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- a tactical view of my to-do list in OmniFocus;
- a visual representation of my workflow in Omniboard; and
- independent high-level strategic kanban boards operating separately in Trello.
Personal Kanban
What is Kanban?
Traditional Kanban boards are used in manufacturing and other production environments to help visualise the flow of work and bring to attention any potential backlogs or other issues that might impact upon efficiency or productivity. When I travelled to Japan a few years ago as part of a study tour on lean manufacturing, I witnessed all sorts of kanban boards in operation to help provide factories with necessary production information.The essential premise of a kanban board is to demonstrate the flow of work along the value chain of production. At the fundamental level, the kanban board starts with a column for ‘work to be done’, then one for ‘work in progress’, before the work task exits the value chain as ‘completed’ work. Visually, a simple kanban board will have these elements drawn as columns on a whiteboard with a series of sticky notes representative of each element of work. As the work progresses, the sticky note is physically moved along the kanban board.
Kanban boards can be used more broadly than in just manufacturing environments. More recently, software development has adopted many of the processes and tools of lean manufacturing, including kanban boards, in the design and implementation of agile, scrum and other team-based development methodologies.
Personal Kanban
I have an interest in kanban at a more atomic level - that is, how can the use of kanban boards help an individual to understand and visualise their own personal workflow. For knowledge work, understanding where somebody is at with work projects and having a grasp as to whether the situation is under control, or at risk, can be hard.I’ve recently been reviewing my own productivity management system to see if I can better implement personal kanban myself, to help me understand just how much work I have at any one time, and how my own ‘backlog’ is looking.
My Technical Implementation
I previously wrote about OmniFocus and how that brilliant application keeps me on track. Into that I have now created some kanban contexts, and tied these to a kanban perspective.[caption id=“attachment_52” align=“alignnone” width=“214”]
My OmniFocus kanban contexts[/caption]
This helps me work on my task list by seeing my backlog of items, seeing what is currently active, and being able to work on them to completion.
While OmniFocus is excellent, one of its key weaknesses is reporting and data presentation. It helps manage work brilliantly, but it doesn’t do so well at providing context. Not a management report is to be seen, other than being able to create any combination of list.
To help with visualisation, I’ve had to turn elsewhere. I have recently revised a few Trello boards that I use to help visualise my workflow, simplifying the board design and ensuring there was a very clear ‘left to right’ flow. In the process of updating Trello, I investigated a few other online kanban boards (namely Kanban Tool and LeanKit) to ensure there wasn’t a better option for me, but the best experience remains Trello.
My final step was to really nerd out by leveraging the hard work of Jan-Yves Ruzicka who has built a Ruby library called Omniboard. If you have the capability to install Ruby, and the MacOS developer tools, Omniboard can create a fantastic graphical presentation of your OmniFocus data. This is output as a single, stand-alone HTML file which can be saved to Dropbox and thereby made accessible from any device at any location.
[caption id=“attachment_51” align=“alignnone” width=“1163”]
OmniFocus data presented in Omniboard[/caption]
To fully automate the process, my final task was to have Keyboard Maestro executes a shell command to update the Omniboard file on a regular basis. This ensures I have a regularly updated personal kanban board based on the activity and progress I have recorded in OmniFocus.
The Point Being?
The ultimate outcome of all this tinkering is that I now have:Budgeting and YNAB
I’ve always been a money tracker. I still have ledger books from when I was 14 years old, with my handwriting tracking my money in and out. I would reconcile it to my bank savings account with little ticks.
I think I learned this habit watching my Mom as she would carefully manage the family finances at the kitchen table.1 There was never enough money to go around (not that I was aware of that at the time), so much of my Mom’s job was timing cheque payments, deferring bills, and calculating how much, if any, might be left over for the week. Such was life for a divorced mother of four living on not much more than a pension and without any support from her former husband and father of the aforementioned children.2
As I grew and got my first part-time job, my money-tracking ways continued. Each week I would record my income, and understand how much money I had available to get me through to the next week.
I got a bit older, graduated university and got a real job. By this point I had graduated to electronic money tracking. For a short while I used Microsoft Money, before settling on Quicken and using it for years. Each year, they would release a mediocre upgrade and I would pay the license fee to keep using it. Year after year that software got worse.
I got married and we took a traditional approach to finance by merging our money. What was mine was hers, and what was hers was mine. Fortunately, my money tracking addiction could continue since while my wife is financially aware, she didn’t have a compelling urge to record and reconcile the way I did!
Eventually Quicken became so terrible that I couldn’t bring myself to pay for it anymore. This was a dark time. There was no compelling software to adopt so I rolled my own Excel spreadsheet and used that. This was probably the first time since my ledger books that I wasn’t recording transactions. Instead, I tried to take a high-level approach by using a budgeting/forecasting model. It felt like it was working at the time but in hindsight we fell into a bit of a financial hole without realising it. We were relying on future income to cover past expenditure - what is referred to as ‘riding the credit card float’.
About 3 years ago, I realised that my carefully managed spreadsheet was busy work that was actually not helping us meet our goals. I did another software review and this time I found the application that changed everything: YNAB (short for You Need a Budget). YNAB took me back to my roots. It required transaction monitoring and was backed by a ledger that needed to be reconciled. But the magic trick of YNAB is that first and foremost, it is a budgeting system. As much as I had tracked money for all those years, and generated my income and expenditure reports, it was always backwards looking. I was auditing what had already happened, but not making commitments about what my money should do in the future. YNAB completely changed my perspective on personal finance management.
YNAB is all about giving jobs to the money you have on hand right now. You budget that available cash down to zero, then stop. You don’t live on the credit card float. You don’t plan to spend more than you have. You allocate the money to a series of planned expenditures, and then track progress against that. If you overspend you get immediate feedback and can adjust your budget through reallocation - as YNAB says, you ‘roll with the punches’.
While this seems like short-term budgeting, it actually facilitates long-term goal realisation. You suddenly realise how finite your cash supply is, especially after accounting for those recurring bills and putting money aside for the big annual bills3. With the little amounts that are left over after setting money aside for the necessities, you can make some hard decisions about what you want to do with that discretionary cash.
Since using YNAB we have never been in a more solid financial position. We can pay all our bills as and when they fall due (even the big ones). We can save and invest for our family’s future. We can set aside money for fun.
The best thing of all, though, is that we do not fight about money. We have no nagging money stress between us. We share our income, we share our expenses, and we share our savings goals and spending intentions.
After having managed my money very carefully for almost 30 years, this is the best it’s ever been. I endorse YNAB wholeheartedly. Get it, use it, love it!
A Recent Customer Story
I recently worked with Asterisk Information Security on their Entrepreneurs' Programme Business Evaluation. Asterisk provide information security advice, services and infrastructure to other companies.
The owners are dedicated to their craft and are really working hard to grow and improve their company. Through the Business Evaluation process we dug deep into their business model and identified a number of ways to improve the business even further. What’s more, is the Entrepreneurs' Programme also provided them with $20,000 of government funding to help make their plans a reality.
Our work has been so successful that we wrote up a case study of our engagement with the business.
If you think your Australian firm would benefit from this free of charge service, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Fastmail
I was one of the first on the Gmail bandwagon. Back when the only way to get an account on the service was to receive an invitation code from somebody else already using it. I remember desperately asking around my networks, until I finally found somebody who was able to supply me with a code - I was in!
Having an @gmail.com address was a point of pride. You were a cool kid with a cool email address, and not one of those sad hotmailers, embarrassing yahooligans, or a joker advertising your local ISP. Using Gmail was also transformational. It was probably the first web app that was genuinely better than desktop software. It was fast, had quick keyboard shortcuts, huge storage (1Gb at launch!), and of course your email archive gained the power of Google search.
Times were good. Google kept adding features, making the service better. It added storage so you really could just archive email. But over time, Gmail began to acquire cruft. It became less efficient and it started to frustrate me. The tagging system impacted IMAP compatibility and caused annoyances syncing with local mail clients.
The most frustrating aspect for me was it’s half-hearted approach to supporting custom domain names. Early on, it seemed as though Gmail were onboard with people using custom domains. As time passed though, the business imperative took over and they shifted full custom domain support to their GSuite paid service. So my @andrewcanion email would generally reveal its true Gmail nature, which annoyed me.
A couple of months ago, I decided enough was enough. It was time for a change. I wanted to find an email service that supported custom domains, that would support proper IMAP, offer push email, that would respect my privacy and not sell advertising based on my email, and be a reliable and good service. All of this necessitates payment, and at this stage of my life, I’m okay with that.
After reviewing a few options, including GSuite, Office 365, Zoho and Rackspace, I ultimately chose Fastmail. Their service ticked all the boxes and offered one extra bonus - they are an Australian company. So I could buy local (albeit in US dollars).
So far, the service has been brilliant. Their web app is great, their documentation brilliant, and their customer service quick and accessible. It’s amazing how much better a service can be when you are a real, paying customer.
I’m at the point now where I actually want more email! I don’t think I’ve ever said that before.
If you are looking to upgrade your email experience, I highly commend Fastmail. If you use my referral code to sign up, you also get a discount. I am sure you will not be disappointed.
OmniFocus
I have a vision of myself without the support of OmniFocus. I’d be wandering around in a semi-permanent state of confusion, wondering what the heck I should be doing with my time and trying to keep all the ‘to-do’s’ of my life active and remembered in my brain. The stress of it all would be horrible!
Instead, I have OmniFocus. This application acts as my external brain, keeping all my various projects and tasks ordered, across all my areas of responsibility. It syncs across my Mac, iPhone and iPad so that I can know what I should (and can) do at any point in time. It keeps me on track with my work, bringing up tasks to do at the right time, and keeping them out of my sight when there’s nothing I can do to move the project forward.
I have been on the OmniFocus bandwagon for years, but I’ve been on the “Getting Things Done” bandwagon for even longer. I think I started using that way of managing my work in about 2003. Now, I can’t imagine working, living or thinking about my stuff to be done in any other way.
I have been an active user of OmniFocus since before it was OmniFocus, and was instead just a user-generated add-on for OmniOutliner. The app is just so fantastic to use. Of course, it does have it’s foibles, and the biggest problem is aligned with the biggest problem of GTD in general these days, which is ubiquitous context. When GTD was developed, you went to your office to handle paperwork, and your computer desk to ‘do email’. Smartphones hadn’t been invented and if you wanted to sync data, it probably involved a serial cable between your computer and your Palm Pilot.
This created physical barriers that prevented you from doing stuff, which the methodology termed context. (Un)fortunately, now we can pretty much do anything anywhere, rendering the concept of context almost obsolete. While people have tried to use other axes such as energy or mindset, there’s nothing as good as the essentially redundant physical context. OmniFocus, for better or worse, continues to cling to that context mode.
Nevertheless, that can be worked around, and it still offers a fantastic view of your life in task form. Look at what’s urgent, look at what you can do now, look at what you are waiting on to be able to progress - it can slice and dice your tasks in any way you need.
I couldn’t live without it. I don’t want to live without it. I don’t want to have to keep all my thoughts juggled in my head - that’s crazy! My brain is for value-adding, not remembering stuff!
The challenge of choice
Following on from my thoughts about Setapp, and now having all this extra software choice in my life, is that I now have to confront the challenge of choice.
For many, many, years I have been using OmniFocus to manage my life - keeping all my work and personal projects and tasks safe and sound. I was using OmniFocus before it was even an app - back when it was a series of OmniOutliner scripts put together by Ethan Schoonover to replicate this magical GTD (Getting Things Done) philosophy that had entered the world not all that long before. So I’ve got a long-term relationship with OmniFocus. I love it. But as with any relationships, there are hurdles and things that you really wish were different. I wish OmniFocus had graphical elements, like visual timelines and kanban boards. I wish it had better abilities as an information/document manager. I wish it would move away from the arcane view of ‘contexts’ which in this modern, connected, mobile world are not nearly as useful as they were in David Allen’s 2001 world where he could walk to the park and suddenly not be able to answer email.
So, Setapp has some alternative apps. One in particular, Pagico, looks nice. It has some interesting file management concepts. It has a visual timeline. Maybe I could get to like this? But, hang on, I have a decade of history with OmniFocus. The switching cost - not in dollars - but in time and effort is huge. OmniFocus has inertia, muscle memory and comfort in its favour. How can Pagico compete with that? So I’ve tried using Pagico, and it looks pretty on the surface. But underneath it feels a bit… brittle. The sync engine is weird and the mobile apps feel pretty terrible anyway. The interface seems slow. I am struggling to trust the app.
Maybe I should just stick with OmniFocus…
Okay, so let’s go with another choice. I’ve used Scrivener for many years and more recently have been using it heavily as the starting point for the report writing I have to do for my work, before it is transferred into a CMS or Word file. I like Scrivener, but it is big and heavy for what I need. So now, with Setapp, I have Ulysses. This is an app that I’ve followed but not ever felt compelled to buy since I had Scrivener already. Now, though, I can give it a chance.
So I have to learn a new app, remember to always write in Markdown, and then hope that I can easily get the text out of Ulysses in a format that I can use it in for its final form. Yes, Markdown is great but bureaucratic government systems don’t grok it, okay?
So I’ve got to deal with another app choice, and now potentially have my stuff spread across two different word processors. But, of course, I’ve built an ecosystem around Scrivener across macOS and iOS - but Setapp only gives me the macOS version of Ulysses.
The list goes on, and I guess this is capitalism at its finest. There is never the tool to use. Wherever a successful product is built, others quickly join the party. This is not something that is limited to software - this happens throughout the economy. Some of these apps are really good, and some come with their own idiosyncrasies. My challenge is to decide which of all the flawed products, speaks most to me. Which of these apps has been designed most in the way that my brain works, and which have flaws that least often affect me? This is the challenge of choice. I think I might just need to look on the bright side, and realise that this is all just grist for the mill of a software tinkerer, indulging his hobby.
Setapp
Tonight I installed Setapp on my Mac. This service provides a wide range of full version software in exchange for US$9.99 per month. There is no escape from software as a service, and I appreciate the challenge that software developers face trying to earn an income and support a living with the old “full version plus upgrades” pricing model.
A couple of the applications in the Setapp bundle I have been eyeing off for a while; some I have wanted but not enough to pay for; and some I’ve no use for. The only downside is that many of the ‘highlight’ apps I have previously bought independently, so I’m missing the good deal on those ones.
I admire MacPaw for having the idea and the temerity to build this kind of store, and to attract a wide range of developers into it. I wish everybody involved the best of luck. Apple’s own Mac App Store is a cesspit of garbage apps (and sandboxing restrictions) that has never really worked for me, or it seems, quality developers. Perhaps Setapp can be subscription software done right.
If you’d like to sign up to Setapp yourself and give this service a try, I’d be much obliged if you did so using my Setapp referral link. Thanks!
Back on the website wagon?
Many years ago I started a Movable Type blog when the web was young, and doing such things was hard.
Then a young upstart named Wordpress arrived, and I couldn’t resist its modern design and dynamic database structure. I transitioned, and spent hours monkeying with CSS to get things looking just right.
Then the web became social, and I gave up on blogs. The big shift was to micro-updates and photoblogs and pseudo-conversations through Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, respectively.
Gradually, the web became corporatised around these big brands.
Meanwhile, I was still loyal to reading blogs through RSS feeds and my Feedwrangler account (valé Google Reader). These blogs were where I got my web nutrition, not the vacuous Facebook shares and fleeting Twitter exchanges. Blogs belonged to people. They were hosted at personal domains and the work was their own. I used to be one of those people.
Time has moved on, and Movable Type and Wordpress are still out there, but I don’t have the time to invest like I used to, nor the interest to dig in, nor the will and desire to set up on a large-scale web host. So I am trialling a new approach. This time, using RapidWeaver and its very simple blog module. It seems too simple. It seems like I will find myself frustrated by its ‘simple’ approach. But that is probably all I need. I don’t intend to blog every day. I don’t even expect to have a readership.
This is just a hobby for me; a rekindling of something I used to do when I was younger, and when time was more available.
Let’s see how we go.