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.<p>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.<p>It can be edited in any IDE / text editor and even in the online editor of the git management.<p>Works pretty well so far. An example:<p><pre><code> # 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)</code></pre>
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.<p>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 free tiers of <a href="https://linear.app/" rel="nofollow">https://linear.app/</a> and <a href="https://www.notion.so/" rel="nofollow">https://www.notion.so/</a> are pretty good.<p>Combined with plugging your linear account into the VCS of your choice (probably github/gitlab/bitbucket).<p>The free tier of <a href="https://www.figma.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.figma.com/</a> is good for mockups and design.
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 <i>boring</i> 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.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/xyzshantaram/etu">https://github.com/xyzshantaram/etu</a>
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.<p>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