I then move to my Kanban board layout – whether that is the three-column view or the top-down view, it doesn’t matter – and I select the one item that I want to start work on. I then activate the “Kanban: To Do” script and the selected tasks would be assigned the appropriate tag. Update: You will now see the “Kanban View” script above “Kanban: To Do”.Įvery day I go through my master list of potential tasks and select the ones I want to work on today. Otherwise, you can activate the script by going to Automation > Kanban: You might notice the icons look a little different in your version – that was because I realised at the time of creating this blogpost that my icons don’t show very well in dark mode, so I went and changed all the icons. You then find the little icons for the Kanban scripts and drag them up to the toolbar. 1 Right-click the toolbar and select “Customize Toolbar”.
I put the scripts in the OmniFocus toolbar for easy access. Update: If you run the “Kanban View” script, it will automatically create all the tags required. There is just one thing you need to do before using the scripts – and you don’t even need to do it if you don’t care about keeping your OmniFocus tags neat – create the tag “Kanban” and create the following sub-tags (you would want them in this order): omnifocusjs file and follow the OmniFocus prompts.
Unzip it before trying to install it.įor more information on how to install OmniFocus automation plug-ins, please visit the Omni Automation website.
You can download the OmniFocus plug-in here. I chose to create a plug-in bundle instead of standalone files because the bundle allows me to include icons that would show up in the toolbar if you were to add the script up there. I’ve put all six scripts into one OmniFocus Plug-In bundle. So I created a few automation scripts to remove unwanted Kanban tags and assign the correct one quickly. It was possible to edit the task tags manually, but the whole point was to make this as painless as possible (not to mention that to move a task from one column to another properly, you had to remove the tag of the previous column as well).
This might be the easiest way to implement the kanban view (if you don’t want to mess about with Keyboard Maestro).īut this was just the barest of what I need to make a viable Kanban board – you see, I needed a way to move tasks between the columns quickly. Activating this script will automatically take you into this Top-Down view. Update: There is now an additional script in the plug-in called “Kanban View”. The other option, of course, is to have the one instance of OmniFocus open and select just the Kanban tags I’m interested in seeing. However, I have replaced it with a “Waiting” column – sometimes, I need to pass tasks off to other people, and I need to keep track of what I’m waiting for.) (I’m not a programmer, so I don’t need the “Testing” column. It just required a little fiddling with Keyboard Maestro to create the three instances of OmniFocus and have them show the correct Perspective. One of the other suggestions was to create tags for the different Kanban columns and then open multiple instances of OmniFocus, each showing their respective “column” of tasks. And there were a few, most of them involving the capture of OmniFocus data and then creating a visual board using some script of another.Īlthough there were some interesting ideas, I didn’t want a board I couldn’t edit and that required me to jump back into OmniFocus to tick off my tasks. I searched online for solutions other people have come up with. I am happy with OmniFocus, and I wanted to see whether it was possible to implement a Kanban board with OmniFocus. In my work, I also get constantly interrupted by people asking me questions or handing me “one quick task” – so it’s always helpful to see what it was that I was working on before the interruption.īut as much as I like the Kanban board idea, I was not interested in trying another task manager (i.e.
I’m by no means a software developer, but I find the idea of selecting a subset of tasks to be done today and then further highlighting the one task that is currently in progress to be very helpful for a scatterbrain like me. I’ve recently been trying out Kanban boards for my personal use, both at home and at work.
Updated the article’s instructions accordingly.
Edit: Updated the plug-in to include Sal’s code for viewing the kanban tags (the top-down view) and for adding the kanban tags to OmniFocus if they don’t already exist.