(I do my team-based stuff in Basecamp.) Because I don’t need it to collaborate, it doesn’t need to be a web service. But in this case, I’m looking to make something that only I’ll be tracking. Trello, monday, and Notion all look like they’re up to the job. So over the weekend I went down the rabbit hole of the current crop of Kanban-style apps. I tag all active projects in OmniFocus as an “Active Project” and then set a custom perspective to surface only active projects.īut I also know that I think visually, and the idea of a Kanban-style status board for my projects does have a certain appeal to me. Traditionally, I keep lists of active projects in a text file (currently in Obsidian). While it has nothing to do with email or collaboration, this got me thinking about how I’m managing my various projects when wearing my lawyer, podcaster, blogger, and field guide producer hats. He explained that as a college professor, he manages graduate students using a Trello-based Kanban board. One of the things Newport talks about in the book is finding alternatives to email for different kinds of work. I recently read Cal Newport’s A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. And ultimately, it is why I wanted a visual representation of all the active projects in my life on one screen at any time with just one swipe. It is also the reason I am constantly making diagrams, charts, and workflows in OmniGraffle to sort complex things out in my own head. That is the reason why if you ask me for directions, I will draw you a map instead of giving you directions. My brain works much better visually than words. The problem was that I was still letting things drop through the cracks. I have been using OmniFocus tags for project tracking for years and the doing the same with Obsidian since I first started using the app. You are correct.” It is more work, but it is very little extra work in the grand scheme of things. This means I’m duplicating effort setting up the Status Board and giving myself one more thing to keep updated and current as I work. So with a few key presses, I can put myself in perspectives or views that give me this data. Both OmniFocus and Obsidian have excellent tag support, and I’ve already implemented these same tags in them. Because all of my projects are already in OmniFocus and Obsidian, I could already have very effective lists showing projects that are active, on hold, on radar, and any other status using tags. Again, this board is not shared with my team, so collaboration is not necessary.Īnother frequent criticism was that this whole process is unnecessary. OmniGraffle’s advantage is how I can combine multiple Kanbans on one screen and my total control over how things look and where they are on the screen. You could also do this with any number of dedicated Kanban-style apps and services.
Omnigraffle pdf#
(I use OmniGraffle for legal- and MacSparky-related graphics.) You could build this as a PDF or even a Pages document. In my case, I already paid for a license, and the app was already on my computer. Several folks are interested in the idea of a status board but don’t want to pay for OmniGraffle. The trivial amount of time it takes to do this manually helps remind me of what the active projects are and where they stand. I’m going to set time aside to explore that further, but I’m not in a burning hurry. The Omni Group has some excellent new JavaScript-based automation tools that would let me automate OmniFocus and OmniGraffle’s process. This often prompts a “checking in” email to whomever I’m waiting on. I also check all the “waiting on” blocks to see if anything changed over the last few days. If the project changes status, I move the block. If I finished a project, I delete the block.
(Click to enlarge.)Īs part of my daily shutdown, I take the Status Board out of preview mode and make adjustments. To add a link in OmniGraffle, select an object and then select “Open a URL” in settings.
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