During the last few weeks, my requirements for managing my personal to-dos changed, and my system wasn’t able to serve me anymore. I tried several apps, but nothing worked, and I started toying with the idea of building my own.

I was indeed about to shave a big, fat yak. Luckily, the least exciting of all project management apps, the one that makes people wrongly believe they’re agile, came to the rescue.

Here’s how it happened.

 

I wanted to track how many tasks I was completing

I’ve recently begun treating my ADHD, and I’m suddenly in need of indicators. I want to measure how well my executive function is doing so that my doctor and I can tweak the treatment appropriately.

To track my habits, I’m using Beeminder. Despite its peculiar UI, Beeminder’s dashboard lets me see where I need to push harder and plan accordingly. I’ve used it on-and-off in the last few years, but something has clicked recently, and I’m loving it.

Yet, there was a crucial habit I couldn’t easily track in Beeminder: that of regularly checking off items from my to-do lists.

 

I also wanted a personal kanban to help me focus

I tend to start many things and to finish few of them, and something resonated with me when Oliver Burkeman discussed personal kanbans in his Four Thousand Weeks. He recommends having a simple board with three columns:

1. One dedicated to the things you’re not doing. Most of them you will never get to do, and you’d better accept this fact of life.
2. Another one for the things you’re currently doing. Only one card at a time—two if you also include work stuff—may be placed here.
3. A last one for the things you’ve done, which, of course, you want to be as crowded as possible.

That is, you can’t start something unless you finish something else and make room in the “Doing” column.

Note that you don’t need a board to implement this system. Three lists, each representing a column, may also work fine—at least in principle.

 

I tried to keep using Things

Cultured Code’s Things is a beautiful piece of software. Its conceptual model is the best of all the to-do apps I’ve tried. To sum it up:

1. There are to-dos, areas (“of responsibility”), and projects.
2. Projects can belong to areas.
3. To-dos can stand alone or belong to projects or areas.

Sadly, two limitations prevented me from using it as a personal kanban:

1. I could see what I could do, and I could see what I had done, but I couldn’t see what I was doing. It sounds silly, but I wanted to see at a glance whatever I was supposed to be doing, lest I tackle a new thing before completing it. (Tags may have clumsily helped here.)
2. I couldn’t easily sync my progress to Beeminder. Yes, there’s AppleScript, there’s a URL scheme, and there must be a SQLite file somewhere. Thanks, but no, thanks.

Switching to-do apps is a clear symptom of procrastination, but I decided to start looking around. I needed an app with an API, and I needed a UI that actually looks like a kanban board.

 

Todoist’s boards didn’t express status

Todoist, a web-based clone of Things with an API and board views, seemed to fulfill my requirements.

Though it lacked areas, I could have replicated them with tags or even projects.

But I could not work around the fact that the to-do status—done or not done—is orthogonal to the position on the board. Even if you move something to the “Done” column, the task isn’t done as far as Todoist is concerned, and you need to check it off. I wanted the board columns to have meaning.

In addition, the “Today” and “Upcoming” tabs have their own predefined, date-based board columns, which I found confusing.

 

Trello did help me do more things

Trello looked super-dated, and Atlassian acquired it in 2017, which didn’t feel like a good presage. I always thought that Jira, Atlassian’s flagship product, was an over-bloated piece of software, one that, alas, all the companies I’ve worked for insist on using.

I put those thoughts aside and created a new account.

After setting up a “Personal Kanban” board and linking my account with Beeminder—it has a ready-to-go integration—I used it for about a week.

To my surprise, it worked well! I had to enforce the two-card limit in the “Doing” column myself, but otherwise I began to experience two advantages of a kanban board view:

1. The “Doing” column made it obvious what I was supposed to be focusing on at the moment.
2. The card limit in the “Doing” column encouraged me to make tasks as small as possible, so I could keep one of the slots free.
3. I could see the “Done” column growing longer all the time, which motivated me to do more.

Trello, as a personal kanban, was indeed helping me do more things.

 

But “doing more things” wasn’t enough

I set up Beeminder to track the number of cards in my “Done” column. Then I realized this number didn’t mean a lot to me.

First, when the “Not doing” column started accumulating cards, my system made it difficult to prioritize them. Trello’s “labels” are just colors, and you must keep the semantics in your brain. In addition, assigning them by opening a modal or by using Vim-esque shortcuts is tedious.

Second, some areas of my life were overrepresented in the “Done” column, while others were totally absent. My system wasn’t tracking balance at all. Trello would let me create multiple boards, and I could assign each to a separate Beeminder goal; there was no way to have a cross-project board.

Trello wasn’t a good fit after all.

 

Amazing Marvin wasn’t that amazing

Some people recommended Amazing Marvin. It has an API, and it promises to be malleable enough to fit any workflow.

To me, it felt more like a disjointed set of apps than as an app, and I didn’t have the patience to fiddle with it. The annoying Clippy-style mascot dancing around every time I checked off a to-do, because science, pissed me off.

 

Shaving the yak

Yak-shaving impulses had been latent all the time, but they ran amok at that point. No piece of software was going to ever fulfill my specific requirements, and I had a new mission and no other option: I had to create my own personal kanban app.

“I shouldn’t waste a lot of time, so let’s use familiar technology, such as Rails and Stimulus. Look what I did in a few hours, I’m a genius! But oh, no, I made a mistake when modeling, I should have used delegated types there. Damn, this wouldn’t have happened had I used Datomic. It’s a pity I’m so new to Clojure… But wait, why not use this project to practice Clojure and Datomic? It’s a win-win, I get organized and turn into a great Clojure programmer! And what shall I use for the front-end? Reagent and re-frame? No, no, I’m an SSR person and this goes against my principles. I’ll go with UIx… Oh, wait, Roman Liutikov is not at Pitch anymore—will Pitch still support it? And now that I think of it, didn’t Ryan Florence show off a Trello clone he did with Remix? I never used Remix, but I always wanted to, so that’s it—Remix for the front-end and a Datomic Ion for the back-end! Let’s get to it!”

You know.

 

And he saw Jira, that it was good

As I was already figuring out how to deploy my yet-to-be-written masterpiece, something came to mind: Jira.

Yes, Jira. The same Jira I despised the most. My whole identity is based on hating Jira. But, no, it can’t be possible. Using Jira for my personal tasks and for my personal projects?

Then I started seeing that it checked many boxes:

1. It has an API and a query language that lets me fetch exactly what I want.
2. It is malleable enough to fit my “personal kanban” requirements.
3. You can create cross-project boards and see all your work at once.
4. You can limit the amount of work in a certain column.
5. Since my day job uses Jira (of course), I can also track my progress at work.

I quickly built a CLI tool (in Clojure!) that lets me map the number of issues that fulfill a certain Jira Query Language (JQL) predicate to a Beeminder goal and tried it out.

The integration is simple. It does all I want for now, and JQL will let me track whatever I want and put it wherever I want as my requirements evolve.

And it’s working great. I’m doing more things across all areas, and I feel less overwhelmed.

Jira is still ugly (though a bit less than a few years ago), slow, over-bloated.

But it has saved me from spending the rest of my life creating The Best Personal Kanban App, Try It For Free, No Credit Card Required, and let me instead do really valuable things, like writing this post.