I built a Kanban website. I still use the physical board.

Why the most useful planning tool I've found isn't digital, even when I made the digital version myself.

I'm an educational consultant, not a project manager. I came to Kanban boards through curriculum planning. I needed a way to see an entire unit at once: which lessons were drafted, which were in progress, which were done, without losing the thread of how they connected. Kanban solved that problem cleanly.

I used it enough that I eventually built kanbandits.com, a digital tool for running Kanban boards. And then I kept reaching for the physical blocks anyway.

That probably sounds contradictory. It isn't.

What Kanban actually does

The concept is simple enough to explain in a sentence: tasks move from left to right. To do, doing, done. What makes it powerful isn't the categories. It's what the movement reveals. You can see where work is piling up. You can see what's moving and what's stuck. You can see, at a glance, whether you've taken on too much or whether one area is bottlenecked.

I made a short video showing exactly how to build one. The example is launching a new website: figuring out all the tasks, organizing them into categories, then moving them through as the work progresses. It takes about two minutes.

How I use it in education

When I'm planning a unit, I need to see the whole thing before I can build any part of it well. Which lessons are load-bearing. Which activities depend on prior knowledge I haven't introduced yet. Which parts of the unit are actually finished versus which ones I've just thought about.

A list doesn't show me that. A spreadsheet doesn't show me that. A Kanban board does, because the position of each card is information. To the left means not started. In the middle means in progress. To the right means done. The spatial arrangement tells me the story of the unit at a glance.

The same logic applies to managing my own projects. When I'm planning a new workshop, developing a curriculum scope, or building a website, I want to see all the moving pieces in relation to each other. Not in a list. On a surface, where I can move things around and watch how the whole changes.

Why I built the website and still use the blocks

Building kanbandits.com made sense at the time. If I found Kanban useful, other people probably would too. A digital tool is accessible anywhere. It doesn't require a wall.

But here's what I noticed while building it: I was planning the development of the website using physical Switch-Its blocks on a wall. I had a Kanban board running on a surface while I built a Kanban board for the internet. And the physical one was doing something the digital version couldn't quite replicate.

When I move a physical block from "doing" to "done," I feel it. There's a small, real satisfaction in the gesture that doesn't exist when I drag a card across a screen. And when I'm stuck, when I don't know what to work on next, I look at the wall. Something about seeing the whole project in one unmediated glance, without a screen between me and the plan, helps me think.

Physical tools are for thinking. Digital tools are for tracking. Both matter. Most people have the tracking covered. The thinking part, the part where you stand back, look at the whole thing, and figure out what actually needs to happen next, that's where the wall still wins.

Start simple

If you've never used a Kanban board, start with three columns and whatever you're working on right now. To do. Doing. Done. Put each task on a separate card. Move them as the work moves.

If you want to try the physical version, Switch-Its blocks work well for this. They're magnetic, dry-erase, and come in three sizes that naturally map to the hierarchy of a project: big components, workstreams within those components, individual tasks. You can see the structure without anyone having to explain it.

And if you want to try the digital version, kanbandits.com is there. I built it. I use it sometimes. But I'd be dishonest if I didn't tell you which one I reach for first.