Kanban Action Planner - column triage, focus mode, time tracking, and the end of the freeze
Canonical version: Kanban Action Planner - column triage, focus mode, time tracking, and the end of the freeze.
Five releases of the Kanban Action Planner landed today, from 1.18.0 to 1.19.2. Together they add up to one idea: less time managing the board, more time deciding and doing.
Column triage
Triage mode already existed for clarifying a whole backlog. Column triage brings that spirit to a single column: every column header now carries a small triage button that turns THAT column into a deck of cards you go through one at a time.
The card sits in the middle, the next ones peeking behind it. Under it, a tray shows every status of the card's own type as a color-dotted chip, plus a Keep button. Tall rails hug the edges of the pane, labelled with the previous and next status. Then you decide, however you like: swipe the card left or right, drag it onto a chip or a rail, press 1 to 9 to jump straight to a status, arrow keys for the carousel, ↓ or Space to keep. Each decision stamps the destination status onto the card like a passport stamp and the card flies off toward its new column. Reaching a done state gets you confetti (of course it does).
Two details I care about:
↑is undo. It steps back to the card you just decided and cancels that decision, including the file write. Triage should be fast, and fast means mistakes; mistakes need a one-key way back.- Decisions are optimistic. The next card is on screen the instant you decide; the write settles in the background, and a failed write puts the card back into the pass. Your automations fire exactly as if you had dragged the card on the board.
Focus mode
When the triage is done and it's time to actually work, right-click any card, on any view, and pick Enter focus mode. One card, full pane: title, status, the properties from your Bases view, its subtasks (checked off as they reach their done state), and its related notes.
A timer button starts a time-tracking session for the card, and the elapsed time ticks live next to the estimate. Done marks the card done per its note type's definition, automations included, and offers the next card from the same queue. → skips, Esc leaves. It is the closest the plugin gets to telling you: this, now, nothing else.
Time tracking
The timer is part of a full time-tracking loop. Start or stop a session from any card's menu; one session runs at a time, starting a second card stops the first, and the session survives an Obsidian restart. Stopping writes the elapsed minutes to a duration property on the note. Plain frontmatter, readable by any other tool, like everything this plugin touches.
The payoff shows up in the WBS:
Every row carries a ⏱ chip with the subtree's tracked total: the note's own minutes plus every descendant's. Actuals sit right next to the estimates, in the same d / h / m grammar, so "how long did we think" and "how long is it taking" finally read side by side. A row menu action persists the subtree total to a total_duration property when you want the number in the note itself.
Sharper filters
The filter box gained aliases for the configured properties: scheduled:today, scheduled:week, estimate:>4h, estimate:<=30m, progress:<50, order: comparisons. Estimates are unit-aware; a task estimated in minutes still matches estimate:4h and estimate:0.5 alike, converted through your minutes-per-day setting.
The freeze is gone
The last release of the day, 1.19.2, adds nothing visible. It removes the waiting. On a 200-card column in my own vault, every column-triage decision froze Obsidian for up to a second, and moving any card on the board took a sixth of one.
Profiling turned up something I did not expect. The plugin's code was fast, and the board of 200 cards is fewer than 800 DOM elements. The real cost was style recalculation: my vault runs a theme, CSS snippets, and around 80 plugins, which stacks up to 64 stylesheets, and every style invalidation makes the browser re-check elements against that entire pile. Roughly a tenth of a millisecond per element, whoever caused it. A plugin cannot make that tax smaller. It can only pay it less often.
So that is what 1.19.2 does. A triage decision no longer re-renders the board hidden behind the overlay, the overlay updates in place instead of being rebuilt, and card heights are only re-measured when something that can change a height actually changed. A decision went from up to 900 milliseconds to 1 or 2. A board move went from about 160 to about 10. Keep in mind that the stylesheet tax applies to every plugin you run; if your vault feels sluggish everywhere, your snippet and theme pile is part of the answer.
One more thing: the first version of that fix shipped with three real bugs, and I found none of them myself. A second AI model reviewed the change adversarially before release and caught all three. I'll write about that workflow separately.
Get it
Update from Community plugins in Obsidian, open a board, and look for the new triage button in any column header. Nothing to migrate; your boards and settings carry over untouched.
And if you want the whole system this plugin belongs to, that is what the Obsidian Starter Kit and the Knowii Community are for.
That's it for today! ✨
References
- Releases: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-kanban-action-planner/releases
- Documentation: https://dsebastien.github.io/obsidian-kanban-action-planner
- Community: https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/kanban-action-planner
- Column triage issue: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-kanban-action-planner/issues/170
- Focus mode issue: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-kanban-action-planner/issues/160
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