Kanban boards and philosophy

[Jastiv]

So, I started getting an interest in the ideas of project management, hoping I could find something useful from the corporate world to apply to hobby projects. I read about the Kanban board. Basically, you take one or two tasks, focus on those until they are done, then do the next ones. I find it to not be much fun at all. For a while I didn't want to do anything because it was on my todo list, as if it putting it on the list made me not want to do it. Then, I started putting a lot of stuff on my list and crossing things off. For a while, I hated doing things so much, I had to cross them off before I did them, and then I was able to do things again.

Of course with only two developers on the project, a lot of the stuff just doesn't apply, but I'm always looking for motivation hacks. I feel that if motivation could be hacked, then the project could be in a better state.

[Julius]

Kanban is useful for teams, and don't read too much into the philosophy behind it. Basically is is just a nice way to sort a shared task list.

But if you are looking for contributors, then having a Kanban board can also make sense for a single person project. That way potential contributors can easily pick out some tasks that need help.

[anon666]

i use kanban to quickly codify things and to store some outline or just dump some data/ideas/links/info into comments, also for bugs and bug-fixes
i don't like how others sometimes try to put entire thing into a kanban board or a task it doesn't feel well and its hard to read or edit (even in Taiga)
i also use separate design documents for larger things/parts (stored in the doc directory in project root)
also (personal) offline wiki per-project (i use cherrytree) to describe lots of things there (stored in the doc dir)
some .txt files in the doc dir
some images in doc/pix
some files in doc/unsort
plus todo.txt in project root