Thread: Kanban style!
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Much of GTD makes good sense, but I've found the notion of contexts to be a pernicious distraction. It doesn't matter how cleverly I devise them, they always prove to be a waste of time. And because OmniFocus is built around contexts, I keep feeling that I'm wasting OF's horsepower.

I recently came across the "personal kanban" concept, and it rang all my bells. To me, this is a much better way of processing the day's work than contexts. Because I'm solidly invested in OF across a Mac, iPad and iPhone, I decided to see if I could bend OF to a kanban-style system.

Without going into a lengthy explanation, kanban is a system for visualising the work you have stacked up, and ensuring that you only have as much work as you can reasonably handle in front of you. The simplest system is to have three categories: backlog (for work to be done), doing (for work in progress), and done (a list of completed work for that warm inner glow of accomplishment).

I keep my backlog of projects in a folder euphemistically called "Later". Anything that has to be on my radar is in a folder called (even more euphemistically) "Shipping".

I use OF's contexts & perspectives to kanban-ise the work I have in Shipping.

Here's an early draft of the system.

The perspective "Hotspots" is to check for upcoming due dates and items I've flagged as a warning to myself:
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"Starting" is a scan for projects not yet in motion, but coming onto my radar:
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While reviewing the previous two perspectives, I mark tasks of importance with the contexts "today", "week" or "month", to give me a sense of where they are loaded into the system.
The "Kanban" perspective then shows me what's on my plate, and what's coming:
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"today" is what I'm committed to doing today. If I clean up these tasks, or something is stalled (and thereby given the "waiting" context), I can promote a task from "week".
"week" shows what I must do, or would like to do, over the next 5-7 days.
"month" tells me what's coming down the pipe. In a weekly review, I promote things out of "month" into "week".

So far, this simple system works very well for me. It accomplishes the two rules of personal kanban: visualise your work, and limit your work-in-progress.

OF isn't always well disposed to this sort of workflow, though. For instance, in 'month" or "week", I'd often like to have projects, rather than tasks. But if I assign either context to a project, the project will appear in the kanban perspective along with all its tasks, filling the view with unecessary crud.

I'm floating this concept to see whether others have suggestions to improve it within the confines of OF. I'm constantly surprised at how the OmniFocus hive mind comes up with new ways of doing things, and would appreciate its high-voltage input.

Last edited by bashosfrog; 2012-11-02 at 04:21 AM..