Peace of Mind Organizing

Kanban for knitting

21 March 2011

Last summer, I wrote about Personal Kanban a visual task-management system that I was trying on for size. It involves using a whiteboard or wall, writing tasks on post-it notes, and moving the post-its from Backlog to Doing to Done columns. An important part of the system is limiting the number of tasks/projects you have in the “Doing” column.

Here’s a photo of my kanban board from last August, taken from my blog post on the topic:

Daily tasks are stashed in the lower right area.

I enjoyed that system for awhile, but I got so busy that my board couldn’t hold all the tasks. I ended up going back to Mark Forster’s Autofocus task-management system and have since moved on to his new SuperFocus system, which I’m nuts about.

I noticed in my web analytics report (I love Woopra) that someone had made his or her way to my website using the search term “kanban for knitting” and that got me thinking.

I realized that the kanban system might be helpful for keeping track of my knitting projects. Right now I’m in a bit of a knitting slump. I have a few projects that are started and stalled in the knitting phase and a couple more that are stalled in the finishing phase (an afghan that has to be seamed and another that needs edging).

I had a lovely, fabric covered bulletin board adorning a wall near my yarn stash and it had nothing on it. So I transformed it into a knitting kanban board, using yarn to create four columns. They are:

• Possibilities
• Knitting
• Finishing
• Completed

I wrote the names of different knitting projects on index cards and pinned them to the appropriate column of the board. This allows me to see at a glance where I stand on projects. I’ll get the pleasure of moving the card along when I start a new phase of a project. The “Completed” column allows me to revel in my accomplishments.

Here’s a photo of my freshly minted Knitting Kanban board:

It makes me happy.

Tagged with: knitting, mark forster, personal kanban

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