Invisible Work: What Isn't on Your Kanban Board

You set up a board, add the stages, invite the team, and expect work to flow. A few weeks later the board looks calm, but everyone is busy and cards still move slowly. A common cause is invisible work: the meetings, support requests, coordination and waiting that take time but never get a card.

A second kind of work also stays off the board: the agreements about how cards move. This article covers both. You will learn how to find hidden work, how to show it, and how to write the explicit policies that a board cannot hold.

What is invisible work?

Invisible work is effort that takes time but is not seen or counted as work. The sociologist Arlene Kaplan Daniels used the term in her 1987 article “Invisible Work” in Social Problems. She argued that ordinary ideas of work count only what people are paid to do, which leaves much of women’s work unseen and undervalued.

Susan Leigh Star and Anselm Strauss took the idea into the study of workplace software in 1999. Their article “Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice” argues that no work is visible or invisible by nature. People notice work through indicators, such as a finished product or a changed state of affairs, and which indicators count depends on the setting.

A kanban board is one such setting. It makes work visible as cards, so anything without a card stays invisible, however long it takes.

Hidden work that never reaches the board

Most teams can name these kinds of hidden work:

• Meetings. Planning, status updates and one-to-one calls.
• Support and interruptions. Quick questions, password resets and “can you look at this?” messages.
• Coordination. Chasing approvals, scheduling and handing work between people.
• Reviews for others. Proofreading a colleague’s draft or checking someone’s code.
• Waiting. Time a card spends blocked on a client, a supplier or another team.
• Rework. Fixing something that went out with a mistake, often without a new card.
• Upkeep. Updates, backups, reports and admin that repeat every week.

Communication alone takes a large share of the week. Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index, based on a survey of 31,000 workers in 31 markets, found that the average employee spends 57% of their time communicating in meetings, email and chat, and 43% creating. In the same survey, 68% of people said they lack enough uninterrupted focus time, and respondents ranked inefficient meetings as their top productivity disruptor.

Why hidden work breaks a kanban board

A WIP limit counts cards. If a designer has two cards in Doing and also spends half of each day on support, the board says the designer has spare capacity. The team then pulls in more work, and every card slows down.

Hidden work causes three visible symptoms:

• Cards sit still with no stated reason. The owner is busy with work the board does not show.
• WIP limits look met while people are overloaded. The limit covers only part of the load.
• Cycle time rises. Each card waits longer between steps, so the average time to finish goes up.

How to make hidden work visible

You do not need a card for every email. You need enough of the hidden work on the board that the limits mean something.

1. Tally it for one week. Each person notes interruptions and meetings in a simple list, with a rough time for each.
2. Group the tally by type. Support, reviews, client calls and admin are common groups.
3. Give recurring work a place on the board. A large recurring item gets a card, such as “Monthly site updates”. Small requests can share a label such as Support, so you can count them.
4. Use a separate row for unplanned work. Swimlanes split a board into rows, and a lane for unplanned work shows how much of each week it takes.
5. Add a waiting stage where work stalls. Waiting on client or Blocked turns a hidden delay into a card that everyone can see.
6. Reserve capacity. If support takes a fifth of the team’s time, lower the WIP limits by about that much instead of pretending the time is free.

Repeat the tally after a month. If the hidden share went down, the board now shows more of the real work.

Explicit policies: the rules that are not on the board

The second kind of invisible work is the set of agreements behind the board. A team has to decide whether a task that fails review goes back to Doing, who moves cards to Done, and whether anyone can add tasks or only the lead. A board shows where work is, but it cannot show these rules.

Kanban treats these rules as part of the system. “Make policies explicit” is one of the six general practices in the Kanban University guide. Its examples include rules for replenishing the board (“when, how much, by whom”) and the “Definition of when a work activity is completed, and the work item can move on.” The Kanban Guide also asks a team to agree on “Explicit policies about how work items can flow through each state from started to finished.”

These practices rest on the kanban principles. Kanban University’s first principle is “start with what you do now”, so the first policies describe how the team works today, not an ideal process. For the full list of principles and practices, see what is a kanban board.

Policies worth writing down

Keep the list short. These six areas cover most questions:

• Stage entry rules. For each stage, say what must be true before a card can enter. “In Review” might mean the author considers the piece finished and has attached notes. “Done” might mean published and checked, not only written.
• Who moves what. Often the person doing the work moves the card forward, and a reviewer moves it to Done.
• What happens on failure. A common rule is to move a failed card back one stage and add a comment that says why, so the history stays readable.
• Limits. Say how many cards each busy stage may hold, and what people do when a stage is full.
• Priority. Say how urgent work is marked, who may mark it, and whether it may skip the queue.
• Where discussion happens. If comments belong on the card, say so. Otherwise decisions scatter across chat and email.

An example policy set

A four-person content team might agree on these rules:

• The board has five stages: Ideas, Drafting, In Review, Scheduled, Published.
• Drafting holds at most three cards.
• Authors move their cards to In Review, and only the editor moves cards to Scheduled.
• A piece that fails review goes back to Drafting with a comment.
• Urgent pieces get the label Urgent and go to the top of Ideas, but they do not break the Drafting limit.

What to keep off the board

Not everything deserves a card:

• Trivial tasks. Five-minute chores clutter the board. Count them under a shared label instead, or keep them on a personal list.
• Vague wishes. “Improve the website” is not a task. Break it into deliverables, or keep it in a notes document until it is ready.
• Secrets. Passwords and private personal data do not belong in task descriptions.
• Long documents. Link or attach them instead of pasting them into the description.

The difference between this list and hidden work is time. A five-minute chore can stay off the board. Support that takes a day a week cannot.

How to introduce policies without a long meeting

1. Run the board for a week or two with the stages you expect to use.
2. Write down each question about the rules as it comes up.
3. Meet for thirty minutes and answer the questions. Aim for rules that cover most cases, not every edge case.
4. Put the rules where everyone can find them.
5. Review them after a month. Delete rules nobody follows and add one for each confusion that came back.

If you work with clients or contractors, agree the rules with them too, because their expectations are the most likely to differ from yours.

Where KanbanWP helps

KanbanWP is a free WordPress plugin for kanban boards. These features support the steps above:

• Labels mark types of work such as Support or Urgent, and the filter bar shows only the cards with one label. See labels.
• Swimlanes split the board into rows, such as a row for unplanned work. They are switched on per board through the REST API. See swimlanes.
• WIP limits show each stage’s count against its limit and a warning when a stage goes over. The warning does not block a move, so the limit stays a team agreement. See WIP limits.
• Comments with @mentions keep discussion on the card, and every move is recorded in the board’s activity feed. See task comments.
• Internal tasks and comments are visible only to board admins and members, so internal discussion stays off the client portal.
• Stage rules. Through the REST API, you can give a stage on-enter rules that add labels, assign people, set a priority, set a due date or add a comment. The rules run whenever a card enters that stage, including when someone drags it on the board.

KanbanWP has no separate field for board policies. One simple option is a task called “Board rules” at the top of the first stage, with the policies in its description.

For more on the method, read the benefits of kanban and these kanban examples. To set up a board, start with your first board.