[yitchelle]

I have a personal kanban board. My pain is deciding how many tasks I can work on for a given day.

Somedays I have 5 tasks and I finish them with a few hours left over. Other days, I only managed finished 2 tasks and have to push the left over tasks back into the pool.

Anyone know if there some heuristics I can apply so that I continuously adjust my task loading on a day to day basis?

[cratermoon]

What sort of tasks are we talking about? If they are cognitively demanding tasks that require uninterrupted focus, plan on getting no more than four hours worth done on an average day. Some people may find it takes practice to get to four hours, some may find that four hours is easy and six is possible.

A single distraction can easily eat up 30 minutes from your allotted time, even if the distraction itself only takes a few minutes.

[gamerDude]

If you wanted to start using the pomodoro technique, they have some time based heuristics. Basically each pomodoro is 25 minutes of focused work.

After you start the habit, you estimate and track tasks in number of pomodoro. And your goal is to do a certain number of pomodoros in a day and then adjusting your tasks on if you estimate it will take more or less pomodoros.

[sokoloff]

What's the problem on the days where you finish 5 tasks and have hours and energy leftover with using that information to "pull more work"?

Kanban is designed to minimize WIP. When your WIP is down to zero, it's perfectly reasonable to pull more work.

[choeger]

I don't think there's a valuable heuristic. I would propose to go low (2 tasks in your case) and if you feel extremely motivated do some tasks from the next day (and consequently finish your week early if possible). Leftover time can be filled with hobbies and household to make you a better human being.

[withinboredom]

Have you tried velocity/capacity planning? It’s not too accurate on small scales, but should be pretty accurate for a single person on the scale of a week or two.