I've used several tools over the years but no one fits my needs well enough. I wonder if I miss some magic tool. Which tool work best for a single person operation?
I wrote a tool based on my own custom markdown format / file structure. The file is always called `project.md` and part of the project as well as my personal invoice generator git repository, which is basically a parser + pdf generator.
The md file contains customer information, todos and time tracking. Based on this format I can generate an invoice with a detailed table of every task including the time required. And it even looks pretty good in the markdown view.
It can be edited in any IDE / text editor and even in the online editor of the git management.
Works pretty well so far. An example:
# Customer
```
Company Name
Magic Avenue 12
Zip-Code City
Project name with short description
30 day terms
```
# Todo
- [x] create project
- [x] init git
- [x] add build scripts
- [x] draw UI concept
- [x] Home
- [x] Settings
- [ ] Choose icons
- [ ] Build prototype
- [ ] Choose UI framework
- [ ] ...
# Time tracking
2022-04-26
- 17.42-18.02 project creation and git initialisation
2022-04-28
- 11.55-13.23 basic project setup and build scripts
2022-04-29
- 16.47-17.08 new UI concept (drawing and design, HomeView)
- 17.20-17.42 new UI concept (drawing and design, SettingsView)
Todoist, Obsidian and Eagle form the second brain. Write to forget things, not remember them. Only plan daily if you can. Github issues + projects, even without a team helps to track progress and prioritise tasks. Mix Clockify in there as a time tracker and invoice generator for short and long term tasks
Git for source code control. A notepad and pencil for listing out the TODOs. I write "Done" next to a bullet point when it's done. I might rewrite the list occasionally without the done items for clarity or write numbers next to the bullet points to prioritise them. I think if you can't write out a task description as a short sentence then it's either not well understood enough or too broad in scope to accomplish easily. In the latter case it needs breaking out into a set of smaller tasks.
I don't use any framework for unit tests. Only a short program for each test that returns 0 on success or some other number for failure and prints a message to stderr about what the problem is. These get run in a loop from a shell script.
The same as you, but for TODOs, I have a simple macro on my neovim setup because then I can keep the todos with my version control(it is a single text file, newline separated) and see what changed and why I added something. Really helpful if I come back to something after some time.
The only tool I truly find magically despite how boring it sounds is chatGPT, I can tell it everything as a living dev log, I tell it time date when I do things and why and so on just documentating my progress, listing todos and reminders as I go but now I can "talk" back forth on the administrative things like reminding me where I was, recap here, it's just great for managing boring things like I never been able to do before
I just have a long text file with notes of all different things in it which I grep through as necessary for todos etc. But for time tracking I didn't really like what was available so I (shameless plug) built etu[0]. It's free and open source and I quite enjoy it.
I built Tatask.com for this! I want to have easy visibility over everything but quickly drill down into specifics so it uses a tree structure for tasks.
You can break down any project into smaller and smaller sections to whatever degree you like and it makes it super easy to visualise everything and make progress.
- clockify for time tracking
- Google keep for notes
- Trello for my personal work management
- DocuSign to sign contracts
- eProcessify for generating and sending invoices
The md file contains customer information, todos and time tracking. Based on this format I can generate an invoice with a detailed table of every task including the time required. And it even looks pretty good in the markdown view.
It can be edited in any IDE / text editor and even in the online editor of the git management.
Works pretty well so far. An example: