‘Kanbanibalization’ in Obsidian

Moving from Search and Dataview to Kanban, all the way down

I have been experimenting with an evolution in how I manage my work in Obsidian. Ever since I adopted Obsidian, I’ve used Dataview as a unifying element of my workflow. In a nutshell, I’ve relied on this basic model, which I have called Taskidian in the recent past (see Taskidian [Unwonked]):

1. I define tasks in whatever Obsidian context I happen to be: in a daily note, in an interview file, in a meeting note, in an annotation of a webpage pulled into Obsidian by one external tool or another.
2. I rely on various Taskidian-specific metadata to be able to find and filter tasks.
3. I use the search box or the Dataview and custom queries plugins to subsequent search for specific tasks or groups of tasks.

Over the last few months, I’ve started to use Kanban boards for work management, and I have shifted my thinking in a fundamental way. In Taskidian 1.0, I could be very unstructured in where I created tasks because I heavily annotated them with metadata so searching for them later was relatively easy.

Now I qualify that claim is ‘relatively’, but several of the cons of Taskidian meant that when looking at a dataview or a search result I was presented with a generated list of tasks that were 1/uneditable and 2/ unorderable. So if I used Dataview to find, for example, all the tasks associated with a subproject — denoted by [øø:: subproject] —…