Personal Kanban: Set a WIP Limit of 3 for an Overloaded Life

A work-in-progress (WIP) limit is a cap on how many things you let yourself be in the middle of at one time. Most overloaded lives are not short on effort. They have fifteen projects started and none finished, so a cap of three, with a single Done column that fills up, is the fix.

Where the idea comes from

Kanban is a Japanese word for a signboard or card. At Toyota, under Taiichi Ohno, cards were used to tell one process to make more only when the next process had used up what it had. The point was to stop piling up half-made work. Toyota’s story is told mostly through Ohno’s own writing and later histories, and accounts differ on the exact years, so I will leave dates out.

Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry carried the idea to individuals in Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life (2011). The method has two rules: visualize your work, and limit your work in progress. That is the whole method, and the board is optional furniture.

Why a cap speeds up finishing

John Little proved in 1961 (Operations Research 9(3): 383-387, five pages) that in a stable system, the average number of items inside equals the arrival rate times the average time each one spends there: L = λW. For a person, that gives a rough sum. If you finish about two projects a month and have eight open, the average project takes about four months to get through. Hold the open number at three and the same pace gives about six weeks.

The sum is a model, not a measurement of you. It assumes your pace stays steady, and real life does not. But it shows the lever: finishing speed responds to how much you have open, not only to how hard you work.

What does juggling cost?

Two bodies of work are worth knowing, and both are narrower than their popular summaries.

Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans (2001, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 27(4): 763-797) measured the time lost when people switch between simple tasks in a lab. Switching took time, and the cost grew with the complexity of the rules for the new task. Those tasks lasted seconds, so the paper says nothing about how many hours a week of life you lose to switching between a tax return and a move.

Sophie Leroy (2009, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 109(2): 168-181) coined “attention residue”. In two lab experiments with undergraduates (84 and 78 students, as summarized by the British Psychological Society), people who switched away from an unfinished task were still partly thinking about it, and did worse on the next one. Her own faculty page lists unfinished tasks, interruptions and anticipated rushes back to old work as the triggers. The tasks were word puzzles and mock CV reviews lasting minutes, not months-long projects.

Here is the fit, stated modestly. Many open projects means many unfinished tasks. Leroy’s results suggest unfinished work stays in your head. The still-unfinished feeling that the Zeigarnik effect describes may be part of the same story, though that older finding has its own replication problems. Nobody has tested a WIP limit of 3 against a control group of overloaded adults, so treat it as a sound bet and run it as a four-week experiment.

How to set it up in 20 minutes

Use paper. A screen invites you to add cards without ever moving one.

1. Write every open project on its own card (6 minutes). Anything you started or promised and have not finished. Do not rank anything yet.
2. Draw three columns (4 minutes). Backlog, Doing, Done. Write a big 3 at the top of Doing. All cards start in Backlog.
3. Pull three cards into Doing (4 minutes). Pick the three that matter most this week. Everything else stays visible but is not allowed to claim your attention.
4. Write one next physical action on each Doing card (3 minutes). Something you could begin in under five minutes. “Fill in page 1 of the form” works. “Sort out visa” does not.
5. Book a 10-minute weekly pull (3 minutes). Sunday evening, say. Move finished cards to Done. Only then pull new cards into Doing, never past three.

Two rules keep it honest. A new card enters Doing only when a card leaves Doing. And a card that has sat for seven days with no action goes back to Backlog, which is a decision to stop pretending, not a failure.

If you are choosing among goals that compete with each other, the Emmons and King goal-conflict audit helps decide which three get the slots. If the pile makes you freeze, Osler’s day-tight compartments is a gentler way to shrink what you look at each day.

Making the Done column fill

The board fails if nothing ever lands in Done, so make the first card tiny and daily. Finishing starts with a first visible action each day, and getting up when you planned to counts as one Done card. DontSnooze asks for a 30-second video when the alarm fires, and a missed one sends a random camera-roll photo to your friends, so that card gets a witness.

The cap pairs with a tendency to put off the first step; Steel’s procrastination equation shows why the start, not the middle, is where most cards stall.

Put the Done column where you see it every morning. On a Sunday evening in a month, count the cards in it. Three is a good result, and two is still more than the pile was producing.