Ask HN: How do you manage your one-man project?

I use a wiki for strawman feature proposals and for the roadmap; each entry in the roadmap gets a bug in Bugzilla, and all milestones/releases get a tracking bug depending on the bugs that should go in. milestones/releases are every six months, so there's an inherent deadline in there.

it's an open source project, so this not only helps me having a clear idea of what I'm meant to be doing, but it also helps others to contribute to it, by giving a precise idea of what can be worked on at any given time.

For my one person projects I use fossil for bug-tracking and wiki.

http://www.fossil-scm.org/

Github issues can be a useful place to stash features that you want to implement in your project, and if your project is public and has eyeballs on it, that puts some impetus on you to focus on getting them done.

A todo list app can also be useful, but only if using it is something you use out of habit. That's why Github issues fits nicely with me, because it fits with my natural workflow (filing issues or scouring issues of software I want to use).

I also use Trello, though in combination with a whiteboard.

I have one big project, so I have a Trello board for that, with lists for: Today, Tomorrow, and then future work by discipline (it's a game, so things like: gameplay, rendering, art, design, etc.).

Every morning, the first thing I do is check my today list. If it's empty, I move some things from the tomorrow list in. Then I fill up the tomorrow list with things from the future work lists.

This means I have a list of all the work I need to do, but I don't explicitly plan more than a couple of days ahead - things are too variable for that.

Once tasks (in the today list) are done, they get moved to a 'done' list that I can review later.

It's simple, and seems to work fairly well for me.

I use Basecamp because it's very simple. There are a few text docs that outline different aspects of the project, and I keep updating them as I go along (instead of adding new ones). And, as somebody else wrote, having three to-do lists ("Things to do right away", "New features", "Ideas") is also a good approach. If you have a little time you can pick off small things from the priority list. Stuff from the "Ideas" list either gets kicked out over time, or slowly graduates to "New features" and then to specific items in the priority list.

Generally though, I find that having a site out there and people using it is the best motivator to keep pushing forward. It creates a real sense of urgency and priorities, and you simply won't have the luxury of not focusing on the important stuff that affects people's experience.