# Managing Workload as a Solo Contributor *2026-11-10* > A personal Kanban board for non-development work (Originally drafted in September 2019 during my tenure at Xero. Republished here in November 2026 with updated context and removed proprietary references) > "Work smarter, not harder" - Allan F. Mogensen When I moved [from a Developer role into architecture]({{< relref "the-myth-of-the-software-architect" >}}), one of the things I hadn't anticipated losing was my sense of progress. As a Developer, I had a constant stream of metrics telling me what I'd achieved: lines of code, JIRA tickets closed, pull requests merged, bugs fixed, features shipped. In architecture, those signals disappeared. I knew I was doing *stuff*, but I had no idea when I had done what I had done, whether one piece of pending work was more important than another, or where my time had actually gone. My immediate thought for time management was to use something like [Todoist](https://todoist.com/). However, I quickly found that my work-life and home-life became intertwined: work-related tasks would always appear alongside home-related tasks and this made it incredibly difficult to switch off and fully disconnect when work had finished for the day. I needed a different approach. So I went back to what I was familiar with during my time as a Developer: I needed a 'sprint' board. ## Columns Keeping the [KISS Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle) in mind, I essentially just had a Trello board with the following four columns: [![Task Board of Doom](task-board-of-doom.png#center)](task-board-of-doom.png) ### Backlog Tasks in the backlog are effectively 'nice-to-haves'. These are things that, given the time, I would like or need to get round to doing eventually. Some of the items in this column had literally been there for years and were likely to never get done. ### Todo These are tasks that, in priority order, I need to get done – either for the teams I work with or for myself. For example, if I picked up a task in a meeting then it would immediately get captured in this column. ### In Progress These are tasks that I was currently working on. With the help of the ['List Limits' Power-Up](https://trello.com/power-ups/5c2462c384ab8949b1724a20/list-limits) I was able to specify a Work-In-Progress (WIP) limit to ensure I didn't have more than two things in progress at once. If there were more than two items in this column then I would move items back to the 'Todo' column to reduce the list. ### Done ([Month] [Year]) When an item got completed it was moved to a list named after the month and year it was completed in. For example, in April this would read 'Done (April 2020)'. When a new month started, a new column was added and the existing column eventually got pushed to the right and out of view. ## Labels Items on the board were annotated with labels to make it easy to identify which category a task belonged to. Not only does this 'group' the items together, but it also makes filtering the board for relevant items that much easier. The labels I personally settled on in Trello were: ![Task Board Labels](task-board-labels.png#center) ### Portfolio Items with this label relate to the portfolio of work I was responsible for. Anything that relates to engineering teams, or requires external consultation on behalf of those teams, gets this label applied. ### Documentation Working at an architectural level revolves around visualising the architecture of the product that an engineering team is working on. Part of that entails both creating artefacts such as diagrams and written documentation, and reading them too. Any tasks of work that were documentation-related would get this label. ### Technical Anything technical in nature - looking into a codebase, research, developing a prototype - would have this label applied. This label also tended to cross over into 'Documentation' when the documentation itself was technical. ### Stakeholder Engagement Software development is as much about [people and interactions]({{< relref "conways-law" >}}) as it is code. Working at a level of abstraction whereby the software and systems are themselves interconnected requires a great deal of engagement with people in other teams or departments. As such, if a task involved reaching out to someone, following up with someone, or setting a meeting up with a group of people, this label would be added. ### Learning Nobody knows everything. It's important to have a [growth mindset](https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/) whereby you're constantly learning, growing, and evolving in your role – and this is true across every role in the organisation, including architecture. Therefore, any tasks going towards my own personal learning and development would get this label added. ### Development Goals Having a set of development goals agreed with your manager is a great way to give focus to the areas you want to grow in. While this could be considered the same as 'Learning', I wanted to distinguish between them as sometimes I had learning goals that weren't part of my formal development plan – and vice versa. ### Communities of Practice At one point I set up a Melbourne-based 'Design Patterns Community of Practice', which initially explored the [Azure Cloud Design Patterns]({{< relref "posts/2024/cloud-design-patterns" >}}). There was a great deal of interest in it early on, but this dwindled over time – running a weekly CoP with all 37 patterns in the curriculum required a great deal of time and effort to prepare for. Any tasks related to communities of practice (presentations, code examples, etc.) would get this label applied. ### Recruitment Fast-growing organisations never seem to stop hiring. Over the course of roughly a year I was personally involved in 16 interviews, and keeping track of who's being interviewed, when, reading their CV and writing up post-interview feedback was challenging. I created this label as a way of separating recruitment duties from my 'regular' everyday responsibilities. ### Blog Post Every now and again an idea would pop into my head or a topic would be raised that I felt compelled to write a blog post about. In fact, the post you're reading right now had a corresponding task on my board with this label. ## Power-Ups In the interest of running less software I didn't tend to use many Power-Ups in Trello. Having said this, there were a few I found handy for my particular use case. [![Task Board Power-ups](task-board-power-ups.png#center)](task-board-power-ups.png) ### Calendar Using 'Due Dates' on cards enables you to prioritise certain tasks before others, and this Power-Up provides a high-level view of when those tasks are due. Unfortunately, there's no way to integrate this with Google Calendar so that meetings show up in Trello. There is, however, a way to display your [Trello cards in Google Calendar](https://support.atlassian.com/trello/docs/using-trello-with-google-calendar/) so cards appear there as well. Just a shame that two-way integration isn't available. ### Card Snooze [The reminder functionality in Slack is](https://slack.com/intl/en-au/help/articles/208423427-Set-a-reminder) absolutely brilliant – being able to set up a reminder for a message you need to get back to at a later time is a great way to reduce your cognitive overhead. This Power-Up is effectively the same thing: pick a card on the board, pick a time and date, and that card disappears from the board and reappears when scheduled. ### Google Drive Given that I tend to always be either reading or writing documentation, having a link to that documentation directly attached to a card is a real time-saver. However, I found in my experience that this Power-Up tends to keep disconnecting itself from Trello, so I'd just resort to pasting the link into the Description textbox on the card. ### List Limits Having a visual indicator for limits on the various lists, to keep the amount of 'In Progress' items in check, is a great way to ensure you're not simultaneously working on too much. While this isn't a hard and fast rule, having the entire list turn yellow when it exceeds the maximum is a great reminder. ## Pros and Cons Hopefully this gives you some insight into how I managed my workload. As every Developer knows, there's nothing quite so satisfying as dragging a JIRA work item from 'In Progress' to 'Completed' :slightly_smiling_face: There are, however, a few pros and cons to this approach. ### Pros **Self-review** - Ever come to the end of the year and wonder what the hell you actually got up to? Me neither. What's great about using Trello is when a new year came around I would go back over all the monthly 'Done' columns for that year and archive them. When self-review time came around I would systematically restore the lists for the previous months and summarise what was accomplished. I was probably notorious with my manager for this very reason due to the Wall of Text™ that landed in their inbox. **Sharing** – Being someone who values honesty and transparency, I kept my personal calendar open, meaning anyone in the organisation could see what I was up to at any given moment. There's nothing worse than opening up someone's calendar and seeing blocks with 'Busy' displayed on them everywhere. While I wouldn't condone someone dictating anyone else's time, it can be useful to see time slots in someone else's calendar so you've got an idea of when you can book that next meeting. Both my manager and the leaders I worked with could see my Trello board and the corresponding workload I had at any point in time. What they were not permitted to do, however, was add items :wink: Having said that, I had to be careful about adding personal information to the board – notably around feedback and recruitment – which is why the audience for the board was limited. **Checklists** – Having so many tasks and such little time to complete them can be overwhelming at times, especially as more items constantly get added to the 'Todo' column. Checklists on cards allow you to break these tasks down into smaller sub-tasks that can then be tackled individually, one at a time: every tick of every box brings about that feeling of accomplishment as systematically completing each subtask brings you one step closer to completing the overall task. ### Cons **Time Visibility** – What's on the board is not always entirely reflective of what you actually do during a working day. Meetings get scheduled, you get interrupted by someone with a question, or something else entirely comes up. While there's a 'Calendar' Power-Up available, there's no way to have a bidirectional link between Trello and Google Calendar. This means it's hard to see exactly what you are - or have been - up to at any given moment. Having said this, the individual contributions people make are not always tangible, and humans do not work in blocks of time – a meeting will spill over or a video conference will take longer than it was meant to – which will make it appear as if there is time that's 'unaccounted' for. ## Closing Comments I worked with Trello in this way for over two years and found it worked really well for me. Using this system helped immensely with keeping track of not only what I had to do, but also what I had accomplished. I find that being able to group and categorise items based on their topic, as well as break tasks down into smaller subtasks, makes it much easier to manage the limited time you have. When you've caught up on Slack, finished reading that long article or finally got out of that meeting, you'll always have your board to go back to and remind you what you should be working on next.