I've been using [obsidian](https://obsidian.md/)'s [canvas](https://obsidian.md/canvas?trk=public_post-text) feature as a sort-of multi-dimensional [kanban board](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_board) plus calendar and goal timeline and it works amazingly well. It seems like its really important to have the right representation for these sorts of things, and this works really well as a representation for me. I highly recommend checking it out
@jmacc I still can't really find an use case for canvas here. Maybe you could share some screenshots on how you've used yours? I do use Dataview heavily.
@trinsec Yeah, definitely! Heres an image with a diagram of my anonymized main workflow and tasking canvas. Sorry its cluttered
I really like having a representation of what I'm going to do laid out in time, but most tasks take an indeterminate amount of time to complete, and I also want to limit as much as I can the amount of choice I have when adding and doing tasks, so I evolved away from the calendar-like canvas I used originally. Now, on a single canvas, I use a week-scale timeline of tasks that have definite start and end times, a logarithmic timeline of goals I want to achieve, and I use a sort-of kanban-like card system for most tasks
Since I can't automate the movement of cards (yet), I want to limit the amount of habitual updates I have to make each day, so, for example, the week timeline has a fixed order, and I just cycle an image of an arrow around to indicate what to look at. A note: you can't independently scale the size of markdown cards, but you can scale the size of image cards as much as you want, so images are a good way to indicate where things are when you're zoomed out. Along that same line, group headers are always visible, and scale up when you zoom out, so they can also be used similarly (though the headers can overlap with stuff, whereas images can't)
The kanban-like system takes the form of an ordered list of (fifo) queues which each individually are split into a top and bottom section, the tasks at the top I do whenever the arrow gets to that queue, the tasks at the bottom I can optionally add to the top to do when I come back around, but I have to keep the order they're in. I always try to add things to the very bottom of whichever (top / bottom) part of a queue, to minimize the amount of choice I have in which order things are added. I don't really want to introduce bias into which tasks I'm doing, though the length of tasks obviously introduces bias into how long I spend doing certain tasks. I'm betting there is an optimal queueing ordering algorithm given you know the distribution of task lengths, or similar
@trinsec Yeah, definitely! Heres an image with a diagram of my anonymized main workflow and tasking canvas. Sorry its cluttered
I really like having a representation of what I'm going to do laid out in time, but most tasks take an indeterminate amount of time to complete, and I also want to limit as much as I can the amount of choice I have when adding and doing tasks, so I evolved away from the calendar-like canvas I used originally. Now, on a single canvas, I use a week-scale timeline of tasks that have definite start and end times, a logarithmic timeline of goals I want to achieve, and I use a sort-of kanban-like card system for most tasks
Since I can't automate the movement of cards (yet), I want to limit the amount of habitual updates I have to make each day, so, for example, the week timeline has a fixed order, and I just cycle an image of an arrow around to indicate what to look at. A note: you can't independently scale the size of markdown cards, but you can scale the size of image cards as much as you want, so images are a good way to indicate where things are when you're zoomed out. Along that same line, group headers are always visible, and scale up when you zoom out, so they can also be used similarly (though the headers can overlap with stuff, whereas images can't)
The kanban-like system takes the form of an ordered list of (fifo) queues which each individually are split into a top and bottom section, the tasks at the top I do whenever the arrow gets to that queue, the tasks at the bottom I can optionally add to the top to do when I come back around, but I have to keep the order they're in. I always try to add things to the very bottom of whichever (top / bottom) part of a queue, to minimize the amount of choice I have in which order things are added. I don't really want to introduce bias into which tasks I'm doing, though the length of tasks obviously introduces bias into how long I spend doing certain tasks. I'm betting there is an optimal queueing ordering algorithm given you know the distribution of task lengths, or similar