Kanban is simple

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Kanban is simple and provides a clear arrangement which is used in several management tools including Odoo, Trello, Kanbanote and Droptas

From a visual point of view, kanban is reassuring since everything is visible. From a psychological point of view, this reassures the brain that nothing is hidden, there is, therefore, nothing to worry about.

I feel sure that David Allen would agree with this in terms of GTD where the approach is getting everything out of the mind and recorded. Having everything visible, helps the trusted system to be … trusted.

Kanban at the heart of the system

There are a couple of things to say around this diagram:
First, it represents the system I use to publish to this site – posts prepared in Evernote and then tagged ‘published’, our friends at postach.io then automatically convert an @Evernote stack into a website.
Second, there is a lot of ‘potential’ content. I find it very useful to use @Kanbanote to organise that content into tags

Kanbanote kanban

Trello kanban

Its @trello that helps me focus on the task at hand, not just blogging or writing content, but all personal and work tasks, both from the operational to the stratgic.

Odoo kanban is simple

And finally Odoo, where I manage my CRM, orders and direct order-related tasks:

You may have noticed by now the similarity – they all use the kanban principal, which I find clear, and clarity is important when there’s a lot to do.

Other presentations

Droptask kanban:
@droptask uses a kanban-like presentation and has a very good modelling interface

Excellent modelling interface in @droptask

Toodledo and Todoist

There are a couple of systems such as @toodledo and @todoist which do not use kanban which I have left behind, but they each have their own merits.
Toodledo notably because it is very well adapted to GTD and ‘forces’ you to look at the important tasks.

Although tasks cannot be ordered manually, Toodledo is well supported with add-ons and has some nice mobile apps especially DGT which has a nice way of linking tasks to goals.

Todoist is excellent in that sync is very reliable and fast and it quickly became my trusted system. However, I find the horizontal presentation of kanban more natural, rather than the downward presentation in todoist.

However, Todoist is very well suited to GTD because it includes the notion of the inbox and can quickly become your trusted system.

Conclusion

The choice of tool is yours, however, I recommend the kanban presentation. Remember that Kanban was the ‘original’ method of stock management used in Japanese factories which used visual markers to show the when items were lacking.

It is a simple ‘one after the other’ presentation which the brain can understand easily, at a glance.