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As a solo indie hacker, do you use any project/task management software?

I am working on a product myself, for which I am the sole developer for the time being. I am looking for some software to plan and track my software development task. Currently I use Trello boards which is not much effective in my case. do you use any such softwares or services for the same? My use cases are

  • track product development
  • prfioritize todo list.
  • view work history & future plans & milestones etc.

So far I tried asana, todoist, basecamp and Trello.

Any suggestions/tips?

  1. 5

    From my comment on a similar thread a few days ago:

    Trello is pretty much perfect for me. I have columns for Done, In Progress, To Do and Backlog (the former basically consisting of the highest priority items from the latter). I label cards Feature, Bug, Refactor, Developer or Marketing to keep track by category. I also use the hell out of the checklists, they’re a great QA tool.

    1. 2

      +1 for Trello. Despite using other tools, I always seem to come back to Trello.

    2. 2

      Yep, its the same I am doing it in Trello now.

    3. 1

      I live my life in Trello. Meal Planning, long term goals, side projects....

  2. 2

    Over two decades in the tech industry, and I've always come back to plain text files for to-dos and task planning.

    Also built and use a simple weekly planner - https://weekis.com for more high level tasks.

    By the way, I tweet about productivity, among other things on startups and tech, at https://twitter.com/VoidMonk, in case you'd like to stay in touch.

    1. 1

      Cool.. will give it a try.

  3. 2

    I like trello once there's more than one person involved. Prior to that I'm an old fashioned paper/ hand written list type. Unless you value a history to go back and reflect on, then maybe start using tools even before you have collaborators.

    1. 1

      yep, I use old fashioned paper/ hand written list type in some cases. but it's difficult to track sometimes. But most of the time I come back to this.!

  4. 2

    I find managing and learning any of those tools to be a big waste of time. I use a whiteboard and have two lists of things:

    1. Things that are long term goals
    2. Things I need to do today

    I rewrite the "today" list just about every single day. It helps me prioritize constantly and refresh what I am working on instead of just diving right in.

    Before I had a whiteboard, I made this system work with two legal notepads. The yellow ones with the seam at the top. I would just keep one pad for the long term list and another pad I'd write out a new list every day of what I needed to accomplish. I will still occasionally throw a legal pad into the mix if the whiteboard is filled up.

    Unless you have external stakeholders you need to communicate the fine details with and they need to know what you're working on there's really no need for any fancy project management tools. Low-fidelity tools like pen and paper are great for being fast and flexible.

    1. 1

      good thoughts (Y)

  5. 1

    I saw an old @levelsio post which I've recently copied and really like.
    On Trello, have "this year", "this month", "this week", "today", and "now". Then have a column for each week where you move the finshed tasks to. At the end of the week you move that weekly list to a new completed board, allowing you to see how many tasks you did each week.
    Before I just had "to do", "doing", "done", but the lists quickly became unmanageable

  6. 1

    to me Trello or Basecamp will do the job for you its not complex to use it and it is very effective for small projects and teams, my experience with Trello so far is Ok

  7. 1

    We are super early, but the product I am working (Taskable) on is a personal productivity tool with this use case in mind. If interested can show you a demo, and would love to get your feedback! taskablehq.com

  8. 1

    Yes, even though I am a solo developer, I use a project management tool for logging bugs, tracking tasks, building to-do's, managing development wikis etc.

    I actually host my own instance of the open source tool Phabricator - https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

    It is fantastic, and I like the fact I am setting the ground rules for when we scale up and have other programmers working on the team. The system does full code reviews, manages repositories and secrets etc. Been using it for nearly 4 years now with great results.

  9. 1

    I use Trello for organizing most tasks in my life, but I've been using the kanban boards on github for most of the development for auToDo and it seems to work really well. Most of my work is related to software development for the app currently so it's very nice to have everything right there on github.

    You can check out how I have the project set up here: https://github.com/autodo-app/autodo/projects

    1. 1

      most of my codes are in GitHub.. I will give GitHub projects a try.

  10. 1

    I'm building a few different sites: https://pagecheck.app, https://cellacrate.com, https://growthcalculator.app

    I use https://notion.so for everything. It helps me organize things really nicely and I keep a broad roadmap as well as a TODO list for myself. Also, I have a basic spreadsheet CRM. You can also write documentation for yourself and link to that documentation from different places.

    1. 1

      I haven't used notion yet, I will give it a try.

  11. 1

    I like to keep things simple, so I start off by using a notes application, which makes it really easy to type out whatever you need to do or remember.

    Once that gets unwieldy, I switch over to Trello with four columns: To Do, In Progress, Blocked, and Done. I use tags to indicate priority level of the tasks and which kind of task it is (e.g. marketing, sales, development, etc.).

    So far my method has worked out pretty well for me. As a indie maker it's crucial you don't spend too much time fiddling around with project management - it's supposed to just be a tool that helps you get things done.

    1. 2

      I felt Jira is more complicated for me.

      1. 1

        yes my sentiments also

      2. 1

        Yeah it is hah, but I've been using it for years so naturally I just kept with it.

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