How to set up a personal Kanban board (and keep it alive)
The columns, the one rule that keeps a solo board honest, and the weekly habit that stops it from dying, with the exact setup in Hense.
The short answer. A personal Kanban board is a board with three to five columns (To Do, Doing, Waiting, Done), one card per task, and one rule: keep Doing small. That is the whole system. Hense gives you exactly that on iPhone, iPad, and Mac for free, with iCloud sync and no account, and this guide walks through setting it up in about ten minutes.
Personal Kanban is not team Kanban, smaller
Kanban comes from factories and software teams, and most guides still carry that baggage: swimlanes, cycle-time charts, daily stand-ups. None of that applies when the whole team is you.
For one person, a board does two jobs. It makes work visible, so you stop carrying the list in your head. And it shows status, so you can tell the difference between a task you have not started, one you are in the middle of, and one that is stuck waiting for someone else. A to-do list can only do the first job. That gap is why lists get long and stop being trusted, and why a board tends to survive where a list does not.
The good news is that a personal board needs almost no setup. The bad news is that most people over-build it in the first hour and abandon it in the first month. So the guide below is deliberately small.
The columns
Start with four:
| Column | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| To Do | Everything you have decided to do but have not started. Not everything you could possibly do. |
| Doing | What you are working on right now. Two or three cards, not ten. |
| Waiting | Things you have done your part of and are waiting on someone else: a reply, a delivery, a decision. |
| Done | Finished work. Leave it there for a week so you can see what you accomplished, then clear it. |
Add a fifth, Someday, if your To Do column keeps filling with ideas that are not commitments. Do not add a sixth until you have run the board for a month. Five columns is also the free limit in Hense, which turns out to be a useful constraint.
Notice what the columns are: stages, not categories. Work, Home, and Errands are categories, and they belong on labels (below), not on columns. A column answers “what state is this in,” and that is the question a board is for.
The one rule: limit Doing
The thing that separates a board from a prettier to-do list is a limit on the Doing column. Pick a number, usually two or three, and do not start a new card until one leaves Doing. When Doing is full and something urgent arrives, something else has to move back to To Do, out loud, on the board.
This feels arbitrary for a week and then becomes the most useful part of the system. It forces the decision you were avoiding (which of these five half-started things am I actually doing?) and it makes finishing the default instead of starting.
Hense does not enforce the limit for you, on purpose; the number is a promise to yourself, not a setting. What it does is make the breach obvious: a Doing column with eight cards looks wrong on the screen in a way it never does in a list.
Cards: small enough to move
A card should be something you can finish in a sitting or two. “Redo the website” is a project, not a card. “Write the About page” is a card. If a card sits in Doing for more than a few days, it is usually too big; open it, add a checklist of the real steps, and split the first step off into its own card.
Give a card only what it needs:
- A due date when there is a real one. Fake deadlines train you to ignore the red.
- A checklist when a card has steps. The progress badge on the card face (3 of 7) is the fastest status you will ever read.
- A label for the area of life it belongs to, so you can filter.
- An attachment when the card is about a file: the PDF, the photo of the broken thing, the screenshot.
Setting it up in Hense
In Hense
- Create a board (plus button, or ⌘N on iPad and Mac). Call it something honest like “Life” or “Work” rather than “Master Board.”
- Add the four columns: To Do, Doing, Waiting, Done. Tap Add Column at the end of the board, or press ⇧⌘N.
- Add three labels for areas of life. Edit the board (⌘E, or long-press the board), open Labels, and create them: for example Work, Home, Health. Free includes 3 labels per board; Pro is unlimited.
- Empty your head into To Do. Add a card for every commitment you are carrying. Do not sort yet. Add Card is at the bottom of the column, or press ⌥⌘N.
- Pick two cards and drag them into Doing. That is your Doing limit, chosen.
- Turn on Done as an end-state column if you have Pro: edit the column and mark it as an end state. Cards there show a green check instead of an overdue warning, so finished work stops nagging you.
On iPhone, use the paginated view (one column per screen) for checking in, and the zoomed view for the weekly review. On iPad and Mac, the whole board fits.
The weekly habit that keeps a board alive
Boards die when they stop matching reality. The fix is one short review, at the same time every week (Sunday evening, Monday morning, whatever you will actually keep):
- Clear Done. Glance at it, enjoy it, delete the cards or leave the column to be cleared later.
- Chase Waiting. For each card, either it is still fairly waiting, or you send the follow-up now, or it moves back to To Do.
- Check Doing. Anything that has been there all week gets split or moved back.
- Pull next week’s work from To Do (or Someday) to the top of To Do. Add due dates where they are real.
Ten minutes. If the review takes longer, the board has too many cards, and the fix is deleting, not organizing. The weekly Kanban board guide turns this into a board of its own if you want a dedicated weekly view.
One board or several?
Start with one. Split it only when two areas of life have different rhythms and you keep filtering to see one of them. A common end state is two boards: a Life board for the running list of everything, and a project board for the one big thing (the move, the launch, the thesis) with its own stages. Two boards is the free limit in Hense, and it is a good limit.
If you find yourself wanting a board per project, that is what Pro is for, along with copying a board so a project’s columns become a reusable template.
Frequently asked questions
What columns should a personal Kanban board have?
To Do, Doing, Waiting, and Done cover almost every personal use. Add Someday for ideas that are not yet commitments. Keep columns as stages of work, and use labels for categories like Work or Home.
How many cards should be in Doing?
Two or three. The limit is the point: when Doing is full, you finish something before starting something else. Hense does not enforce the number; it makes an overfull column visible.
Can I use Hense as a personal Kanban board for free?
Yes. The free version includes 2 boards with up to 5 columns each, 3 labels per board, checklists, one attachment per card, board search, drag and drop, and iCloud sync across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Hense Pro is a one-time $9.99 USD upgrade, not a subscription.
Is a Kanban board better than a to-do list for personal tasks?
For anything with stages or waiting time, yes: a board shows status, a list only shows existence. For a simple checklist of errands, a list is fine. Many people keep both, with the board for projects and ongoing work.
Does Hense have swimlanes or WIP limits?
No. Hense keeps a board to columns and cards on purpose. You choose a Doing limit yourself, and you use labels and the label filter where a team tool would use swimlanes.