Make trade-offs visible
Priorities are useful only when they force a choice. The board gives every task a clear place and makes an overloaded high-priority lane obvious.
Triage new work
Keep requests in Backlog until someone has considered their impact and urgency.
Protect the critical few
Use High Priority for the small set of tasks that genuinely need immediate attention.
Rebalance quickly
Drag tasks between lanes as deadlines, dependencies, and customer needs change.
The included priority workflow
Backlog
Untriaged or not-yet-committed work.
High Priority
Urgent, high-impact tasks that need attention now.
Medium Priority
Important work that should follow the critical items.
Low Priority
Useful improvements without near-term urgency.
Done
Completed work retained for review and reporting.
Prioritise for free
- Up to 3 boards and unlimited tasks
- Due dates, tags, subtasks, and timers
- Private local use without signup
Add Pro when needed
- Unlimited boards and collaborators
- Analytics and completion trends
- Custom themes and colours
Deciding what is actually high priority
Rank against consequence, not urgency
Ask what happens if this slips a week. Loud requests are often cheap to delay, and quiet structural work is often the expensive one. Urgency is a property of the requester; priority is a property of the work.
Cap how much can be High
If more than about a fifth of the board is High, the label has stopped carrying information. Force the ranking by deciding which items lose the label rather than adding a tier above it.
Pair priority with a due date
Priority says what matters; a due date says when it bites. A High card with no date tends to stay High indefinitely, while a Medium card due tomorrow is the one that should be moving.
Re-rank on a schedule
Priorities set once are wrong within a fortnight. Revisit the board weekly and demote deliberately, because stale High cards train everyone to ignore the column.
Common questions
How should I use a priority Kanban board?
Capture untriaged work in Backlog, move it into High, Medium, or Low Priority, and move completed work to Done.
Is the priority board free?
Yes. You can open it without signing up and keep up to three boards free.
Can tasks change priority?
Yes. Drag a card between priority columns whenever urgency or impact changes.