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💡 The Big Idea: Obsidian FINALLY Shipped a Kanban View for Bases. Here’s What You Need to Know.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been managing my creative projects in Obsidian using a couple of community plugins and a little bit of duct tape.

So when Obsidian 1.14 shipped a native Kanban layout for Bases last week to Catalyst supporters, I got real excited. I’ve wanted this view ever since Bases first shipped.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite what I was hoping for.

In this newsletter, I want to share an honest review of the new built-in Bases Kanban View.

But first, you may be wondering: what the heck is Kanban?

A Quick Kanban Overview

Kanban started on a factory floor. Back in the 1940s, Toyota started using physical cards that moved through the factory with the parts. When a card came back, it was the signal to make more — no meetings, no status reports, just a card that told you what the work needed. Software teams borrowed the idea decades later and turned it into the board we know today.

The word Kanban is Japanese for “signboard,” and fundamentally, that’s still the whole idea. Columns are the stages of the work. Cards are the work itself. You drag a card to the right as it progresses, and the board shows you where everything stands at a glance.

Two things separate a Kanban board from a to-do list. The first is that you limit how much sits in any one column, because it’s more important to ship one thing than work on five. The second is that the order inside a column represents the prioritized order of the work — the card at the top is the one you do next.

Getting Started With the Kanban View

Here’s how to set it up:

1. Add the view to an existing Base by selecting View → Add view → Kanban.
2. Choose the columns by clicking Sort → Group by and selecting the property you want (i.e. status)
3. Select the data you want displayed on the cards by clicking Properties and checking the boxes

Here’s what it looks like:

From here, you can just drag the cards to update the property you’re sorting by. And if you click on a card, you can open it to edit the contents of the note.

My Honest Review

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time because I thought it would be perfect for how I manage my creative projects.

Here’s what I like about it:

• It’s a view, not a file format. The old Kanban plugin required you to make a board inside of a separate Markdown file. This one is just a Bases view, which is more like a lens for looking at the files in your vault in a particular way. The advantage of this is that it’s always up to date and there’s nothing to edit or sync. This makes the whole board view much more useful IMHO.
• Dragging a card to a new column edits the property directly. This wasn’t the case with the old Kanban plugin, and I worked around this with another plugin called Kanban Status Updater, but it didn’t always update the property values. The new one just works, because the drag is the edit — a much better option if you need to make sure all the metadata in your vault is accurate.
• It’s native. This may not seem like a big deal, but it really is. It means there’s nothing to update when it comes to maintaining plugins, but it also means that everything works on both desktop and mobile.

But it’s not all puppies and rainbows. The Kanban View is brand new and is still a little rough around the edges. Here’s where I think it falls short:

• You can only group by one property. This is consistent with other Bases views, but if you’re used to managing complex projects with Kanban boards, you might be surprised by this limitation.
• Cards are notes, not tasks. Tasks or checkboxes inside of a note won’t show up since Bases requires every card to be a separate file. This is the big one for me, and has me rethinking what’s possible with my complex task management workflow. More to come on that 😉
• Column layouts aren’t saved. You can drag columns where you want them, but once a column is empty, it disappears. When you add it back, it gets added to the end, and you have to move it back into the right place.
• No manual sorting. Again, not a surprise for experienced Bases users. But if you’re going to do any sort of task or project management with this view, you might be surprised that you can’t drag cards to reorder them.
• Adding things to the Kanban view is weird. I created a base and applied a filter for the folder with my newsletters in it. So I thought that when I clicked the button to add a new note, it would place it in that folder so the file would show up on the board. Nope. It put it in the vault root, so it was essentially invisible.

The Bottom Line: A Good Start, But There’s Some Work to Do

Unfortunately, I don’t think the Bases View is quite where I need it for me to move my creative project management over just yet.

And it’s not the big philosophical stuff that’s holding me back. It’s the paper cuts. The column layout resetting, not being able to drag a card to the top of a column — those sound like nitpicks until you’re actually trying to work. A board I can’t order is just a status display, and I’ve already got a few of those.

Everything on that list is fixable, though, and I have no doubt it will keep getting better — it’s still in early access beta, after all. For now, my duct tape has to stay up a little longer.

If your projects already live as individual notes, you only need to group by one thing, and you don’t care what order the cards sit in, go set this up right now. But if you need to prioritize cards inside a column, or your tasks live as checkboxes inside notes, give it a couple of releases.

— Mike