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

Maybe i am weird but i just use the Gmail Draft as a todo and note taking tool.

I have a white board right above my monitor. I write a daily "to do" list there and check off items as they get done. Items that do not get done in one day get moved to the next day. I try not to let the list get too long (I know I need to do 100 things, but if I can only do 3 today then my to do list only contains 3). It keeps me sane and focused.

In the past I tried something similar to scrum (have a master list of everything I needed to do). But since I do have a day job and other responsibilities, I found that seeing a massive list got too overwhelming. Now I focus only on what I can get done now, not worrying about the pile of things waiting to be done.

I maintain a sorted list of tasks that are concrete action items, tagged with a priority (high, medium, low, or wishlist). Whenever I figure out something else that I need to do, I add it to the task list. While I'm working, I generally ignore the task list and work on whatever I feel like at the moment. If I can't think of something to do, I'll grab something off the top of the list.

Every Friday morning, I step back and evaluate my progress: I write a paragraph about what I did during the week, a paragraph about the overall sentiment of the feedback that I got during the week, and a paragraph about where the project stands in comparison to its long-term goals. During this time, I also go over my task list and add, remove, or reprioritize tasks as needed to make the list reflect reality.

Over the summer I started building a little command line tool to do task management for small projects I was working on (find it here: http://github.com/198d/clask). It basically creates another root branch in the repository you're working on and writes YAML files with various pieces of task metadata. The command line tool really just facilitated the editing/viewing of the underlying YAML files.

More recently, at work, I've been using a Trello board, as I'm sure many others here do.

For small projects, I use text files, and keep them inside the repository.

This way the files are available whenever I switch computers and they are automatically backed up.

I keep several text files in a directory: 1. A backlog. This is roughly similar to a scrum backlog. It's disorganized and needs to be, because it's important that I can easily put stuff in here when an idea comes to me without having to get distracted organizing things.

2. A plan. I periodically select a few things fro mthe backlog and organize them into a chunk of work that I plan on doing next. I put checkboxes like this [ ] next to each item, and when I finish the item, I change it to this [x]. The item that I am currently working on looks like this [.] to indicate it's in progress. That way when I get interrupted for 2 hours or a day and come back, I can easily see what I was doing and get back in the groove.

Periodically I move everything I have completed from the plan text file into a file like history/2012-12.txt. I put a date right before the items I put in. This way I can go back and see what I completed on a given time period.

Also into the plan file I will put notes of issues I'm researching, which can occasionally be useful to go back and look at a month or more later. Those notes get moved into the history file when that chunk of work gets completed.

The benefit of this approach is that I can use this method even when I am traveling on the train, and it let's me easily switch computers and keep working. I find my to do list to be just as important as my code, because it's very hard for me to be productive on a large project without continuous planning.