Kanban Board

What Kanban actually is, and why columns matter

Kanban started on the factory floor at Toyota as a way to signal when work should move forward, and it has become the simplest reliable system for tracking knowledge work. The idea is small but powerful: make every piece of work visible as a card, and make every stage of your process a column. A card can only be in one column at a time, so the board always shows the honest current state of everything you have on your plate. This board opens with the three columns most workflows reduce to — To Do, In Progress, and Done — but you can rename them or add as many custom columns as your process needs.

The value isn't the columns themselves; it's that moving a card from one to the next is a deliberate act. When you drag a card from In Progress to Done, you are confirming the work is genuinely finished, not just "mostly there." That single moment of honesty is what stops half-finished tasks from quietly piling up.

A worked example: shipping a small feature

Say you are building a contact form for a website. You create three cards in To Do: Design the form layout, Wire up the submit handler, and Write the confirmation email. You give the first a blue background and a Design label, the second a Feature label, and the third a yellow background so it stands out. You start on the layout, so you drag that card into In Progress. The column header next to its name shows a live count — In Progress now reads 1, a small but useful signal of how much you have in flight. When the layout is done you drag it to Done, pull in the submit handler, and repeat. At a glance the board tells you exactly what is finished, what is active, and what is still waiting.

The colors and labels, and how to use them

Each card supports a background color from a fixed palette (white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink) and any combination of six built-in labels: Bug, Feature, Urgent, Research, Design, and Review. Color and labels do different jobs. Color is for fast visual scanning — make every bug red and your eye finds defects instantly. Labels are for categorizing and filtering in your head — a card can be both a Feature and Urgent at once. A practical convention is to reserve one color (red works well) for anything that is blocking other work, so blockers never hide in a sea of identical cards.

Limit your work in progress

The single most effective Kanban habit is a WIP limit: a self-imposed cap on how many cards may sit in the In Progress column at once. This board doesn't enforce a limit, but the live count in each column header makes it easy to police one yourself. Pick a number — three is a sensible start for one person — and refuse to pull a new card until you have moved one to Done. This feels restrictive at first and then becomes liberating: instead of juggling ten started-but-unfinished tasks, you finish things. Multitasking has a real switching cost, and a WIP limit is the cheapest way to eliminate it.

Where your board is stored

Everything you create lives entirely in your browser's localStorage under a single key. Nothing is sent to a server, there is no account, and no one else can see your tasks. The practical consequences are worth understanding. Your board survives page refreshes and browser restarts, so you can close the tab and come back tomorrow. But because the data is tied to one browser on one device, it does not sync to your phone or another computer, and clearing your browsing data or site storage will erase the board. If you are tracking something you cannot afford to lose, treat this as a working surface rather than permanent storage, and copy important card titles somewhere durable.

Common mistakes

• Too many columns. Beginners often create a column for every micro-stage. More than five or six columns turns the board into a maze and obscures the flow. Start with three and add a column only when cards genuinely get stuck waiting in a distinct state.
• Vague card titles. A card called Website tells you nothing a week later. Write titles as concrete, finishable actions: Add favicon to header, not Header stuff.
• Never moving anything to Done. If your Done column stays empty while In Progress grows, your tasks are too big. Break them into pieces small enough to finish in a sitting.
• Treating it as cross-device. Because storage is local, don't expect a card added on your laptop to appear on your phone. Use one device per board.