Ask HN: Single-user task and project management recs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Single-user task and project management recs?

I'd love to hear about any good task/project management tools that you've used in a single-user environment. There are a handful of other devs on my team, but my work is typically independent of theirs. Most of the project management tools I've seen (Trello, Basecamp, etc.) are geared toward collaborative environments, so there's a lot of functionality that I wouldn't be using.

View on HN

I've settled on just having a simple Markdown file* in the root of every project I work on where I list (a) the tasks I or the client wants done and (b) notes on discoveries and bugs I want to keep track of for later. I have tasks lined up in a section called # Tomorrow that I rename to # Today when I want to tackle them. The tasks I put in this file usually derive from whatever pm tool the client or my team is using.

* I give all these files a special extension so that they're easy to ignore in my global gitignore and give syntax highlighting in my editor

I find both Trello and Asana to be effective for personal projects. Each supports team environments to a degree but their core functionality is simple enough for a single person. (Frankly, I find both to be terribly under-featured, insufficiently structured task managers for a team of more than 2-3 people.)

A backup would be a nested bulleted list in some editor that supports a "strikethrough" text format.

I find 3 files useful for my one-man side-projects:

* TODO.md - contains things lined up for a 2-week sprint.

* ROADMAP.md - contains other stuff not lined up for that sprint, also big epics that would suite for an "Icebox" column.

* CHANGELOG.md - version release notes for the sprint.

This is pretty good as a personal Kanban board: http://greggigon.github.io/my-personal-kanban/

For small projects, I typically use a text file. Or a draft email left in my personal gmail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com