Background: I make my living as a Certified Scrum Trainer - helping Teams use Scrum and Kanban to make their work more effective, engaging, fun etc. I’m not an expert in what works for individuals who’re not part of teams. I share this so you see where my comments are coming from:
I don’t understand the recent interest in Kanban from the Obsidian/OmniFocus/… world.
Kanban is a tool to help improve the flow of work through a group of people (aka a Team). In a team environment it helps make work visible, enforces WIP limit, challenges people to collaborate, is a source of data for improvement.
When applied to individual work this all just breaks down. Why do you need a board with ToDo/Doing/Done to achieve all of this?
I made some recent notes in a comment to a few others who have been talking about Kanban on their podcasts:
- Kanban is as much about mindset and discipline as it is about mechanics
- A Kanban board is only a trivial part of Kanban
- Just as important: Measure the System and Improve Experimentally
- Also Kanban tends to work best when there is a team and a large
enough volume of work to spot trends and patternsThis is a bit like what I see in professional work - where people take
Scrum - something to organize teams of 3-9 people (ideally 4-7) full
time and make it work with three part time team members. A good tool
misused gets strange results.Hope this helps you see a bit of why a Kanban board alone was never
going to be very useful. From what you described you might well
benefit from a couple of Agile tools
Story Mapping | Agile Pain Relief Consulting and
Impact Mapping | Agile Pain Relief Consulting - both of which
help gain a strategic overview of your work and its priorities.
Both Kanban and Scrum are fantastic tools in the bounds of their primary context, they tend to break when pulled far outside.