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Jack Wallen shows you how to add card aging to the Kanbantool service so you can quickly gauge if a task is languishing.
Kanban boards are one of the best at-a-glance project management tools you’ll ever use. A simple-to-use layout lets you quickly see where each task is in the timeline. The one thing that’s a bit more challenging is gauging how old a task is. You might have a column marked Beta filled with cards, but which of those cards are new and which are older?
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That’s not so easy to tell. Sure, you can open a card and view a created-by date and see any progress that’s been added to a notes section, but the beauty of Kanban is that it should give you most of what you need to know by way of a quick glance. You shouldn’t need to open a card just to know how old something is.
Fortunately, many Kanban services offer solutions for this. For example, Kanbanbool has a Power Up that changes the color of a card based on its age. With this Power Up, cards become more transparent as time passes without any activity. The more time between activity, the more transparent a card becomes. That fixes the aging card issue, so you can get a glance at what activities haven’t been touched for a while.
Let me show you how to add this Power Up to your Kanbantool account.
What you’ll need to add aging cards to Kanbantool
The only thing you’ll need to make this work is a valid Kanbantool account. This can be either a free or paid account.
How to install the Aging Cards Power Up
Log into your Kanbantool account. From the main window, click Settings near the top right corner. From the popup window, click the Power Ups tab (Figure A).
Figure A
You should also see the Card again Power Up near the top of that page. Click that entry and then, in the resulting window (Figure B), click Enable.
Figure B
As soon as you click Enable, the popup window will ask you to set the aging thresholds (Figure C).
Figure C
By default, the thresholds are seven, 14 and 30 days. You can change those to whatever you need. You might require faster work on tasks, so a more agile threshold could look like one, three, seven. You might have to adjust these thresholds to better fit your needs as you start to see how the Aging cards Power Up works.
To change the thresholds, simply go back to the Aging card window (in Settings | Powerups) and adjust the 3 numbers.
When you look at your Kanbantool Kanban board now, you’ll get a very quick idea of how much time has elapsed since the last activity recorded on a card. If a card is nearly transparent, something needs to be done with it.
That’s all there is to add this extra functionality to Kanbantool. Give it a try and see if it doesn’t help improve your Kanban workflow with this service.
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