I’ll bet you have a lot of things to do. Of course you do. We all do. A personal kanban anti-pattern I’m seeing is that people are filling their kanbans with things to do, and then... doing them. They are becoming productivity machines. And that’s really bad.

Look, there’s a limitless amount of things to do, and you can become super-efficient and do much more of them than you ever dreamed possible. But if you do that, soon you will burn out.

So I ask you: Why not figure out which work is important?

This happened to us recently at Modus. We had our kanban board, which we’d been using for a year. The backlog was filling up with tasks that could be done but didn’t necessarily need to be done.

At client sites and in classes, we frequently use our own board as an example. And our board clearly showed this anti-pattern.

So we did a few things that I recommend:

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