For a few years now, I have been running a Kanban-style task board in Notion to track things in my daily life. Not work sprints or product backlogs or anything work related. This year I have taken a bit more of an interest in its maintenance after letting a lot of things pile up in 2025.

In early Jan while on leave, I cleaned out all the done and ice box items.

This is personal. More about what I need to do as a dad, house, personal projects, admin tasks, the kind of stuff that floats around in your head and I write down if I think it’s a good idea. There’s no team pushing things along, it’s only me.

The board is simple and based off traditional to-do list approaches. Six columns: Could Do, Should Do, Must Do, Doing, Done, and Ice Box. No automations, no scoring. Just cards that I drag between columns when something changes. I started treating it less as a productivity tool and more of a measure of comparing how I think I am going to how I actually am.

I started writing down snapshots of the board state and deleting iced items if they weren’t coming back and the done items.

A snapshot from February

On February 1, before creating any new tasks for the month, I took a count of where everything sat:

  • Could Do: 9
  • Should Do: 8
  • Must Do: 12
  • Doing: 4
  • Done: 17
  • Ice Box: 5

During February I created 7 new tasks. Of those, 5 made it to Done in February. How I feel about that is pretty solid, although I did notice that until I took the snapshot I refrained from updating the list.

Which is a happy medium. This means it’s more of a tracker for the bigger items or the ‘glass’ if you’re familiar with the rubber and glass juggling analogy.

Why I found cleaning the clutter mattered

Since Done and Ice Box items were removed after the February snapshot, I can still track “tasks created this month” and “where those tasks ended up,” which is meaningful. Life happens, the idea of tracking how much done in a month is a bit silly to me: things happen, work gets in the way, maybe I’m operating at a pace where development goals don’t really matter.

This is a small example of something I think happens a lot with personal systems: we optimise for how the tool looks right now instead of what it can tell us later. A Done column with thirty cards in it feels messy. It’s ok to delete it and move on rather than virtual hoarding a bunch of completed items or even take a manual snapshot whenever you remember.

The data needs to have some meaning. Done is good. Ice Box is also good. Having things to do is also good. If you’re running low on things to do? Then probably time to break the bigger items down or start planning. The could / should / must approach acts as a natural “backlog”. If something I am thinking of overloads the could or should do list and doesn’t justify inclusion, it never makes it to the ice box and it truly doesn’t matter.

This is something that normal to-do lists even with the should / could / must approach fail at. You can build lists of 20-30 items and start thinking the list itself doesn’t matter. No, sometimes you just want a handful of smaller jobs and you can pluck out of any 3 when you feel like it.

It’s life after all. You’re not meant to be a personal productivity machine all the time.

All good but why a task board? Isn’t that a bit nerdy?

The conventional pitch for Kanban in daily life is about getting more done. And sure, it helps with that. I personally argue any list works fine. I have a bunch of them in the notes app on my phone that will never come near this.

But the more I use notion for the bigger things outside of shopping for food, movie recommendations, date ideas, what I need for my next Bunnings run or simply small bits to put down somewhere. For goals and interest exploration, the more I think the real value is pattern recognition and seeing how it gets used as life ticks along.

For instance, I can write notes and thoughts against tasks as I see them. This tells me I thought about it, had something to say and left it where it is. This helps with the prioritising aspect. Most to-do list apps have a small notes section that doesn’t feel good like a feed style thought dump does.

Similarly, looking at what lingers in Must Do without moving is revealing. Some of those items are legitimately urgent at the time (or I spent a decent amount of money on enablement) but I never get to them. One of them is to finish a course for fussy eating to help my son. I’m not doing it, I should do it, but it hasn’t moved for a few months.

Being able to say ‘hey this is more important than I thought’ or moving something back down the list is a mini ritual of acceptance that things change, plans change and it’s totally normal.

The ice box is my favourite part!

Seeing what I paused or put on the backburner without having it as a to-do, to clean out is kind of nice. I have no idea what was in the ice boxes when I did the monthly clean out regularly. What I did remember was that there was a sizeable amount (~5) staying around and always less than what I do get done.

Showing in another way, what not to do is important. You can do 25-50% more that is worthwhile by saying no or putting off an idea from opportunity cost alone.

Closing thought

A task board for daily life is not going to change how many hours are in a day or how much energy you have after work and kids. Or make your partner say ’neeeeerrrrrd’ in a teasing way any less.

What it can do, quietly and over time, is show you the shape of your commitments and priorities in a gentle way. Where your attention actually goes versus where you think it goes. What you avoid and need to just take a bite off of. What you over-label as urgent.

Where your time goes because nothing got done, which is rarely really true. Life just got busy.

The system does not need to be perfect. It just needs to be honest enough that when you look at it at the end of the month, it tells you something you did not already know and you feel like it’s a good use of time… but not too much.