YesYouKan - kanban in Joplin

YesYouKan is a kanban plugin for Joplin, developed by Laurent - the maintainer of Joplin itself. When it was first published a year ago I appreciated the choice of the name, but didn't expect to use it. After all, I've tried a bunch of kanban tools but they never stuck.

But I remembered the plugin a few weeks ago and decided to give it a spin, because I had a task that a kanban board could handle nicely: I always have a bunch of (low velocity) projects in the works (currently about 17), and since I only get to work on them occasionally, it's very useful to note actionable tasks as they come to my mind and have them at hand when I finally get some time to work on them. That fixes the problem I had a few times: when I unexpectedly found a few extra free hours and wanted to work on something, I had a hard time picking something up and had the feeling that I'm forgetting something more important.

So the last time this happened, I responded by inventing even more work for myself 😀 - downloaded this kanban plugin and jotted down all the ongoing/planned tasks. (And yes, of course I added some of those I completed previously, for an easy dopamine hit.)

That's were the advantage of this being a Joplin plugin come in: it tightly integrates with the rest with my notes. One issue I had with multiple note-taking tools that allow for various representations was that they may let me draw diagrams or make fancy boards, but if I can't link to other notes I just don't find them useful. That's what recently put me off Affine.

With YesYouKan, I kan easily create simple text notes as expected - with a few clicks and a few lines of markdown. But I can also link to other notes easily. It's stored as a markdown file under the hood, so I don't lose any data even without the plugin, and all the other essential features (such as backlinks) work as expected.
If I enter only a link to a note, the plugin displays the contents of the note in the card, as preview. Because Laurent is a genius who knows exactly what he's doing.
Conversely, when a card is growing too large, I can extract its contents into a new note with a click.

It just works with my existing system without getting in my way.