(2022-10-21) Boyd Kanbanibalization In Obsidian

Stowe Boyd: ‘Kanbanibalization’ in Obsidian. Originally posted 2022-10-21: Note that these ideas have progressed in the year since, and I will be moving the materials formerly on Medium back to Substack. Expect more to appear.

Ever since I adopted Obsidian, I’ve used Dataview as a unifying element of my workflow. In a nutshell, I’ve relied on this basic model, which I have called Taskidian in the recent past

I defined tasks in whatever Obsidian context I happened to be: in a daily note, in an interview file

I relied on various Taskidian-specific metadata to be able to find and filter tasks

I used the search box or the Dataview and custom queries plugins to subsequently search for specific tasks or groups of tasks

Over the last few months, I’ve started to use Kanban boards for work management, and I have shifted my thinking in a fundamental way

several of the cons of Taskidian meant that when looking at a dataview or a search result I was presented with a generated list of tasks that were 1/uneditable and 2/ unorderable

with the exception of clicking off tasks and clicking through to edit the source tasks in their respective files — you can’t manipulate Dataview and search results directly.

I’ve long favored the visual presentation of Kanban boards, so I took another run at their use, in place of increasing the metadata overhead of do:: fields.

The first list has a simple task, defined in the Kanban card directly. The card in the next list is complex, shown by the link symbols. This means the task is transcluded from another file.

The immediate benefits of this over a search or Dataview query are considerable.

The elements in a Kanban can be moved around by dragging and dropping, so I can denote a task as now instead of next easily, without having to edit the metadata in the source file.

But I discovered an even more interesting benefit: Kanban boards can be nested, to very good effect.

Kanban ‘Tree’ — The Work Futures Editorial Calendar as a Kanban

a kanban that includes another kanban as a card

Also, if some step in the Interview project, for example, turned out to be complex enough to warrant its own kanban, it could be created and nested in the Interview kanban.