Tag Archives: Trello

A survey of the kanban tools I use

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In a previous post about distinguishing between tasks and projects, I made a brief mention of the different kanban tools I use with a promise to go into further depth. Here is the depth. This post is more about the tools I use and the context in which I use them as opposed to the specific design of the boards themselves.

Trello

Trello is the gold standard when it comes to kanban. It’s free to use (although I’ve paid for a business subscription in the past), has a useful mobile app, and focuses on being good at being a kanban board. Trello was the first kanban board I used and it became my default. I use it to track article ideas for this blog, plan meals, and track online orders.

I wouldn’t mind switching to another tool, just to have one less place to track work, but there are a few things that keep me around. The mobile app is the biggest. Trello’s mobile app works really well. It doesn’t have the full feature set of the web app, but it’s enough to be productive. I’m also a big fan of the calendar view. This helps me plan time-based work like blog posts and dinners. Combined with labels, the calendar view makes it really easy to see if I’m being too repetitive. I also like that Trello makes a visual distinction between complete and incomplete when displaying dates. Relatedly, the package tracking plugin is really nice, too. Plug in a tracking number and the estimated delivery date displays on the card as if it were a due date. The last feature that I love is the automation. I only use it on my writing board, but it comes in handy. I have a rule that when I set a due date on a card, it gets moved from “Ideas” to “Planned”. There’s another one that will mark a card as done when I move it to the “Scheduled” column.

Trello also has a good blog if you’re into that sort of thing.

Todoist

I switched to Todoist when I couldn’t put off migrating away from Wunderlist any longer. As the name implies, it’s primarily a todo list manager (and a darn good one at that), but it recently added support for kanban boards. To try it out, I converted my “laundry” category to a board. It works okay for that purpose.

The mobile app is great for the todo side, but the boards are a little buggy (although the same is true for the web app). Cards don’t always want to move to the column you’re trying to drag them to. But my biggest gripe is that there’s currently no way to cleanly handle recurring tasks. For example, my laundry board is broken out by load (e.g. whites, pants, towels), with tasks scheduled to recur every two weeks. When I mark a task done, I’d like the new incarnation to start in the “dirty” column. Ideally, moving a task to the “folded” column would automatically mark it done.

I’ve found myself using the board feature less and less with my laundry. The issues above combined with the fact that the state is readily apparent means it doesn’t have a lot of value. I like Todoist overall, so I wish I had more reason to use the board feature.

Taiga

I actually use two different Taiga instances: Fedora’s and the public instance. In the Fedora instance, I have a board where I track all of my work as Fedora Program Manager, as well as using it collaboratively with other teams. On the public instance, I’m currently only using it to track progress on my book.

Taiga is designed to be a full-featured project management tool, which gives it a leg up in some ways. User stories on the kanban board can have child tasks with their own state, which is helpful when i need to decompose work. It also has a module for epics, which is useful for aggregating larger work. As an example, I have a card for each chapter on my book board. When my editor gives me things to fix, I add those as tasks. Each of the milestones that the publisher has in their process is an epic.

There are two missing features that keep from moving to Taiga as my main kanban tool. The first is the lack of a calendar view. This would be particularly for the Fedora Magazine editorial board. The second is a sub-optimal (read: basically unusable) mobile experience. I don’t manipulate my boards on my phone a ton, but I do enough that it would be hellish. There are some third-party apps, but they can’t connect via Fedora’s authentication system, so they don’t help me.

I’d also like the ability to mark specific user stories as private, although I concede that doesn’t make a ton of sense in the context of what it’s intended for.

GitHub, GitLab, and Pagure

I combined these three because they’re basically the same to me: nice additions to issue tracking tools. I wouldn’t use either of them primarily as a kanban tool, but it comes in handy as a layer on the primary purpose. GitHub allows you to add both issues and non-issue cards to a board, which has resulted in a very confused me on several occasions. Pagure does not appear to have this problem. I’ve used GitLab’s board feature a little bit, but I don’t feel I’m familiar enough to comment on it.

Twitter’s public roadmap: I’ll believe it when I see it

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Full disclosure: I own a small number of shares in Twitter.

Trello is a very important tool in my workflow, so I read their blog for tips and news. I started reading a recent post by Leah Rider and everything was fine until I saw this:

As one of the most dialed-in companies to the pulse of the people, Twitter…

I’m sorry, what? Twitter is notoriously bad at knowing what people want, be they users (an edit button and less harassment), developers (the ability to develop apps), or investors (I’d settle for breaking even at this point). Twitter may be where the pulse of the people is expressed, but that doesn’t mean the company has a clue.

The post goes on to say

Through a simple public Trello board, Twitter is redefining their relationship with the developer community and setting a precedent for other platforms.

If Twitter wants to define a relationship with the developer community, they could start by having one. The only reason I maintain a Twitter client is because Twitter drove away the original developer. Twitter’s rise was due in part to the ecosystem of great (and not-so-great) third-party applications. Twitter was a platform that people could build off of.

That’s no longer the case. Many features are not available via the API. Polls and GIF searches are two that come right to mind. It takes more than a public Trello board to have a community. And the Trello board isn’t even impressive. It is publicly visible, but not editable. What’s worse, the last update was almost a month ago. The last activity before that was over two months ago.

So if Twitter is ready to develop a robust third-party app ecosystem again, that’s great. It can only benefit the platform. But you’ll forgive me if I wait to see some evidence before I believe it.

How I keep organized despite being an unorganized person

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I am not, by nature, a well-organized person. I’ve known people who are always on top of what they need to do and where things are. I can’t do that. And even though I generally do my best to make sure I meet my responsibilities on time, I’ve been known to let things languish too long by accident.

When my wife became pregnant with our second child, I was forced to adapt. Although the pregnancy ended with a healthy, full-term baby, it was a rough one for my dear wife. She was, much to her dismay, effectively confined to the couch for the better part of nine months (at least to the degree that one can remain stationary while parenting a two year old). This left me responsible for the bulk of the housework, in addition to working, grad school, and trying to be a husband and father.

Clearly, I needed to step up my organizational game. For a long time, I used TuDu to manage my todo list. It’s still, from a feature perspective, my favorite such tool, but the fact that mobile access required SSHing to my desktop was not the best user experience. I found Wunderlist and soon decided it was not only a great application, but also worth paying for.

Wunderlist soon became my crutch. Everything I had to do went into Wunderlist. With due dates, categories, and hashtag searches, I could easily see only what I needed to see. I knew the only way I would do things like clean the bathroom on a regular basis was if I had a gentle reminder, so I loaded up with recurring events. During a particularly hectic April (a major project at work had me working almost every night and weekend), I completely outsourced my days to Wunderlist. Whatever the list said, I did. I’m fortune that no one compromised my account,  because I’m not sure I would have paused to consider a “give me all your money” task.

Wunderlist, and more importantly my regular and dedicated use of it, has helped my organization tremendously. Gone are the days of accidentally forgetting to pay a bill because it wasn’t due at the same time as the rest (yes, yes, autopay. I only do that for bills that are semi-regular.) Despite being a one man show, the house is probably cleaner than it was with both of us able to contribute simply because things were regular and scheduled.

Another tool that I’ve fallen in love with, though I haven’t yet started making full use of is Trello. I was introduced to Trello at work. It’s what we use to track development work and large projects. I recently took my list of blog post it was out of Wunderlist and put them into Trello. Now I can have various posts in a variety of states and see at a glance where they are. I’ve introduced it to a community blog I contribute to and to a local free/open source software group I’m a part of.

Of course, I still use TaskJuggler for some things, but it’s not necessarily well-suited for managing my entire life. If I were to attempt to put all of my personal and work projects into a single TaskJuggler project, my computer might explode.

The downside to having everything I need to do mapped out for me is that it’s all so damn visible. When I get sick or tired (as of this writing, I’m a little bit of both), this wall of todo can be incredibly overwhelming. But I am disorganized and lazy by default,  so the fact that I have tools available to help me overcome these traits is generally a life-improver. Now if only there were an app that would clean my office for me…