Okay, so this isn't, strictly speaking, an outliner, but it's a neat information manager with outliner-like characteristics!

I've just discovered Kanban Kit (unfortunately Mac-only, I fear), which is a very nice, efficient implementation of the Kanban task/project management concept.

What makes it slightly unusual are a couple of extra features: subtasks, and due dates. Otherwise it follows the standard Kanban column-based arrangement, proceeding left to right from 'Todo' to 'Next' to 'In Progress' to 'Done'.

You can divide up tasks or projects using tags – gratifyingly, you can attach as many tags as you like to a single 'card'.

While Ulysses is still my go-to task manager, I was looking for something I could quickly slap stuff down on in a very visual way. Kanban Kit fits the bill!

More info at http://screenisland.com/kanban-kit/

Interesting. Looks just like Trello(https://trello.com/ Which is free, runs in the browser, and so is available on both Windows and Mac. It comes from the folks at Fogcreek Software, which is where Joel Spolsky of the famous Joel on Software holds court(http://www.joelonsoftware.com There is a big community of Trello users out there, and some of them have come up with some interesting ways to use Trello.

I signed up for an account in my search for organizational Nirvana. Since I have reverted to doing things with pens and paper, I haven't done much with it for a while.

Jim

I like the idea behind Personal Kanban: Doing one thing, and one thing only; and keep yourself reminded to to that.

For while, I added a Kanban "board" to my todo list in LibreOffice Calc. But that did not work for me. For me, the Kanban board must be constantly visible. And that's is the problem with Kanban boards on the PC/Mac: They are usually hidden behind the windows I am working in. I even thought about keeping a board on my iPad next to my monitors but keeping the iPad constantly on seems so ...

Franz

@jamesofford wrote

Since I have reverted to doing things with pens and paper, I haven’t done much with it for a while.

I've reverted to PostIt notes over and over -- especially for anything that I have to do right now, sitting right here. My computer's bezel is always littered with these.

Paul Korm wrote:

@jamesofford wrote
>I have reverted to doing things with pens and paper

I've reverted to PostIt notes over and over

Franz Grieser wrote:

For me, the Kanban board must be
constantly visible. And that's is the problem with Kanban boards on the
PC/Mac: They are usually hidden behind the windows I am working in.

There must be something in the air then... As in recent weeks I have also reverted to a physical A2 corkboard with coloured post-it notes and metal pins (so they don't fall off), exactly for the reasons Franz mentioned. The board needs to be visible at all times, so computer implementations are no good (unless you can reserve an entire monitor just for that permanently, and have it on permanently, which is a luxury).

I don't know whether what I'm doing is Kanban or not, as I just made it up by myself, but there are roughly three areas on the corkboard:

1. In the top left I pin the most important and urgent current big task (or mini project), followed by the most immediate and important ones next to it that will need to be tackled when the first one is done). Let's call this the priority queue (and columns, in the case of simultaneous due dates and tasks).

2. In the top right I have a cluster of post-it notes in chronological order (by deadlines) that I know I will definitely have to do in the foreseeable future (next 6 months roughly), but they are not imminent yet. It is helpful to display these as I can visualise what my workload looks like in the coming months. Moreover, they provide the supply of urgent and important tasks, and they will be gradually moved (inched) forward to the top left, when the time comes.

3. In the bottom right corner I keep a cluster of post-its that have been finished by me, but either they need to be followed up because I'm waiting for someone's response or action on them, or they are recurrent tasks and they will need to come back up to the top right and then to the top left when the time is right.

Post-it notes with tasks that get done forever get removed and destroyed.

I do use different colours and different sizes of post-it notes to emphasise importance of task and size of the effort needed.

I really enjoy the physicality of the experience, and there is great satisfaction when I get to remove a completed post-it note. And the visualisation of the workload (which forces me to make choices and also decide not to take on more projects until these get done) is a major bonus.

Any other approaches along these lines?

Dr. Andus wrote

any other approaches?

I frequently work in a comfortable chair with a Levenger Lap Desk and a laptop or iPad. The Lap Desk has a large surface to one side of the computer, and my personal "Kanban" of Post Its is arrayed there next to my laptop -- nice stacks by domain (work, personal, research) and a separate Post It with a list I make each day of the hot things to do right now. At the end of the day I get to crumple up that note and toss it in the bin. So much more enjoyable to crumple and banish the do list -- since I can't crumple and toss my computer ;-)

I admire Kanban as a tool, but it seems to have somewhat limited application in certain workflows, especially if you have large amounts of projects, tasks, subtasks and notes. Trello, for example, is a visually appealing piece of software, and it is handy for certain types of work, but I find it quite difficult to pull out critical tasks from a number of projects on a daily basis. Asana is better, but I guess that that I am finding myself in that middle ground of too many tasks for simple use of a program like Trello, and not enough tasks to be comfortable saying that these five out of several hundred tasks are key and need to be addressed ASAP. I frequently have a number of open tasks that are priority, and while I can only address one at a time, the list of them is just too much to display effectively on a screen. So, like many of us, I partially use a variety of task managers, and I supplement that with pads of paper, scraps of paper and post-it notes. This really is not ideal, but staring at a screen filled with tasks does not seem to help matters either, but unfortunately for me, tasks that are out of sight are out of mind. Very frustrating, and a work flow that has been hard to modify over the years as the amount of work as steadily increased.

--Ken

Ken wrote:

I admire Kanban as a tool, but it seems to have somewhat limited
application in certain workflows, especially if you have large amounts
of projects, tasks, subtasks and notes.

The answer to that might be not to use a single tool to try to manage all of them. There are benefits to separating out the projects from the major tasks and then the sub-tasks, if for nothing else, to be able to see them separately (and see both the forest and the trees).

E.g. I use the aforementioned corkboard with the post-its only for visualising the projects and large and critical tasks. Otherwise I track the major tasks in Google Calendar, and deal with the minutia of sub-tasks and to-dos in WorkFlowy. So each of those three tools deal with a different level of detail.

It's a lot easier to decide at a project level whether or not to do a project, then to get lost in a massive to-do list and then spend time doing things that maybe should have been left undone.

I too admire the Kanban system.

As I understand it, in its full flowering it is particularly designed for communication between and to members of a collaborative team. The board is almost all it is about. However, like Dr Andus I as a lone freelancer find it useful for larger projects, such as book-writing. Apart from any other benefits, I like to see "progress".

A curiosity, however, is that there is no application that I know of that offers "kanbanery" offline on the desktop, whilst there are at least a dozen free or subscription-based online offerings. (Always a risky thing to say, because there are probably exceptions, but I don't know of them. There was, when I last looked, Taskboard for the iPad.) You would at least think that some desktop task managers of the traditional sort would offer a kanban view, but no. The closest that I'm aware of is Firetask. Of course, there's always Excel (as there is for many things). There have also been interesting projects syncing data from Omnifocus with Curio in a kanban mode, and Trello, using AppleScript or other means, but they're not for the faint-hearted or time-poor like me.

Hugh wrote:

I too admire the Kanban system.

As I understand it, in its full flowering it is particularly designed
for communication between and to members of a collaborative team. The
board is almost all it is about. However, like Dr Andus I as a lone
freelancer find it useful for larger projects, such as book-writing.
Apart from any other benefits, I like to see "progress".

A curiosity, however, is that there is no application that I know of
that offers "kanbanery" offline on the desktop, whilst there are at
least a dozen free or subscription-based online offerings. (Always a
risky thing to say, because there are probably exceptions, but I don't
know of them. There was, when I last looked, Taskboard for the iPad.)
You would at least think that some desktop task managers of the
traditional sort would offer a kanban view, but no. The closest that I'm
aware of is Firetask. Of course, there's always Excel (as there is for
many things). There have also been interesting projects syncing data
from Omnifocus with Curio in a kanban mode, and Trello, using
AppleScript or other means, but they're not for the faint-hearted or
time-poor like me.

Ah, OK, Kanban Kit. But is it the only one?

Hugh wrote:

Ah, OK, Kanban Kit. But is it the only one?

On the Mac there are the usual suspects that can be bent to make a Kanban-style project management possible: Curio and Tinderbox.
Some months ago I searched for Kanban PMs on the Mac that did not store their data (MY data) somewhere in the cloud and came up empty-handed. While I do have something running in Tinderbox that is not completely terrible it is not something that is particularly advanced or satisfying. I like the visual feedback of urgency and achievement, but it is the data aspect that I am not completely happy with. Managing the data inside Tinderbox requires more Tbx skills than I happen to have and linking to the data outside adds another layer of complexity that can easily become overwhelming.
Is that feeling of not being quite there and as a consequence not trusting the system enough that leads to disuse and - ultimately - abandonment also CRIMPing?
I'll probably never get past that stage...
Prion

I agree that finding a single tool may not be possible nor wise. But I find myself often dipping into Mindscope on iOS about once a week. It offers a very customizable Kanban board that has the advantage of nested lists or further sub-boards. So that's an offline choice. A very clever bit of programming. I also like that it allows me to just drag the text around the screen, and even to draw relationships between things. So I can take several lines of text and arrange them in a circle (or pyramid, etc.), then fiddle with the order. I almost recommended it again to Dr Andus when he was talking about rapid fire brainstorming - but it's not online.

I've mentioned before that you can create a kanban-like board in XMind using the "Matrix" structure. This creates a kind of spreadsheet with each cell containing a mindmap node. Each node could be used as a kanban item moving along the horizontal track of a matrix row. Each node has the usual collapsible info of a mind map node.

It doesn't have explicit tagging but you can accomplish something similar using markers, labels and advanced filtering (I haven't used this function yet).

In addition, a single node inside a matrix cell can itself by a matrix with its own rows and columns.

If you're interested in seeing a different take on organizing info, I strongly recommend giving this feature a try. I've never liked mind maps but this version has really won me over.

Wayne

Curio & Kanban

If you look into Curio Forum at zengobi.com you'll find discussions of a very workable Kanban model made in Curio by @DRJJWMac -- one of Curio's maesters

Hugh wrote:

Ah, OK, Kanban Kit. But is it the only one?

There is something similar to kanban, Scrumdesk, which offers an installable version as well, but it doesn't come cheap http://www.scrumdesk.com/download/

There is actually a very good reason for most tools being on the web: they are mostly aimed at collaborative projects. Within such a context, in particular for distributed teams, physical boards are rather useless. By contrast, they may be very well suited for personal kanban.

I've been using Kanban Tool with my team for some months now, on a mission-critical application, and can recommend it. It's a Polish product, supported by very good knowledge of project management needs (and plenty of tips). I should probably add that over the years I've developed a lot of respect for Central and Eastern European software offerings.

Atlassian offer something similar for their JIRA product, I believe - also optimised for collaboration.

The nice developer of Kanban Kit is contemplating an iOS version as well. This would make up for the lack of the (very good) Taskboard on MacOS, in my view - I really enjoyed using Taskboard, but like Franz, couldn't see the sense in keeping my iPad permanently on!

Kanban Kit is gratifyingly lightweight (unlike e.g. Curio), and runs very nicely alongside my 'heavyweight' task management app, Ulysses.

I suppose you could create something like Kanban using OmniFocus Pro (the most expensive version, which is also the most customisable). But I fear it would take a lot of messing about! The value of Kanban, in my view, is simplicity.

Of course MindFocus can be used for Kanban, and thinking about it, Numbers could easily be used for Kanban too. But MindFocus hasn't appeared on MacOS yet, and Numbers, while excellent, is rather bulky. And then of course there's OneNote - also ideal for Kanban - or Outline+ (MacOS and iOS)... Gosh. What a lot of choice!

Dr Andus wrote:

The answer to that might be not to use a single tool to try to manage
all of them. There are benefits to separating out the projects from the
major tasks and then the sub-tasks, if for nothing else, to be able to
see them separately (and see both the forest and the trees).

This does seem to be the case, but unless I am being a bit nostalgic, or work flow and loads were less extreme, I seem to remember doing quite well with Ecco. Perhaps it was because I had been using it for years, and it was second nature with respect to inputting information/tasks as well as actually managing those tasks, but I found its integration and display options very much to my style. I guess it allowed me to clearly see both the forest and the trees.

--Ken

An addition, new to me, to the very limited field of desktop kanban apps: HyperPlan (http://www.hyperplan.com available on both Windows and the Mac - currently available for Mac users for the next few hours on MacUpDate for $20. (No time to test it yet due to the alternative attractions of Federer versus Djokovic at Wimbledon.)