Managing Your Work with Progress

We all have our own ways of managing our work, whether that’s a large project or a small one. Some of us use a task list. Others rely on more fully-featured project management applications. And then there’s the kanban board.

That’s what I turn to when a project I’m working on has more than a few moving parts. A kanban board — like Nextcloud Deck, FocalBoard — helps me keep on top of what I need to do and how that project is moving along. Or not.

As part of an ebook project I’m currently working on, I’ve given a desktop kanban board called Progress a try to help manage my tasks. Let’s take a look at it.

Installing Progress

You can try getting it from your Linux distribution’s software centre (or whatever it may be called), or you can install Progress as a flatpak. You can also install it on Arch Linux or Debian-based distributions using their package managers.

No matter what route you take, the installation is fairly quick and you have working software in almost no time at all.

Getting Going with Progress

Fire the application up. You see this screen:

Click the + in the top left corner of the window to add a kanban board. This screen displays:

Enter the name of the board and choose whether to give the board a coloured background (by clicking As a color) or using an image as the board’s background (by clicking As a file and choosing an image).

When you’re done, click Create. Repeat that for each board you need to add. Here’s an example of the boards I created when I took Progress for a test drive:

Working with a Board

A kanban board is a blank canvas. To make it useful, you’ll need to add one or more lists, which are the columns on the board.

Open a board and then click Add List. Progress adds a column to the board, to which you give a name and then click the green checkmark to save it. Continue doing that for each list that you need to create. You wind up with something like this:

Once you’ve done that, click Add card in a list to add a task for that stage of the project. This pop up displays:

Enter a name for a card and then click the green checkmark. Again, keep adding tasks. You’ll wind up with something that looks like this:

Drag and drop the cards from column to column until you complete a task. Then, rinse and repeat.

That Sounds Simple …

Progress doesn’t seem to do much, does it? In fact, what progress lacks is as notable as what it does. As a kanban board application, Progress is very basic. You can add cards and that’s about it.

While I like my software simple, with a kanban board I do find myself needing a bit more — for example, adding subtasks, due dates, and notes to a card. I can’t do anything like that with Progress.

I didn’t find Progress to be any more effective or useful than using a plain text task list. Sure, Progress has a graphical kanban form factor but I can get the same results with a task list.

I won’t say I found Progress disappointing; I went into it with no expectations. However, it just didn’t click with me. I used it for a few days then uninstalled it. That’s pretty much all I have to say about it.

— Scott Nesbitt