Personal kanban, and the rule everyone skips
Personal kanban is famously two rules: visualise the work, and limit work in progress. Almost everybody adopts the first, because a board is pleasant to look at and easy to set up. Almost nobody adopts the second, because it is the one that says no to you.
A board without a limit is a to-do list with columns. It looks organised and it changes nothing, which is why so many people report that kanban "did not really do anything for them".
The limit is the method
The rule is: your Doing column has a number, and you do not exceed it. For one person that number is two, occasionally three, and never five.
What makes it work is not the discipline of the number itself. It is what happens when you want to start something new and Doing is full. You have to finish something, or you have to explicitly park something. Both are decisions you would otherwise have avoided by simply starting the new thing and quietly carrying five half-finished ones.
Write the number into the column name, so the board argues with you rather than waiting to be remembered.
Three columns, and the honest fourth
To do, Doing (max 2), Done. That is the whole board.
The fourth column worth having is Parked, and it is the one that keeps the limit believable. Without somewhere to put a thing you are stopping, the limit is a rule you break under pressure. With it, stopping is a legitimate move rather than a failure.
Anything that sits in Parked through two reviews belongs in Someday, or belongs deleted.
Why in an outline, and not in a board app
Because a card is a bullet, so it carries its own children: the notes, the next actions, the waiting-fors that belong to that piece of work. In most board tools a card is a title and a description, and the real detail ends up somewhere else, which splits the work in half.
And because the board is a LAYOUT rather than a document type, the same branch is a plain list again when you want to think about it as a list. The week you do not need a board, you do not have a board to maintain.
What to watch after two weeks
Count how many cards crossed into Done. That number, not the number of cards on the board, is your throughput, and it is usually a surprise. If Doing was routinely over the limit and throughput did not rise, you have the finding kanban exists to give you: work in progress was slowing you down, not speeding you up.
Take the board
Open the template, press "Show in my Pando", and put this week's real work in it. Then set the number in Doing to two and keep it there for a fortnight. The number is the method; everything else is decoration.