Notion Kanban Boards
Introduction
One very useful feature of project management is developing
a list of tasks that can be prioritised and assigned to different people in a
team. The ability to quickly see the status of these tasks can greatly increase
acceptance that the project is on track and can also boost morale in team
members as they can see tasks being completed.
All these features are available within Notion Kanban
boards.
Notion
Notion describes itself as
“the connected workspace where better, faster work happens.”
It’s a web-based documentation tool that allows you to take notes, create timelines, create Gannt charts, Kanban boards and more.
Figure 1 below shows a sample Kanban board for the PROM05 module on my MSc programme.
There are many different tools that provide Kanban boards
such as:
Most of these offer some sort of free offering as well as
paid options. The reason I have decided to use Kanban is because it provides
the functionality that I need for my research project, and is integrated
directly within Notion, which I use for note taking.
So, what is the functionality that I need from a Kanban
board?
Since my research project is predominantly being performed
by myself and not a team, I don’t need to have the ability to assign tasks to
other people and keep track of their work. Although Notion provides this functionality,
it’s easy to disable it. Each task in a Notion Kanban board has a set of
properties. The default properties are:
- Name
- Deadline
- Assign
- Status
Any of these properties can be hidden by accessing the board’s
properties.
Figure 2 - Kanban Board Item Properties
Adding new properties can be done by selecting the “New
Property” option. An example of this would be “Priority”. By adding this, the
filtering and sorting options allow the list of tasks to do to be easily sorted
with the most important at the top of the list.
In addition to each task having a set of properties, each
task has a notebook style page associated with it. That allows me to add notes
to any task and update them during the lifecycle of the item.
As can be seen in the properties, each task can have a
deadline assigned with it. This can either be set to a specific date, or to a
date range. The Kanban board can be viewed as a Timeline view which provides
quick access to see whether tasks or on time, delayed or ahead of schedule.
As well as the Timeline view, Notion also provides a Table view
allowing tasks to easily be edited and ordered as required.
Summary
In summary, the main reasons that I have chosen Notion to help me with my project management are
that:
- It fits into my workflow as I already use Notion for note taking.
- Its simple to use, yet powerful enough to provide project management tools for a single-user project.
- It can easily be customised to add additional fields to allow priority sorting and filtering.
- Notes and additional information can easily be attached to any task on the board.
References
Your connected workspace for wiki, docs & projects (no date) Notion. Available at: https://www.notion.so/ (Accessed: 11 September 2023).
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