Swimlaned Kanbans in Obsidian

The Kanban plugin doesn’t support swimlanes natively, so here’s a workable hack.

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I had been thinking about how to create a model of all the projects, plans, and aspirations I have.

I looked at a few approaches, for example building a Canvas, and modeling a workflow or a framework there. I’m not proficient in Canvas, and there seem to be few repositories of good examples to build on (or steal).

I looked hard at Mermaid models and implemented the start of a Quadrant Chart, but it seemed unintegrated with other aspects of Obsidian. For example, I couldn’t style text or add footnotes in the Mermaid diagram. Show stopper.

Trying To Swimlane with Kanbans

I have a lot of experience with Kanban boards, so I thought about how I might concoct a swimlane Kanban, that would allow me to array all my activities in a 3x3 matrix. Here’s what that looks like:

The cards of the Kanban are the various projects I am involved in, and the hot zone is the top-most swimlane: high interest. The hottest is the upper right zone: high interest: developing, meaning projects I have already committed time to…