Finally – An Email Inbox Focused Personal Kanban Board

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
WhatsApp

The Email Inbox – The real Personal Kanban frontier

I’ve been struggling for years with visualizing my personal work using Kanban.

Using a physical board isn’t that practical since a lot of the time I actually do my work I’m not at my office.

I then tried Kanban tools such as LeanKit, Trello (and even AgileZen…). This worked pretty well for a while, but I kept falling out of it. Something was missing.

Over time I realized that it relates to where so much of the work happens – in my email inbox. The overhead of creating Kanban cards based on emails I’m receiving and of syncing progress on the Kanban board to what’s going on in email proved to be too much of a bother for me. Maybe I’m not disciplined enough…

Then, a couple of months ago, Flow-e arrived on the Kanban tools scene. It seems like it’s built with people like me in mind. It provides Kanban-based flow visualization and management that’s tightly integrated into your email inbox.

I’m still learning and experimenting with how to integrate flow-e into my daily routine. From a user experience perspective, it’s doing exactly what I always wanted. It provides your email inbox as a backlog/queue to the left of your Kanban board and you can easily process your inbox and pull things into relevant work stages that you personalize.

Flow-e in action

It actually works beautifully. Setting it up to connect to my AgileSparks Google Apps account was a breeze. It smartly by default only loads the last 2 weeks into the “inbox” area which keeps you focused and keeps the app light and fast. You can easily configure your workflow. Here’s what I currently use:

Cards can originate from emails or you can just create them on your own. Threading is supported well. A new email on a thread is very easily associated with an existing thread/card that’s already in progress.

You can easily perform typical email actions such as replying, forwarding, archiving, and postponing, all within the Kanban board.

When it comes to mobile, I haven’t yet found a full kanban view. It does have a thoughtful responsive web design that allows you to process the inbox. This makes sense to me. I won’t necessarily manage my kanban on my phone but I definitely process my inbox on it. Having the option to do it directly in Flow-e reduces the risk that I’ll forget about it and just use google inbox directly.

My Wishlist

Aging/SLA information – I coach teams to look for cards that are aging too much in their process and see how they can help them flow. This is important in personal Kanban as well. Both for cards that originate from emails as well as cards created manually. (This is actually a power-up that the Flow-e team is considering…)

Analytics/Metrics like cycle times, CFDs, and some other insights can help me improve my flow. The added benefit of having this apply to my email inbox can make for an awesome combination.

Even better integration with inbox actions such as reminders, pinning and snoozing. Ideally, these actions should map to some action on your Kanban board. For E.g. move something to my “Ready/Next” queue when I pin it. Move it to “Later” when I snooze it. Add a “due date” according to the time I snooze it maybe? Or maybe add it as a “start date”. This will help people like me that WILL do some work directly in their inbox by mapping these inbox actions to an appropriate kanban/flow visualization.

The bigger picture

From a change management perspective, with Flow-e it’s now easy and natural to start experiencing Kanban at a personal level, with the hope that it will be a “gateway drug” to team/enterprise-level Kanban, which we know is a “gateway drug” towards other agile practices and behaviors. I’m already thinking about how we could leverage Flow-e as part of the AgileSparks Way. Maybe get leaders in the organization to start using Personal Kanban as part of learning about Flow, Kanban, and agility…

Interested to try it out? Here’s my referral URL…

Subscribe for Email Updates:

Categories:

Tags:

Risk-aware Product Development
Nexus
Advanced Roadmaps
Reading List
Agile Assembly Architecture
Agile Contracts Best Practices
Jira
SAFe Release Planning
Continuous Planning
Hybrid Work
Lean Agile Management
Agile Release Management
speed @ scale
Managing Risk on Agile Projects
Frameworks
Kanban Game
Lean Budgeting
Lean Agile Organization
Iterative Incremental Development
Rovo
TDD
Accelerate Value Delivery At Scale
Slides
Certified SAFe
NIT
Business Agility
Built-In Quality
Principles of Lean-Agile Leadership
Nexus Integration Team
Agile Product Ownership
Continuous Delivery
AI Artificial Intelligence
Lean and Agile Principles and Practices
Tools
RSA
What Is Kanban
SAFe
Development Value Streams
POPM
Agile Delivery
The Kanban Method
Kaizen
chatgpt
Nexus and Kanban
Scrum Values
Tips
User stories
Agile for Embedded Systems
Scrum.org
AI
Portfolio for Jira
Releases Using Lean
Artificial Intelligence
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
Story Slicing
Scrum Guide
An Appreciative Retrospective
Agile India
Agile Project
Agile Project Management
Lean and Agile Techniques
Manage Budget Creation
Agile Product Development
RTE Role
BDD
Operational Value Stream
Process Improvement
Kanban Basics
Agile
Nexus vs SAFe
Scrum With Kanban
Agile Exercises
System Team
Rapid RTC
Team Flow
Scrum Master Role
Legacy Enterprise
Continuous Improvement
Enterprise DevOps
Legacy Code
Continuous Deployment
Kaizen Workshop
EOS®
Atlassian
Planning
Certification
Amdocs
System Archetypes
Lean Agile Basics
LAB
Agile Testing Practices
DevOps
LeSS
Pomodoro Technique
Product Ownership
Self-organization
SAFe DevOps
A Kanban System for Software Engineering
Achieve Business Agility
AgileSparks
ATDD vs. BDD
Agile Techniques
WIP
Agile Basics
Managing Projects
PI Planning
Games and Exercises
Lean Agile Leadership
Scrum Primer
Agile Mindset
Scrum and XP
Scrum Master
Lean Software Development
Value Streams
Risk Management in Kanban
RTE
SPC
Product Management
Lean Startup
Effective Agile Retrospectives
Engineering Practices
Release Train Engineer
Continuous Integration
speed at scale
Program Increment
System Integration Environments
Software Development
Webinar
Keith Sawyer
Covid19
ART Success
ScrumMaster Tales
PI Objectives
Scrum
Kanban 101
Introduction to ATDD
Limiting Work in Progress
Change Management
ARTs
Lean-Agile Budgeting
Professional Scrum with Kanban
Systems Thinking
agileisrael
Confluence
Agile Community
LPM
Video
Agile Risk Management
lean agile change management
Lean Risk Management
Agile Games and Exercises
Atlaassian
Scaled Agile Framework
Perfection Game
predictability
Jira Cloud
Agile Outsourcing
QA
Jira Plans
Spotify
Jira admin
The Agile Coach
Agile and DevOps Journey
Coaching Agile Teams
Kanban Kickstart Example
GanttBan
Agile Israel Events
Implementing SAFe
Professional Scrum Master
Quality Assurance
Daily Scrum
Lean-Agile Software Development
Agility
Sprint Retrospectives
Kanban
Nexus and SAFe
Sprint Planning
IT Operations
Code
Lean Agile
Applying Agile Methodology
Agile in the Enterprise
Agile Release Planning
Test Driven Development
Software Development Estimation
Agile Program
Agile Games
Implementation of Lean and Agile
Presentation
Elastic Leadership
Agile Marketing
Risk Management on Agile Projects
ALM Tools
Large Scale Scrum
Introduction to Test Driven Development
Entrepreneurial Operating System®
Sprint Iteration
Professional Scrum Product Owner
Agile Israel
ATDD
Retrospectives
transformation
ROI
SA
AgileSparks
Logo
Enable registration in settings - general

Contact Us

Request for additional information and prices

AgileSparks Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter, and stay updated on the latest Agile news and events

This website uses Cookies to provide a better experience
Shopping cart