[npritchard]

For what it's worth, I've also come across this problem - so I made my own solution. I call it Mondage [0], it looks like a plain todo list app, but lets you drag tasks on top of each other to set dependencies.

Tasks you can do first get sent to the top. Everything else is shown underneath. I like graph views to get an overview, but when I'm in the weeds, a list is what I want.

The web version is live, I have Android and iOS clients built too, but only in beta release. With enough interest, I'll add full scheduling and other features, but for now, I'm keeping it simple and free. It's a little rough around the edges, but hopefully someone else can find it useful too.

The space is astonishingly crowded, and while that makes things hard to stand out or get noticed, it suggests to me that no one has properly solved this sort of problem - or that it's too personal to solve properly.

[0] https://mondage.com/