Why three columns are enough for personal work (and why more columns hurt)

By Gerald · 20 July 2026

Physical three-column kanban board with index cards, representing a deliberately constrained personal workflow that stays visible and usable

The first thing most people do when they set up a personal kanban board is add more columns. "Waiting," "Someday," "This Week," "High Priority," "Research," "Blocked," and whatever other distinctions feel useful on the day the board is born.

Three months later the board has twelve columns, the "Executing" column is empty because everything is in a more specific state, and the person who built it has gone back to a simple list because the board became too much work to maintain.

The constraint is not a limitation. It is the thing that keeps the board honest.

What three columns actually force

Triage is the place where work arrives and waits for a decision. It can be large. It does not need to be perfectly organised. Its only job is to be the single place you look when you are ready to commit to something new.

Executing is the place where you have made a commitment. The items here should be small enough in number that you can see all of them at a glance and remember what they are without re-reading the titles. This is the filter. Everything that is not currently claiming your attention belongs somewhere else.

Done is the record. Not for the feeling of completion (although that matters), but because a visible history of finished work is one of the few reliable signals that progress is happening even when the current week feels scattered.

These three states map to the only decisions that actually matter for personal work: it has arrived, I am working on it or have committed to it soon, or it is finished. Everything else is a refinement that feels clarifying on Sunday and becomes overhead by Wednesday.

Why more columns usually make things worse

Physical three column kanban board with index cards, illustrating why fewer columns keep personal work moving — More columns create more places for work to hide. Three columns map to the only decisions that matter.

Each additional column is a new decision at the moment you move a card. Is this "Waiting for input" or "Blocked" or "On hold"? Is this "This week" or "Next week" or "Q3 goals"? The distinctions may have been clear when you created the column. They become ambiguous the moment real life intervenes.

More columns also create more places for work to hide. A card that should have been killed or pulled into active work can instead be moved to "Someday/Maybe" or "Research" or "Low priority," where it will quietly age and contribute to the background sense that there is always more than you can see.

More columns also make the board harder to scan. A three-column board on a phone or a second monitor is glanceable. A twelve-column board requires scrolling and interpretation. The glance is what makes the board useful as a daily orientation tool rather than a project you have to study.

The disciplines that make three columns work

The first discipline is keeping Executing small. If the column has more than a handful of items, the problem is not the number of columns. The problem is that you have not decided what you are actually doing. Adding a "This week" column is a way to avoid making that decision. Three columns force you to make it.

The second discipline is treating Triage as a parking lot, not a promise. Items can sit there for a long time. They can be deleted in batches during a review. They do not need individual states. The moment you start subdividing Triage, you are building the system you will later abandon.

The third discipline is using Done as a real record rather than a place to archive everything forever. Old cards can be archived or deleted after a reasonable period. The value is in seeing recent progress, not in maintaining a complete museum of every task you have ever considered.

When more columns are actually the right answer

If you are coordinating work across multiple people with different responsibilities, more states can be useful. "Waiting for legal," "In design," "Ready for review" are real handoff points that multiple people need to see.

If you are managing a large number of recurring processes with strict stages, more columns can reflect reality rather than fight it.

For solo personal work, those conditions are rare. The extra columns are usually an attempt to outsource the decision-making to the board itself. The board cannot do that work for you. It can only make the lack of a decision more visible and more expensive to maintain.

Frequently asked questions

What about "Waiting" as a separate column?

"Waiting" is a useful distinction when you have a lot of delegated or dependent work. For most solo users it is a way to move something out of Executing without admitting that it is not currently active. If the item is genuinely waiting on someone else, it can live in Triage with a note or a tag. If it is not active, it does not need to occupy space in the committed column.

Does this mean I should never customise the board?

You can add a small number of additional distinctions if they survive the tired-Tuesday test. The test is whether the extra column makes your daily glance faster or slower. If you have to stop and think about which column something belongs in, the column is cost, not value.

What happens to long-term projects and goals?

They live in notes, in a separate longer-term list, or in Triage with a future date or a project tag. The kanban board is not the place where everything you ever want to do lives. It is the place where the small number of things you are actually moving right now are visible.

Can I use more columns on a computer and fewer on mobile?

You can. The board should serve the surface you use most often for orientation. If you mostly look at the board on a phone or a narrow monitor, the three-column constraint is even more valuable. The desktop view can afford a little more width without breaking the habit.

Is three columns too rigid for creative or research work?

Creative and research work still has the same three states: it has arrived as an idea or a thread, you are actively working on it, or it has produced something finished (a note, a decision, a draft, an experiment result). The content inside the states is different. The states themselves are not.

My verdict

A personal kanban board with more than three columns is usually a sign that the owner has not yet accepted how few things they can actually give attention to at once. The extra columns are an attempt to make the board reflect every nuance of their thinking. The board ends up reflecting the complexity of their indecision instead. Three columns (Triage, Executing, Done) are enough because they map to the only three states that matter for moving work forward: it exists, I am committed to it now, or it is finished. Everything else is a story you are telling yourself about the work rather than the work itself.