Ask HN: Anyone using project management tools for personal projects? Hey HN, curious to learn if anyone is using project management tools for their personal projects. I’ve started using Linear to organize tasks in my projects with some success. It is a balancing act though, between keeping a project organized and not adding too much process or overhead where it becomes cumbersome. Anyone else using workflows like this? |
For personal projects I write a lot of notes into .md files or comments but keep task lists as paper notes on letter pads. When the list gets too messy I copy the whole list by hand which means I keep on top of it. I'd argue that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CONWIP
is the basic practice of management for small projects and that you can't really commit to more work than you can handle with a paper process.
I like that practice. That way you’re always conscious of everything in flight and stuff isn’t slipping through the cracks. Will be looking into that system more
My personal projects are generally done by a team of 1 (sometimes I'll bring in one or two friends, but not usually). Project management for a team that small is trivial.
What I use to manage my personal projects is just a wiki and a version control system. Project management tools add some friction and overhead, so they're only useful if they're reducing more friction and overhead somewhere else. Working alone already greatly reduces such overhead, rendering heavier-duty tools counterproductive for me.
The eradication of Project management and all it's concepts is an ideology I'm hoping to push, along with the elimination of all of their jobs (PMs/Scrum/Agile) along with their toy software. Just an army of one at the moment though.
I prefer just doing it in Excel, Google docs, Google sheets and notes depending on complexity of the project.
I have a whiteboard in my office and just put things there. The small size of the whiteboard forces brevity and the constant visibility makes it clear to me when I'm actually making progress on things and when they are lingering.