desktop as kanban board
All on her own, the 13 year old turned her school-issued MacBook Air desktop into a kanban board. Looking over her shoulder a couple of months ago, I noticed that her school work life appeared to exist as stickies, organized in kanban fashion, on her desktop. Huh.
Casually (because that’s how you ask a 13 year old questions ...), I asked her about the stickies. She says to me that she was using the stickies app before I introduced kanban into our family life, and that she realized the stickies would work like our family kanban board, so she just started doing it. Again, huh.
It appears that, quite organically, she started organizing her weekly work via a desktop stickies kanban board, listing out (on yellow stickies) all the work to be done for the week. Work in progress? Stickies get moved to the middle lane, and changed to green. Work that’s been completed? Moved to far right, and changed to blue.
I asked her how she prioritized the work, and she said she lines up the yellow stickies in order of due date (top to bottom), so she knows what to work on first. She also cross-checks periodically with her school planner (calendar), to make sure she’s working on the right thing at the right time.
The image above is a screenshot of her current desktop board — she’s studying for exams, and is creating a new board once a set of exams is finished. She’s set the stickies app to launch automatically, so it’s the first thing she sees when she turns the MBA on. This keeps her focused on her work, she says.
She took the kanban idea and ran with it, in a way that works for her. Huh.