Any Concept Can Be A Kanban Board

EtherPK now has Kanban boards. Any concept in your graph can have one, whether it's a page or a journal entry. A board lays out the tasks referenced under that concept as cards in lanes, with one lane for each state a task can be in. You don't set anything up first, because the board is built from the tasks you've already written in your notes. Moving a card edits the task in its note.

A Kanban board for a project, with one task open in the Task Detail below it

The board IS your notes

I didn't want boards that live somewhere apart from the notes. Tasks in EtherPK are ordinary markdown checklist items, like - [ ] Send the quote, written wherever the work comes up: a project page, a meeting note or today's journal. Their state is already in the text, in the checkbox and the state tags #D (doing) and #W (waiting). So the board's lanes are those states, and each card sits where its line puts it:

Lane The task's line
Open - [ ] Send the quote
Doing - [ ] #D Send the quote
Waiting - [ ] #W Send the quote
Done - [x] Send the quote
Cancelled - [x] #C Send the quote

Each lane is split into sections for P1, P2, P3 and No priority, from the task's priority tag. When you drag a card from Open to Doing, EtherPK adds #D to the task's line and changes nothing else. The board stores nothing of its own, so the board, the note, the Tasks view and your other devices always agree. On a local graph the move is an edit to a plain markdown file, so it shows up in git like any edit you type.

Any concept, not just projects

A board belongs to a concept, and in EtherPK a concept is any name in your graph: a page, a journal day, or a name you've linked but haven't written a page for yet. A task is about a concept when the concept is linked on the task's line, or on a bullet or heading above it. A task is also about the page it's on and the concepts in that page's name, so the tasks on [[Acme]] Website are about Acme too. So boards aren't limited to projects. For example:

  • A board for a person shows what you're waiting on them for and what you owe them, from every note that mentions them.
  • A board for a client, Acme, also picks up the tasks on [[Acme]] Website and on every other page named within Acme.
  • A board for a day shows the tasks in that day's journal entry.

Here is the board for a person, Sidney Jones. Its tasks come from three documents: the project page, Sidney's own page and the journal entry for a call.

A Kanban board for a person, gathering tasks from three documents

Working through a board

Clicking a card opens its task in the Task Detail, an editor below the board that shows the task's document with the task at the top and its notes underneath. The keyboard stays on the board, so the arrow keys keep moving between cards. Press Enter again to start typing at the end of the task's line, and Escape to go back to the board. Alt with an arrow key moves a card to the next lane or section, and Ctrl+Z undoes the board's last move.

Handing a card to an agent

Right-click a card and choose Copy task reference to copy the task with an address that finds it again, even after the note around it has changed. Paste it to an AI agent that's connected to your graph through the EtherPK MCP server, and it can read the task and its notes, move it along the board and add a note when the work is done.

Try it

To open a board, right-click a document's tab and choose Open Kanban board, or type /kanban in the editor. Boards need a desktop or a wide window. The Kanban boards documentation covers the rest, including exactly which tasks appear on a board.