Using Freeform For Visual To-Do Lists And Kanban Boards

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use Freeform to manager your tasks and projects. 

Freeform is an app that comes with your Mac that allows you to place text, shapes, images, and other objects on an infinite canvas. You can use it for all sorts of creative things. But let me show you how you can use it to manage tasks. 

I'm going to launch Freeform here and I'm going to create a New Board and I'm just going to call this board Task Board. Now let's start off really simply and just add a textbox by clicking the Textbox Button at the top. Then I'm going to type in some text here by double clicking on it and then just typing. Now let's clean this up a bit. I'm going to use Command A to select All and the first thing I'm going to do is align it to the left. Then I'm going to select the first line here. I'm going to make that Bold. I'm going to select the other lines here and I'm going to make that a Bullet List, like this. So now I've got a basic To Do List. Now normally you would do this kind of thing in the Reminders App or the Notes App. In fact both those apps can do this much better. You can have real checkboxes here to the left of each item. You can break things up into sections and they are really meant to handle exactly this sort of To Do List. 

Let's keep going here with Freeform to see what we can do here that we can't do in those other apps. The first thing I'm going to do is add two more textboxes, like this, but for different projects. So now I've got these three different lists here and I could add plenty more. I can move them around in this 2D space. So, for instance, I could put this one here. This one next to it and then this one underneath it. Now in Reminders you can do sections, so you can kind of do this there. But this gives you complete freedom to arrange these like you want. Next, instead of having a textbox that contains an entire list like this let's break each of these items out into its own textbox. 

So now what I've got here is I've got individual textboxes for each of these things. Even the titles. So this allows you now to work in a 2D space. If you want you can move an item over to another list. Or you can move it over to its own list and easily create another list like that. A tip here is that you don't need to create a new textbox each time. Doing so would be clicking this button here, then typing in it, then changing it to be left justified and all of that. Instead you can just select an item like this and use Command D to duplicate it or what I like to do is hold the Option Key down and drag and that creates a duplicate of any item and then you can change the text to something else. 

Now we've definitely gone beyond what you can do in Notes and Reminders with the 2D movement of any item to any spot that you want. It's also very easy to select multiple items and change them. I'm going to Command click on these four different items here and I'm going to make them all gray because they're things I don't need to worry about today. But then tomorrow to start things off I'm going to select all of these here and I'm going to change them all back to black, like that. Now instead of having just text here we can do better by using Shapes. I'm going to click on the Shapes Tool here and I'm going to use a rounded rectangle, like this. I'm going to use this for each list. So let me make it a little bit bigger and a little bit longer, like that. I don't like how rounded the edges are there so I'm going to change that to a 10 point radius, like that. I want to make this where the daily tasks go. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to double click on it and you can type in any shape. So I'm going to make this Daily Tasks. Now that's in the center which is not where I want it. I want to click outside and click again so I selected the box. Click here and I can set this to align to the top, like that. Now I can move these items into this. When I do so at first it's going to actually put them behind this. That's okay. I can easily go to Arrange and Bring To Front, or Shift Command F. I can do the same for these. As a matter of fact I'm going to select this box right here and Option Drag it like that and change this to have a different name, like that, and then again. I'm going to drag all these elements here and I'm going to bring them to the front. All of these elements here and bring them to the front as well. 

Some of these need a little more space and that's fine. I can actually shrink this, like that. Now I can get rid of these and if I want to grab everything here I can just drag around it, select it all, and move the entire thing very easily, like this, to arrange things like I want. I can change the colors of these. Let me make this a different color here, like that. Maybe make this one a different color as well. Now I can continue to add items here, move them around, move them out into another space. Swap them back and forth between all of these. 

Another thing I can do is I can make these, instead of text, I can make them shapes as well. I'm going to go and create another rounded rectangle here. Let's set the radius back down a little bit. Let's use a different color for this. I'll just use a gray right here. I'll set it to something that will fit nicely inside of this, like that. If I double click on this I could type and notice the more I type the smaller the text gets to make it fit in that box. If you don't like that you could select the box, go to Format text and turn Off Autosize Text. I'm going to leave that On but I do want to make this just plain text, not bold, and then I'm going to drag this in here to replace that textbox.Then I'm going to get rid of these textboxes and place this inside here instead. I can Option Drag to create copies of this and then double click in here to change the text. I can expand the outer box like this and have plenty of room to fit these things in there. 

If I ever want to change some Style I can select All these just by holding the Command Key down and I can change, say, the box background to something else, like maybe this. Then I can change the Font as well for all of these items all at once. Then I can do the same for these items over here. Now I've got something that looks like this. I can move these around very easily by selecting All of the items by dragging around it then I can move them together as a group. I can also select all of the items like this. Use Arrange and then Group and now, just by clicking, I can drag to move these around. But I can still double click on them and then still select these individual items to move them or to change the text in them even though when I deselect them and select again they are grouped.

Now just being able to design and move things around in a 2D space like this already gives it a bit of an advantage over Reminders and Notes. However you can keep going with this. Like, for instance, let's say I wanted to add some simple symbols to this. I can go into Shapes here and I can go to, say, a symbol here, add this shape like that. Let's go ahead and select it and change its color, like this. Then I can make it a little smaller and I can put this wherever I want. So I could put a star next to an item, like this. If you ever want to break away from the grid, of course, you can just use the Command Key to place it anywhere you want. I can Option Drag away and easily place this somewhere else. Very easily change this color to something else, like that. So you can overlay a bunch of stuff using any of the different kinds of shapes here. But, you could also go to Text and add a piece of text here and use Emoji. So, I'm going to use the fn or Globe Key and E to bring up the Emoji & Special Character Viewer. I can add, you know, a face or a heart or a thumbs up or all sorts of different symbols here, like this one. Then I could change its size and I can move this to any spot I want as well. 

Or I can add another shape, like for instance, let's use this Speech Bubble here. Let's go ahead and change the color of this to something else, like that. Then use this to signify a person. So you can put a person's name in here and I can make this smaller like this. I can change where it points to, like that by grabbing the green dot. Then I can use this to attach a person to a specific item, like that. I can Option Drag and add that person in other places as well, like this, or something else like that. Maybe color code them and place these all around also. 

So as you can see you really color these up. You can even connect them. I could go and create a connection line, which is this here. I grab the blue dot and I can connect any spot to any other spot like that. When you select this line you can also change the connection line style. So you can do something like this instead. So there's a lot of different things that you can do.  

Now if you've ever heard of a Kanban Board you may notice that this looks a lot like that and indeed it is. You can easily have a project based Kanban Board like this and then move these items between them very easily, like that. Or maybe instead of being project based this could be time based, like this where you've got separate days or weeks or Today, This Week, 30 Days, that kind of thing. You can move items between all of these. Or they can be person based. Right. You can have all the people on your team and you can move items between those people very easily. 

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But here's another way to handle things. Instead of using just shapes as a background you can use a Table. So when you create a Table it gives you boxes and you can add more boxes like that. It kind of looks like a spreadsheet. But it's not! It really is basically a shape here that you can divide into sections and, sure you can double click and then type something in each section. But more importantly you can add other items, like let's add a shape here, and I can put it inside of a box. So, like let's say this is a task here, like that. I can have different tasks and I can have them in different sections of the board, like this. Now the interesting thing is that they are not just sitting on top of it, like having a shape on top of another shape. You can actually select the board and move the whole board. These items will move with the board. Not only that as you change the shape here you can see they move with the cell as well. So you can arrange things inside of these cells, drag them around between the cells, like that, and yet they'll still stay with the cell with the board. 

So at the very least one of the things you may want to do is to actually reduce the table to just a 1 by 1, like this. Then let's setup a background here, just to be a standard color like that, and it looks like a regular shape. But if I add something into it like this, maybe a few different things like that, it moves around with it. It will always stay in front. So if I create another one here and I move it here, you can see how it will pop in front of this 1 by 1 table here.  Not only that the tables will expand if you push the items beyond the edges. If you select a Table and use Command D or Option Drag to duplicate it all the items come along with it. Plus you can create a Table like this where you label each of the sections. So, I'll create four text boxes to go around this. Something like this. Now I can place tasks on this depending upon where they fallout. So I could easily just create a bunch of different tasks and put them around like that on the board as I reshape the board things will move with it in a fairly logical way and I can easily move things around to figure out which task I should do next according to how much time I have and how big a priority it is. Or any other two measurements for anything. Then as you complete tasks you can just move them out over here, maybe in a box here named Completed or you could simply change their color to show that they are done. 

So I"m just really scratching the surface of all the different things you can do here. But I hope you see here how you can use Freeform to go beyond Reminders and Notes in helping you to visualize tasks and projects. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.