When I was introduced to kanban in university, we used Trello.
It was, all things considered, very nice.
While even back then and to this day I hold that most of Agile/XP/SCRUM is snake-oil,
kanban is one of the few practical things they preach.
As a result its not surprising that a felt the same seethe -tho perhaps a only tiny fraction of it-
that Stallman felt, when I learned there is no proper FLOSS implementation.
However, this is no longer the case, but I need to go on a tangent to explain why.
When I started out coding, one of my first projects was a todo manager.
I'm sure you know the drill:
add tasks, complete tasks, fix typo, delete task regarding your high school crush, so on.
It is simple CRUDware trying to help you be productive.
This appears to be a common paradigm, as there are 9'500 results
to the expression "todo manager" on Github (as of 2025 december).
Now, I presume lots of people have learned lots of things though these projects,
but they are useless on their own.
However, the reality that they are useless is quite non-trivial, which is precisely the point.
For anyone with a bit of 'tism (required for programming),
a todo manager sounds awesome at first.
> oh jolly, my life organized into a spreadsheet, its literally perfect!
However, this exclamation immediately faces us with the first hurdle:
how do you organize life into a spreadsheet?
The clue is in the name tho: *todo* manager.
You start with adding tasks.
Then subtasks creep in.
And Sub-subtasks.
Complete recursion.
With dependencies.
And Achievements.
And other types of arbitrary groups.
Fuck it, lets have tagging.
Et cetera, et cetera.
After one has chosen his preferred poisonous data structures,
he can start experimenting with its usage.
Quite quickly it becomes evident that it feels like shit.
All these command line options and/or in-command REPL commands
are so complex and long!
One might as well be writing SQL!
Its then that the idea of a friendly UI arises.
Most often, a TUI or a webapp follows.
The TUI of course still feels like shit,
because there is no mouse support
and the webapp feels like shit because its a webapp;
or some similar reason.
Finally,
with an extra 1'000 hour investment of Polonization,
the UI finally becomes silky smooth.
Now you can start thinking about why you are not using it.
As accurately pinpointed in Atomic Habits,
an act has to be easy and accessible to pick up as a habit.
Even if you are terminally glued to your used P50 Thinkpad laptop
ordered from a Germany man named Hans;
opening your *todo manager* anytime when literally anything happens,
is not convenient.
Lucky us, we live in a dystopia where each of us
has a Frankeinstein Radio Braincontrol Device in their pockets.
So, you have written Habitica, impressive, very nice,
but there is a final nail in the coffin,
also outlined by Atomic Habits.
Its not satisfying.
It is somewhat cool, I mean a press the purple button and line go up,
but I've just finished War And Peace; it doesn't feel very appropriate.
I did something rewarding and now I'm supposed to play accountant within
this program for a sound cue?
Wasn't the premise of this thing to help me be productive?
Because I sure as hell feel like I'm doing extra work.
This is a tangent to the tangent,
but the reason it doesn't feel motivating is the poor feedback.
Think of an achievement in a video game.
They are dopamine bombs, aren't they?
Kill 6'000'000 goblins?
Fuck yeah, I want to do that!
I click, the goblin collapses and line go up - the correlation is clear here for my lizard brain.
Similarly, after I did this for what must have been well over 4 years,
the thingy pops up and every neuron fires in my brain at the same femto-instant.
This experience is quite different from -again- playing accountant.
Mind you, it is possible to ease this;
have you ever opened a Rainbow Six Siege Alpha Pack?
At this point,
it should be quite clear that our *todo manager* was a bad idea.
Too many problems and too much work to make it entry-level usable.
It sounded good, but it doesn't work in practice.
Not until FEMA forcefully installs an Eyesight Television neurowired to my cerebral cortex anyways.
Here comes the secret tho, there *is* a solution:
Pen. and. Paper.
Data structures? Whatever your mind is capable of parsing.
User experience? Hand writing
(I don't want to get any angry emails from malding Amerikastanese,
it is not my fault that your education system is worthless).
Accessibility? Any paper.
Satisfyingness? Your firm grip on your pen as your hand slides across the paper,
creating an analog curve.
It also keeps you away from any illusion that this thing is your motivation and
not merely a projection of your soul.
There is a meaningful conclusion to this -believe it or not.
Namely, this is how using the wrong abstraction looks like.
We had an idea to make something easier,
but issue came up after issue.
The solution is not to force things,
but to look for a (simpler) alternative.
Let me return to the premise at last.
Bellow is the best possible software aided Kanban solution possible on this earth:
[kanban](kanban.png)
And it took approximately 1 minute to create.
Of course, this is not jeet proof.
However, have you considered that you are using the wrong abstraction?
