A couple years ago, somebody recommended Carl Pullein’s YouTube channel on the Mac Power Users forum.

This really messed me up.

The video that caught my eye was called ​“Stop Using Your Task Manager as a Project Manager,” and it sort of blew my mind. I have been a devout Omnifocus user for fifteen years or so, with brief flirtations with Things and Todoist, and have always stored my tasks there.

Carl’s thesis is that Omnifocus, Things, Todoist, whatever — these are not project managers. The tasks might be linked to projects, but you’re not dealing with the project in those apps. You’re working with the tasks. Carl’s problem is that, when you check off a task in those apps, they disappear from view. And if it’s going to be a project manager, you need a bird’s eye view of things.

This has sent me down a years-long rabbit hole. While Carl espouses Gantt charts, I hate them. I’m sure they’re useful, but I have a job, you know? Carl also espouses spreadsheets, but my friends, I am allergic to spreadsheets. Extremely allergic.

I am a designer by trade. I might sound superficial, but if I’m going to use a tool, it’s got to be aesthetically pleasing. Gantt charts and spreadsheets are not going to cut it.

So I’ve tried Asana, ClickUp, Notion, and several others that I genuinely don’t remember anymore because the dalliances were always brief. Asana got kicked out for being too expensive for a single person. ClickUp is a disaster; it’s so broken that should be punishable by law.

And Notion is… well, it’s Notion. Do you like proselytizing the software you use and spending all your time click-click-clicking around instead of getting something done? Notion is for you. Do you like software that looks like junk, but is extremely customizable? Notion is for you. 

I have spent years on this, and still don’t have a great project management solution. At this point, given the way that LLMs are doing, I’m considering writing everything in Markdown docs (I love Markdown and have used plain text for all my notes since 2010).

I have a few needs:

  1. First, I am a single individual. Sometimes, I need to share tasks. For example, my wife is on maternity leave for the next eleven months, and she wants to help with my business’s finances. (She never really sees the money going in or out of the business, I think she’s always wanted to, and it takes two hours a month — so she has the time.) I need to share my monthly project with her so she knows what receipts she needs to grab. So sharing needs to be possible.
  2. I take a lot of meeting notes.
  3. I write a lot of notes while working on a project, and trying to reason something out.
  4. I also collect all the files clients send me.

Outside of tasks, everything else is basically a simple file, or a collection of files. So I think what I’m going to do going forward is pretty simple:

  1. I need to use a task manager that supports sharing projects. In my case, since the only person I really need to share tasks with is my spouse, I could use Things or Omnifocus and give her my login credentials. Then let sync just deal with the rest. (Otherwise, the ​“best” option for my tastes might be something like Todoist.)
  2. Each client should get one meeting note. For the past two or three years, each meeting note has been its own log in Notion. I have never reviewed those files, or at least very rarely. Clients often have multiple projects, but those projects might weave together (like a book design and an accompanying website, for example). I’ve been using databases to connect everything in Notion, but this seems like tremendous overkill for one person. It’s so much slower than just typing in plain text on my Mac.
  3. For the notes while I’m working on a project, I should make each note a date-based plain-text note and stick it in a project. Maybe I should just make this one file too, which H2s for different dates? Some of these notes run pretty long; much like this post, I ramble about things that would be of interest to only me.
  4. Those files that clients send me already go into the appropriate project directories in my Mac, in a subdirectory called 01 Assets (numbered so I can sort them in the Finder alphanumerically).

This would mean that everything that touches a file is a file inside a file system, and todo lists are the only things that aren’t done in plain text. If a project ever needs a top-level file describing it, that’s a non-issue in this system too.

I think this would cover it. A standard project directory would look like this:

Client Name:
- Client Name Meeting Notes.txt
- Project Name
	01 Assets
	02 Editable Files
	03 Review 
	04 Delivery
	Project Name.txt
	Project Name Notes.txt (or a subfolder)

Then tasks can live wherever they need to live.

If you’re reading this and you have any other options you might recommend for something like this, let me know! I’ve never worked in a team in an office setting (always freelanced and ran a studio), and this is one of my blind spots.