Personal Kanban: a board with a work-in-progress limit
by Andreas Tissen · · updated
On Monday you set up a board with three lanes: To do, Doing, Done. Seeing the week laid out feels good. By Thursday Doing holds seven cards, three of which you have not touched since Tuesday, and Done holds two. The board shows the pile-up and does nothing about it.
What that board is missing is a number on the Doing lane. Personal Kanban calls it the work-in-progress limit. It is the second of the two rules.
Two rules
Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry described Personal Kanban in their 2011 book of the same name, adapting the kanban boards used in manufacturing and software teams for a single person, and gave it two rules: visualise your work, and limit your work in progress.
The first rule is the board. The second is a number on the Doing lane, the most cards that may sit there at the same time. For one person, two or three is a common place to start.
A limit changes the order of things. A new card can only start once you finish something or stop something on purpose and say why. Without one you start the new thing anyway and carry five half-done ones, which is the Thursday board.
When the limit lapses
In many board apps the limit is a number you keep in your head or a setting deep in the lane options, so on a busy day nobody looks at it. A card you are blocked on has nowhere to go: back in To do it looks unstarted, and left in Doing it breaks the limit. So the limit is the first thing to go.
The other weak spot is detail. A card in many tools is a title and a description, so the notes, next steps and things you are waiting for end up in another app, and the board turns into a list of headlines.
The board in Pando
Pando is the outliner I build: bullets inside bullets, in the browser and on the phone, and Claude can read and write them over MCP once you connect it. A board is a layout of an ordinary bullet, so its children are the lanes and their children are the cards. One thing to know first: Pando does not enforce a limit. It writes the card count next to the lane name. Keeping the count at or under the number is up to you.
The limit lives in the lane name, "Doing · max 2", with the count beside it, so you read both every time you look. There is no To do lane: the backlog stays in the rest of your outline, and a card goes on the board when you start the work.
The second lane is Parked. "The pricing page rewrite" sits there with its blocker in the note: waiting for the new numbers. Parking is how you keep the limit when something blocks you, because stopping a card becomes a normal move with a written reason. A card that stays in Parked through two weekly reviews moves to Someday or gets deleted.
Each card is a bullet, so it can hold children: next steps, a line for something you are waiting for, notes. Switch the layout off and the same branch is a plain list again. The board follows the Personal Kanban template, which also carries a bullet with standing orders for an agent.
Claude keeps the count
With Pando connected to Claude, you can say from your phone "park the pricing page rewrite, it is blocked on the new numbers", and Claude moves the card to Parked and writes the blocker in its note. The template's prompt also asks Claude to refuse a third card in Doing while the lane is full, and to ask which card finishes or parks first.
On Friday it counts the cards that reached Done, moves them under a dated bullet for the week so the lane starts empty, and lists the parked cards with how long each has waited. Over a quarter those weekly numbers let you compare the weeks you kept the limit with the weeks you did not. Claude reports; what to start next stays your call.
Pando is free up to 5,000 bullets, and Pro costs 3 EUR a month. To run a board with a limit and Claude doing the bookkeeping, create a free account and connect Claude.