Welcome to vikan: your work, in focus

Work rarely arrives as a tidy list. An idea becomes a question, a question becomes a task, and the reason for doing it ends up somewhere else. By the time you are ready to begin, you may need to reconstruct the conversation that made the task important.

vikan is a local-first project management app built around a straightforward goal: your work, in focus. It brings issues and their context together, with list and board views for choosing what to do next.

Start with a clear next action

A useful issue answers three questions: what needs to change, why does it matter, and how will someone recognize that it is done?

Give the issue an action-oriented title. Use its description to explain the background and expected result. Add an assignee and a priority when they help clarify responsibility and order. Larger pieces of work can use parent and child issues to make individual steps visible.

For example, “Improve onboarding” is difficult to pick up. “Explain the first workspace setup step” gives someone a smaller, concrete starting point. Its description can include the confusing moment, proposed wording, and the behavior to check.

Choose the view that helps you decide

Use a list when you want to scan titles and fields closely. Use a board when the movement of work through statuses is the question in front of you. Filters and saved views let you return to a useful slice of the workspace, while My Issues brings assigned work into view.

Keyboard commands offer another way to move through the app. The point is to spend less attention navigating and more attention deciding what deserves it.

Keep the context attached

Issue descriptions, comments, and project documents keep supporting information close to the work. Write down a decision where the next person looking at the task can find it. When a project document refers to an issue, that relationship can help connect the larger explanation to the smaller action.

Local-first behavior also makes preparation useful: sign in and open your workspace online before working offline, and open the descriptions you will need so they are cached. Our guide to local-first project management explains those boundaries.

Connect assistance deliberately

vikan supports MCP connections with access to one selected workspace. You choose read-only or read-and-write access. Connected assistants see synced workspace data; changes still waiting in your browser are not included.

This blog will share practical ways to organize work and explain how vikan behaves as the product develops. To begin with a small routine, try a calmer weekly planning workflow, or visit vikan to explore the product.