Ask HN: Any project management app you feel at home with?

Whatever you want from your tool, the goal is to keep it as simple as possible so you can actually work. If you've got your head stuck in an online system for any length of time during the day, you're not doing it right.

Tools, whether PM tools or not, are supposed to disappear so you can focus on value. If you're talking about them, spending time in them, going to useless meetings with pointless reports generated from them, etc? They stop being tools. At that point they become obstacles. Carpenters don't go to meetings with graphs of how many hammers they own. Brick masons don't spend half a day comparing the status of all of their trowels. Project Management has jack squat to do with configuring and using PM tools. Unless you're specifically training on skills, tools should disappear. That's the entire point. I wish more people knew that.

ADD: Do you know the people who do focus on tools and talk about them a lot? People who don't know what they're doing. To them, the feature list of any tool is reassurance that they can continue not knowing what they're doing and somehow things will still work out fine. The tool will handle it.

  - shared but read-only, the manager writes
  - at the top of page1 are your top3 quarterly goals
  - each persons name starts a short outline list of their 2 -3 active task-goals
  - since your team is 3 - 8ish ppl everyone fits on one page
  - all other ideas, wants, tasks, goals, questions, etc go onto page 2, "the wishlist"
  - meet twice a week, mon/thur
  - monday you go around the "room" (its always a vid conf) and each person declares their 2 - 3 items
  - thursday you go around the room and go over what got done and/or learned
  - every quarter you start a new doc with a clean/only-a-few-carryovers wishlist

I remember my first coaching gig. I was looking to dive into a team, get into the code, make things happen! Instead, I spent the first day in what could best be called religious discussions. It was quite odd.

But in their defense, they had no context. Agile was an abstract and nebulous thing. Instead they all had heroes/demigods that they looked to for advice from on-high. The focus was on "being correct"; tool features, usage, and adoption; having a good time with the teams. All sorts of crap instead of just making stuff people want.

I see the same thing in management, with or without the Agile part added in. Once you get removed from value delivery, even if it's only just a little bit, you end up adrift at sea. So many of the management schools are just as religious as the Agile folks. They just have different demigods :)