As part of using Nextcloud as our family unCloud, I’m using Deck as as personal Kanban-adjacent system. It stretches in 2 main areas (on 2 different boards): apartment related things (shared across the family and including everything from small maintenance through getting stuff from Praxis/Gamma (hardware store chains in NL) to larger (and expensive) projects like the long overdue replacement of our air filtering/circulation system; and personal stuff, for tracking things I need to plan around my life, be it something in the home IT stack, or my bike(s), or planning a holiday.
Each of these have their small benefits.For example: on my Apartment board I have an easy filter for small maintenance (a list on the board, actually) resulting in a list of prioritised stuff I can pick up when I have time / feel like it, so I can e.g. fix the loose tap in the kitchen, or clean the filter in the washing machine. The Gamma/Praxis tag (on any card, actually) helps me when I’m in Gamma/Praxis for something: I just look at the list if there’s anything else I need for another project. And the larger project cards can of course contain some bulleted action list, budgeting, maybe evolve into their own boards, etc. (The one thing they don’t contain, unfortunately, is the money needed for the project.)
Deck also has a separate “Mark as done” button, which does nothing to the card except marking it as done, so I still have to move the card to the Done column manually. Now, this looks like a redundancy, but I actually like it: about 2 years ago I picked up the habit of only archiving cards from the Done column at the end (or beginning) of the year. Doing this, I can have a little lookback at the beginning of the next year and see that yes, it’s typically only a lot of little mundane household tasks, but hey, I completed a lot of them! 18 stupid little household tasks in and around the apartment, like cleaning drains (twice in the shower, twice in the kitchen), fixing the kitchen drain for good including the piping and all (at last!), mounting the new knife holder on the wall, and stuff like this.
And on my Personal board, 58 items Done in 2025! This includes everything from buying a thin profile 17mm wrench for my bike (if you ever had to disassemble-clean-reassemble a rear hub I’m sure you know the exact one), organising the making of The Beacons of Minas Tiener, setting up a Minecraft vm, a lot of little home automation things, prepping for our guest appearance at the summer concert of the Hungarian Choir of Amsterdam, but also bigger stuff like full planning our holiday or for my solo bikepacking trip back in July (related post – Magyar only, sorry), or getting hardware for my Jellyfin rig, which eventually evolved into my Proxmox home cluster, including the shelving for the mini PCs. 58 of these!
So now that the year has turned, I’m happily archiving the 18+58 items in the Done column and start with a tabula rasa for 2026. It’s fun to see that while maybe hidden through the daily grind, there is stuff happening in our lives (and apartments.)