Kanban boards are often a great way to improve your productivity or the whole output of a team of people. Recently I was looking for a very simple and lean way to keep track of tasks in the shape of a Kanban board within my browser and what I found was a Chrome extension called KanbanTab.
KanbanTab might be the leanest Kanban tool around
KanbanTab can be quickly installed through the Google Chrome Web Store, and it can run as your home tab as part of your browser. It’s very lightweight, which is both a pro and con. The advantage of running the app locally like this without passing data through a database is that everything works very fast, and you don’t rely on a cloud service. The con here is that it’s not that great when you work on multiple machines since it doesn’t synchronize tasks between the instances. You can do some basic backups and restoring them, but I wouldn’t say that’s a great workaround for the missing multi-device synchronization feature.
Related article: How to Turn Your Microsoft Planner into a Kanban Board
If you, however, focus on what the tool was made for, a swift means to store and manage information and tasks, it really does excel in comparison to other similar products like, for instance, Microsoft Planner, Asana, Trello, or other visual project management software. Of course, those have other advantages which might make them the right choice for other requirements. As soon as you want to work together with others or share your cards with anyone, you might find KanbanTab not to be a good match, but there are plenty of good use cases still.
KanbanTab has pros and cons but is worth checking out
So how does the KanbanTab work like? Since the app runs only in your browser, you won’t need to create an account or anything along those lines. You can create customized lanes, name them, and create cards within these lanes. You can then fill the cards with a title and any data which would be relevant for the card and drag and drop the card from one lane to another. A popular lane setup would be based on the Scrum methodology:
- Backlog
- To Do
- In Progress
- Testing
- Done
I also liked that I could easily copy and paste any data in the respective task cards in KanbanTab, to act as a slightly advanced clipboard that would just store information that I want to copy-paste elsewhere later on. Of course, this is often used in software development, but you can use this for any kind of task management and note-keeping really. For instance, I was trying it out for managing to keep track of various task streams that I need to tackle for TechAcute, and it had nothing to do with coordinating dev tasks in a team.
Thoughts from the creator of KanbanTab
When the developer Tomas Woksepp introduced his solution on Product Hunt, he shared some details about KanbanTab in a post, “Throughout the years of making, I’ve used various board tools to keep my tasks organized in a visually pleasing way. While these tools usually get the work done, they all have a few issues in common for me, like loading speed, overly complex features, integrations, and so on. KanbanTab is the ideal default tab to help you efficiently organize tasks and build the momentum to get things done! This tool is completely free with no ads and requires no registration. With its minimalist design, zero loading time, and versatile functions, KanbanTab is flexible for your every need whether you’re planning a side-project or personal errands.”
If you’re interested in learning more about Kanban for project management and other activities, you can also watch the explainer video below by OeLean.
YouTube: What is Kanban? An Introduction to Visual Kanban System, Learn Kanban in Less than 10 minutes
Photo credit: The feature image has been done by Bill Jelen. The screenshot in the body of the article has been taken by the author of the article.
