There's probably a tab on your laptop you haven't clicked in a month. It's a project board, and the top card says "Kick-off call — Tuesday." That Tuesday was in March.

The usual fix is a new tool. Asana, which sells one, runs an annual survey on how people spend their working day, and its 2023 edition found that coordination work, such as chasing updates and hunting for files, still took up 58% of the average day. If new software solved the problem, that number would have moved by now.

A board stays useful because someone looks after it. At Lento, that's my job. These are the habits that work for us. None of them cost anything, and the first one usually surprises people.

Rough concepts never go on our board. We create a card when the work is ready for its first review, and not before.

The thinking comes from Ethan Bernstein at Harvard Business School, who studied workers at one of the world's largest phone factories. When managers were watching, the workers followed the official process. As soon as the managers left, they switched back to their own methods, which were faster. Bernstein then had a curtain hung around one production line, and its output rose by 10 to 15%, partly because the workers could test improvements before anyone asked them to justify them.

Creative work behaves the same way. If a designer's rough routes sit on a board marked "40% done," the designer starts managing how the card looks. Early ideas change too quickly for a status column to describe them. When you want to know how something is going at that stage, a five-minute conversation will tell you more than any card.

When keeping the board tidy is everyone's job, nobody does it. Pick one person and give them 30 minutes in the calendar every week. I do mine on Monday mornings, before most of the team is in. Everything in the rest of this piece happens in that half hour.

If you lead the team, this part is your responsibility. You probably won't be the one doing the half hour, but you decide whether it exists. You're also the one who has to protect it when a deadline makes it look optional. I've seen what happens when the person who does this leaves and nobody takes over the slot: within a quarter, the board goes quiet again.

Executives shouldn't have to read a project board, and most of them won't. What they need is a short weekly note that answers three questions. Which projects are on track? Who is stretched? What needs a decision from them?

Ours goes out every Monday, straight after the half hour. Here's the shape of it:

A few rules keep it useful:

The note should take two minutes to read. If an executive wants more detail, the board is there. Writing the note also does a job for the owner: you can't mark a project on track without checking the board is telling the truth.

Last spring I opened our board to prepare a client update and found a project still marked In Progress. It had shipped three weeks earlier, and the client had already emailed to say thanks. Once people find a card like that, they stop trusting the rest of the board and go back to asking each other on Slack.

Now, if a card hasn't moved in two weeks, I either check with its owner or archive it.

We used to have a column called Waiting on Feedback. Over about a year, it became the busiest column on the board, because cards went in and never came out. Nobody owned the waiting.

When I deleted the column, every card in it had to be assigned to a named person, either whoever was chasing the feedback or whoever owed it. Most of those cards moved within the week.

Check your own board for columns like Waiting, On Hold or Blocked. They describe a situation rather than anyone's next step, which is why work settles there.

The question that wastes the most time in a brand team is "which version did we sign off?" On our board, the answer is always the file attached to the card. A link to an email thread doesn't count. We also reserve the word APPROVED for file names that have actually been approved. "brief FINAL v3 USE THIS ONE" no longer exists, and neither does its cousin, "brief FINAL v3 USE THIS ONE (2)."

Every extra place a file might live is another place someone has to look. A Harvard Business Review study of workers at three Fortune 500 companies counted roughly 1,200 switches between apps and websites a day. Getting their bearings after each switch cost them just under four hours a week. That's most of a Friday afternoon, every week.

Every Monday I post the same question in our team channel: what's happening that the board doesn't know about?

Whatever comes back either goes onto the board or shows me a step the board is missing. It takes a couple of minutes, and it's how I hear about early work without anyone having to make a card for it.

Run a quick test first. Ask someone on your team to find last week's approved brief. If it takes longer than a minute, a new tool probably won't help, because the same people will set it up with the same habits.

The easiest place to start is the tab that's open right now. Archive the card from March, and ask your team what the board doesn't know about.