The Kanban board that fills itself from your pins

The Kanban board that fills itself from your pins

Every site has a snag list, and on most sites it lives in a spreadsheet that someone is quietly losing the will to maintain. It’s accurate the day it’s made and drifts out of date by the hour, because every change has to be typed in by hand. The board in your head — what’s open, what’s moving, what’s done — never quite matches the document. The gap between the two is where things slip.

This is a deep dive on a different model: a construction Kanban board that you never fill in, because it fills itself from the pins you’re already dropping on the plan.

The snag spreadsheet problem

A hand-maintained snag list has one fatal flaw: it’s only ever as current as the last time someone remembered to update it. On a busy job, “remembered to update it” is rarely. So the list says fourteen open items when six are fixed, or misses three that were flagged on site and never typed up. Everyone downstream trusts it anyway. The document isn’t the work; it’s a tired snapshot of the work, and the two quietly diverge.

Assign a pin, and it’s on the board

PinMy starts from the other end. You’re on site, you tap the plan, drop a pin, add a voice note or photo, and assign it to a person. That’s the whole action — and the moment you assign it, the pin appears on the Kanban board automatically. You didn’t open a board. You didn’t copy anything across. Assigning is adding it to the board. This is the same capture-and-assign flow as turning a voice note into an assigned task, seen from the board’s side.

Three columns that mirror reality

The board has the three states work actually moves through: To-do, In Progress, Done. As people pick items up and finish them, the cards move across — and because each card is a real pin on the plan, the board isn’t an abstraction of the work, it is the work, viewed as a list. Site task tracking stops being a parallel document you reconcile and becomes a window onto what’s genuinely happening.

The board is the live state, not a copy

This is the core idea worth slowing down on: the board is the live state of your pins, not a copy of them. Move a card, and the pin’s status changes. Resolve a pin on the plan, and it leaves the board’s active flow and dims on the drawing. There’s no syncing step because there’s nothing to sync — the pin and its card are the same thing seen two ways. That’s what a hand-updated spreadsheet can never be: current by default.

Your punch list builds itself

Because every assigned pin is already a card, your punch list board assembles as you work. Walk a floor, drop ten pins, assign them, and you’ve got a punch list — located, owned, time-stamped — without a single minute spent “writing up the list.” It’s an automatic snag list in the most literal sense: the act of flagging things on site is the act of building the list. The ones that need a formal document flow straight into a shareable defect report.

Everyone sees the same board

A spreadsheet on one laptop is one person’s view. A board built from shared pins is everyone’s. The foreman, the subcontractor, the supervisor — they’re all looking at the same live state, so the meeting after the walk isn’t a read-out of a stale list; it’s a glance at what’s actually open and who has it. Fewer “is this still a thing?” conversations, fewer items that fall between two inboxes.

Where a board is the wrong tool

Honesty matters: a Kanban board is great for status of located work, not for everything. It isn’t a Gantt chart or a programme — it won’t show you critical paths, durations or dependencies, and it isn’t trying to. If you need scheduling, that lives in your planning tool. The board’s job is narrower and more immediate: what’s open on this site right now, where, and who owns it.

FAQ

How does the Kanban board fill itself? When you assign a pin on the plan, it appears on the board automatically — assigning is what adds it. The board is the live state of your pins, so you never maintain it as a separate document.

Is this an automatic snag list? Effectively yes. Every assigned pin is a card, so flagging items on site builds the punch list as you go — located, owned and time-stamped — without a write-up step.

Does it replace project scheduling? No. It tracks the status of located work (To-do / In Progress / Done), not durations, dependencies or critical paths. Scheduling stays in your planning tool.

What PinMy is NOT

PinMy’s board isn’t a scheduling or programme tool — no Gantt, no critical path, no resource planning — and it won’t replace your project-management suite. With 3D models, a pin marks a point in space — a dated snapshot — not a model element, and it doesn’t read element data. The web PDF report is useful but still maturing. What PinMy does well is make task status a by-product of capture: assign a pin, and the board is already current.

Let your board fill itself

Drop and assign a few pins on your next walk, and watch the punch list appear without writing one.

• See how it works: pinmy.co
• Book a 15-minute demo: tidycal.com/pinmy