Kanban boards were designed for teams — the columns represent handoffs between people, and the whole point is visibility into who's blocked on whom. When you're working solo, half of that value disappears. But the format is still useful, if you set it up differently than a team would.
The default columns don't fit solo work
"To Do / In Progress / Done" is fine for a team standup. Working alone, it tends to collapse into one giant "To Do" column and a "Done" column nobody looks at again. The missing piece is usually why something is in progress or stuck.
A structure that tends to hold up better for one person:
- Backlog — everything you might do, unsorted
- This week — what you've actually committed to right now
- In progress — capped hard at 1–2 cards, genuinely being worked on today
- Waiting — blocked on something external: a reply, a review, a delivery
- Done — finished, kept visible for a while before archiving
The "Waiting" column is the one most solo boards skip, and it's often the most useful — it separates "I haven't started" from "I can't proceed," which are completely different problems.
Cap "In Progress" more aggressively than you think
Teams use WIP limits to prevent bottlenecks between people. Working alone, the failure mode is different: it's not a bottleneck, it's task-switching. A solo board with six cards in "In Progress" isn't tracking parallel work — it's tracking six half-started things. Capping it at one or two cards forces the board to reflect what you're actually doing, not what you're hoping to get to.
Use priority and tags instead of more columns
It's tempting to keep adding columns for every project or context. In practice, tags do this better — a board with "Client A," "Client B," and "Personal" columns gets messy fast, whereas the same three as tags let you filter the view without fragmenting the workflow itself.
The real value, working solo
The board's job isn't coordination anymore — it's honesty. A kanban board for one person is really just a visible, low-friction way to admit what's actually in progress versus what you're telling yourself you'll get to. Fewer columns, tighter WIP limits, and an honest "Waiting" column get you there faster than mirroring a team's setup.