Obsidian Kanban & Project Management Templates

Using Obsidian for Project Management

Obsidian handles project work better than its note-taking reputation suggests, and the two downloads in this category cover the two main shapes of it. The Kanban Project Board is a four-column board, Backlog, Doing, Review and Done, built on the Kanban plugin and loaded with a realistic example project. Because boards are stored as plain Markdown, it stays readable even without the plugin, and the included card-to-note pattern keeps the board skimmable while the real thinking lives in linked notes. The Project Management vault works one level up: each project is a single note with structured frontmatter, a milestone table, a Mermaid Gantt timeline and its meeting notes linked alongside, while a Dataview dashboard rolls everything up by status, owner and due date. Two complete example projects, a website redesign and an office move, come filled in.

Choose by altitude. One project you move through daily wants the board; a portfolio of projects with owners and deadlines wants the vault. Plenty of people end up running a board inside each project note, and the Gantt timeline needs no plugin at all, since Mermaid rendering is native to Obsidian.

For the layer underneath, the individual next actions rather than the projects, the tasks category covers the GTD side.

Mermaid Gantt Timeline in a Project Note: a Block You Can Copy

Obsidian renders Mermaid diagrams natively, so a Gantt chart is nothing more than a fenced code block inside a project note. No plugin, no export step, and the timeline is still plain text you can diff, search and edit. This is the same pattern the Project Management vault uses in each project note. Paste the block below into any note and switch to reading view:

```mermaid
gantt
    title Website Redesign
    dateFormat YYYY-MM-DD
    axisFormat %b %d
    excludes weekends, 2026-11-11
    section Discovery
    Stakeholder interviews :done, d1, 2026-09-28, 2026-10-09
    Content audit :done, d2, after d1, 5d
    section Build
    Page templates :active, b1, 2026-10-19, 15d
    Content migration :b2, after b1, 8d
    section Launch
    Go live :milestone, m1, after b2, 0d
```

Current versions of Obsidian ask once per vault before drawing Mermaid diagrams: when the note shows "Display Mermaid diagrams in this vault?", choose Allow, or switch on "Display Mermaid diagrams in notes" under Settings, Editor.

Mermaid Gantt syntax, line by line

dateFormat tells Mermaid how you write dates in the task lines, and axisFormat controls how they print along the bottom axis, using the same codes as strftime (%b %d gives "Oct 19"). Each task line is a label, a colon and up to four comma-separated values: an optional state (done, active, crit or milestone), an optional id, a start, and an end or duration. Writing after d1 instead of a date chains a task to the end of another one, which is what keeps a timeline honest when something slips: change one date and everything downstream moves with it.

excludes weekends stops durations from counting Saturdays and Sundays, and you can add specific dates to the same line. The example also skips 11 November 2026, Veterans Day, when US federal offices close, so the build phase is measured in real working days. A task marked milestone with a 0d duration draws as a diamond rather than a bar.

If your tasks already live in separate notes with dates, the Obsidian Gantt chart template draws this chart for you from their properties, one per project.

Mermaid Gantt timeline or Kanban board?

They answer different questions. The Gantt timeline shows when phases happen and what depends on what, which is the view a client or manager asks for. The Kanban board shows what is moving today. Most project notes in Obsidian end up with a Gantt block at the top for the plan and a link to a board for the day-to-day work.