | Next Week
On Friday afternoon, spend ten minutes writing cards rather than moving them. What finished, what stalled and why, what is carrying over. Keep the cards; after two months the Got Stuck column shows a pattern, and it is usually the same two or three causes.
This is the layout most people drop first and the one with the longest payoff. It also makes the weekly reset faster, because the thinking is already done.
Picking one
Start with the week and today board. It is the layout that works when you have no idea which of your problems is the real one, and four out of five people never need to move past it.
Switch when you can name the failure. Constantly blocked by other people, use the commitment board. Hard tasks always sliding, use the energy board. Days chopped into fifteen-minute pieces, use the context board.
Do not run two layouts at once. A board with nine columns describing both stage and energy and context is a filing system, and the point of the board was to see the week in one glance.
Any of these takes about two minutes to set up. You can open a kanban board without signup and build the first one now, or read what Kanban is first if the columns-and-cards model is new to you. Atlassian's guide to kanban boards covers the team version of the same ideas.
Frequently asked questions
How many tasks should I put in a weekly kanban board?
Fewer than feels right. Count what you finished last week and use that as the ceiling for this week, rather than listing everything you would like to do. A week column that is consistently half empty on Friday is a sign to raise the number, which is a better problem than the reverse.
Should I start a new board every week?
No. Keep one board and clear the Done column during the weekly reset. Starting fresh each week loses the backlog, which is where things that are not urgent yet wait their turn. A single board with a weekly clear-out gives you the fresh feeling without discarding anything.
What do I do with tasks I did not finish?
Move them back to the backlog rather than leaving them in Doing. Work parked in Doing for two weeks makes the column look busy while hiding that nothing is moving. Sending it back is also a decision point: some of those cards turn out not to be worth carrying forward at all.
Is a kanban board better than a to-do list for weekly planning?
For a small week they are about equal. The board pulls ahead once you have more than about ten items, because it shows which stage everything is in and a list only shows what is undone. The limit on how much runs at once is the part a list cannot express.
When is the best time to plan the week?
Sunday evening or Monday morning, and the choice matters less than keeping it fixed. Sunday buys you a Monday that starts with work rather than with planning. Monday keeps the weekend clear. Pick one, put it in the calendar, and defend it for a month before judging it.
Related reading
Five layouts, one habit. The layout is worth ten minutes of thought and the weekly reset is worth all the rest, because a board nobody opens is just a tidier version of forgetting.