A personal kanban board that fills itself from your notes.

Remlo’s To-dos page has a board view with stages you name. Cards get onto it when you type a checkbox in a note, which is the part I care about most.

A kanban board is simple. Columns for where the work is, cards for the work, and you drag a card right as it moves. Personal kanban is the same idea for one person’s list, and it works because a list cannot show you what is stuck.

Where the board usually lives

Todoist has a board layout, and it is a good one. You can see a project as columns and drag tasks across. Apple Reminders added column view in iOS 17, where each list section becomes a column. Trello is the one most people know.

All three share a habit. You make the card yourself. You stop what you are doing, open the board, and add it.

That is fine for a project that already has a shape. It does not help with the work that arrives inside a sentence. A task that comes up while you are writing a note stays in the note, and the board never hears about it.

I also found a quieter problem. A board you maintain by hand is a second job. The columns look tidy for two weeks. Then you stop dragging, the board describes last month, and you go back to a flat list.

How the board fills in Remlo

You type a checkbox in front of a sentence, in any note. That line is a to-do, collected on the To-dos page.

Switch that page to board view and the same to-dos are columns. There is no import and no card to create. Tick one anywhere, in the note or on the page, and it moves to Done.

Every card links back to the note it came from. A task from Tuesday’s call opens Tuesday’s call.

Why the stages are yours

Two states, open and done, cannot describe real work. Take one task: send the supplier contract for review.

Monday you draft it, so it is in progress. Tuesday it goes to legal. It is no longer yours, and it is not done either. On a flat list it sits among the things you have not started, and every time you read the list you decide again that there is nothing to do about it. Thursday legal replies. Friday you send it.

With a Waiting stage, that card sits in its own column. The list of what is on you gets short and honest, which is the only condition under which anyone reads it.

So you name the stages. In progress, waiting, review, done. Or whatever your work does between started and finished.

What the board does not do

It does not have swim lanes or work in progress limits. If you run a team process with real WIP limits, use a tool built for it.

It does not share. There is no assigning a card to another person, and no one else sees your board.

It does not work on Windows, Android, or the web. Remlo is native on Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

It has no integrations that pull tasks in from other apps.

Where the other boards win

Todoist wins when a board is shared, when you want recurring tasks written as a sentence, or when your tasks live across platforms.

Reminders wins when you want location alerts, Siri, and a list you can share with a partner for groceries. It is also already on your phone.

Trello wins for anything with more than one person in it.

If the tasks are yours and they begin as sentences in notes, the board that fills itself saves the dragging. That is the case Remlo is for.

The board on the phone

A board needs a screen. On the iPhone I use the list view for the same to-dos, one flat line each, and the board when I sit at the Mac or the iPad. The tick is the same tick in both. The board is a way to look at the to-dos, and there is no second copy of them.

Remlo also creates a page for every day, so there is somewhere to type before you know what the thing is. Everything syncs through your iCloud and works offline. It is $19 a year with seven days free, or $149 once.

A board is only useful if the cards on it are true. Mine are true because I never typed them in twice.