I’m exploring ways to track everything that’s currently in progress within my Johnny.Decimal Life Admin system and I’d love to hear how others are doing it.
As a software engineer, I’ve spent years working with Kanban systems, and I’ve always found it valuable to have a clear “Work in Progress” view. I’m trying to replicate that feeling (that visibility) in my personal life as well. I believe it’s incredibly helpful to know at a glance what’s moving, what’s active, or what needs my attention soon.
At the moment, I’m using Bear for my JDex and notes. Here’s what I’m experimenting with:
When an ID has something happening (in progress, or coming soon), I pin that note in Bear.
Thanks to Bear’s new feature that lets you view all pinned notes together, I can quickly see all active items.
It works well, but Bear unfortunately doesn’t show the count of pinned notes — which would be great for a quick “how many balls in the air?” moment.
So far this is working, but I’d love to improve it and be inspired by other systems.
Questions:
Do you track “in progress” items in your system?
If yes
Do you have a dedicated index note (like 00.03 Projects in progress)?
Do you use tags, symbols, colors, or anything else to help with visibility?
This is a really interesting problem, and one adjacent to but distinct from the idea of managing to-dos. I’m still working on my ideas, which I’ll come to as part of that series.
Simplest: just use Bear’s built-in note sorting to sort by modification date vs. title. Now all your recent stuff bubbles to the top. Combine with pinned notes…
Bear’s new feature that lets you view all pinned notes together
…very neat by the way, I didn’t know about that … yeah, I think modified by and pinned = the simplest way for sure.
If you need more than that, it has to be tags. I’m an aviation nerd so I’ve played with tags that represent the status of something ‘in flight’. It’s the flight progress strips I’ve mentioned here and on Discord.
Basically #atc/1_landing = what’s happening right now. #atc/2_cruising = ongoing. #atc/3_holding pattern = some sort of delay; not now; later. And so on.
I’m trying that same idea on an Obsidian Canvas and finding it really interesting. I’d love to build an app/plugin to do this properly; moving the shapes around yourself is a bit janky.
I’m using tags + bookmarks (Obsidian feature similar to Bear’s pins).
Bookmarks: for ongoing projects, something big
Tags: for small things that I need to to when I have time for that. Not something that I need to have close to hand. Sometimes bookmarked items also have tags for additional context. I don’t have lots of action/status tags, because Obsidian isn’t my task manager, just something to filter for relevant stuff, like #to/blog .
