For students

A kanban board for a semester.

A semester is a hundred small deadlines arriving from five directions. A board turns that into columns you can read from across the room: what is due, what is started, and what is done. Kaniban is free, needs no account, and lives on your own laptop.

Setting it up in five minutes

1. One workspace for the term. Name it after the semester; the ticket prefix you pick becomes the code on every card.
2. Columns for the state of the work. To do, This week, Doing, Done is enough. Rename the three defaults or add one with /ncl:This week in the command deck.
3. One card per assignment, with the course as its tag. The first tag colours the card, so each course has a colour and the board reads at a glance.
4. A due date on each. Press Ctrl K and type /nc:Essay 2 to add a card without touching the mouse, then give it a date. It appears on the calendar on its own.
5. Move cards as you go. Drag one into Doing when you start it, and into Done when it is handed in. That last move is what gives the board a history.

The calendar and the timeline

The calendar shows the month with every assignment on its due day. Drag one to another day if the date moves. Anything without a date waits at the side until it has one. The timeline, on Supporter, lays the same cards out as bars across the weeks, which is how you find out in week three that week nine has four things due, while there is still time to do something about it.

Study sessions with a timer

Start the timer on the card when you sit down with it, and stop it when you get up. Each session is kept on the card and totalled, so “how long did that essay really take” has an answer instead of a feeling. On Supporter, the summary view adds it up across the term as a heatmap of hours; on Plus it also shows the times of day you actually work, which are worth knowing before exam week.

It costs nothing

The free tier is the whole setup above: the board, the calendar, two workspaces, tags, due dates, timers, the command deck and export. It shows ads, kept outside the work grid. If you want a quiet screen during finals, Supporter starts at $3 for 30 days and removes them, and adds the timeline and the summary. Nothing you have written is ever locked behind a payment.

On your laptop, offline, no account

The board is saved in your browser, so it works on library wifi, on no wifi, and without signing up for anything. At the end of term, export it as a single file for the record and start a fresh workspace for the next one. If you use a school laptop that is wiped over the summer, that export is how the board survives.

Questions