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Kanban Kit
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Posted by Paul Korm
May 6, 2015 at 03:23 PM
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 ;-)
Posted by Ken
May 6, 2015 at 03:30 PM
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
Posted by Dr Andus
May 6, 2015 at 04:05 PM
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.
Posted by Hugh
May 6, 2015 at 04:39 PM
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.
Posted by Hugh
May 6, 2015 at 04:41 PM
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?