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A kanban board tracks work as cards moving through columns, each column a stage of your process, from planning to done. This template is a fully worked example for a product team: real cards flowing through planning, design stages, per-person in-progress columns, code review, QA, and production. Teams use it to see work in progress, spot bottlenecks, and pull tasks instead of having them assigned.
The boards look alike; the systems differ. Scrum runs in timeboxes: the board holds one sprint's commitment, resets when the sprint ends, and changes mid-sprint are resisted. Kanban runs on flow: the board never resets, work enters whenever a slot opens, and per-column WIP limits do the governing that sprint commitments do in scrum. Pick scrum when stakeholders need a predictable cadence; pick kanban when work arrives continuously, like support or maintenance. Plenty of teams run scrumban: sprint ceremonies on a WIP-limited board.
A kanban board is a visual workflow tool: tasks are cards, process stages are columns, and work moves left to right from planned to done. The method comes from Toyota's manufacturing system (kanban means 'signal' in Japanese) and was adapted to software and knowledge work. Its two defining habits are limiting work in progress and pulling new work only when capacity opens.
A scrum board lives inside a sprint: it holds only the sprint's committed items, resets every one to four weeks, and belongs to one scrum team with defined roles. A kanban board is continuous: no sprints, no reset, items enter whenever capacity opens, and flow is governed by per-column WIP limits rather than sprint commitments. Scrum measures velocity; kanban measures cycle time.
As many as your work has real stages, and no more. Three (To Do, Doing, Done) is plenty for personal boards. Software teams usually land between five and eight; this template uses eleven because it models design and engineering as separate stages with per-person columns. Add a column only when work genuinely waits at that stage; columns added for neatness become noise.
A WIP (work in progress) limit caps how many cards a column, or a person, can hold at once, like 'In Progress: max 3'. The limit forces finishing before starting, surfaces bottlenecks the moment a column fills, and creates the pull behavior kanban depends on. This template's per-person In Progress columns make WIP visible by name: when Elaine's column is full, Elaine isn't taking new work.
A personal kanban works with the same mechanics at smaller scale: three columns, a strict WIP limit of one or two, and a weekly pruning habit. It suits work with many small, unrelated tasks, which is most personal work. The discipline that matters is the limit; a To Do column with forty cards and a Doing column with nine is a list, not a kanban.