Project management (and project management software, and project management literature)

Purports to be for neurodivergent people. Silently drops you into a "pro trial"; the ostensibly open-source offering is really open-core with a nerfed open core. Especially predatory, being aimed at non-technical people who ipso facto struggle to do things about things.

Unusably dependent on clicking. UX horrorshow.

"Open continuum". Nerfed open core, which I should have guessed for myself given the state of their build documentation. A special place in hell for IndiaFOSS sponsors who advocate for rights ratcheting.

Quite usable. If only it was more usable on mobile. The person who creates a mobile spreadsheet editing idiom that I am willing to use for text entry gets lifetime monthly cookies of their choice in their meatspace mailbox. In the end I suspect I will return to a spreadsheet with a form in front of it, or some homegrown version of the same thing with a SQLite and HTML.

The metadata is usable because it's so extensible, and because the library of templates is so rich. Unfortunately most of that just isn't available in the free tier (and if all I wanted was a todo list I would have used a todo list software or notes app). The terrible export and account closure story was what ha me running away from it as fast as I could, though. There is no way I'm ever trusting Asana with my data.

So far so good. Self-hostable, SQL backed, does not make me want to poke my eyes out morally or otherwise.

• Still more click-driven than I'd like but at least there's a command palette.
• It's available on Android and at least for now that's a limiting factor. Neither the phone ubiquity nor the phone dependency ¹ can currently be gainsaid.

• Arbitrary extensibility helps everything. Asana's library of strategy representations into which you can assemble project-sized concerns was extensive and educational. But! This layer is only available in the paid tier. My discovery of this was shortly thereafter followed by my discovery of its utterly abysmal export and account deletion stories.
• Keyboard shortcuts really, really matter. If I can't write into the thing it is useless to me.
• Having templates and structure in place to test out various workflows is really, really helpful – Leantime's "vision canvas" template was a game changer for me in terms of understanding why these things even existed outside of being highly structured task tracking – what all the metadata is even good for.
  • It lets you get on the strategic level.
• That said, I've had enough metadata fetish in my life to know that the lust for it quickly outstrips its utility. I am populating the fields I've been given as fast as I can without overly worrying about if I'm tracking everything just right off the bat.
• Claude integration is great for skipping through the bits of it that are deadening, boring, or overwhelming. Having a mostly-wrong-but-right-vibes draft to edit down is just as good of a way to learn task management as it is a way of learning anything.
• Metadata is organic. Claude likes to annotate tasks with emoji, category-prefixes, and heavy descriptions; the lesson I take away from it is that sometimes the structure helps you think, and sometimes it gets in the way of thinking. Where there is friction it's better to do the locally sensible thing.
• It turns out that local changes is a really good principle in general. If you assume you know what needs to surface in advance of the surfacing, you trip yourself up. If you try to fit all your insights into the categories even when you experience the friction, you get in the way of your own thinking. If you try to eliminate all friction in advance, though, you get in the way of being able to think at all. This is because the leading edge of your work is where all the exceptions will of necessity happen (it's where you start learning your unknown unknowns.)
• Firms surface these exceptions to managers. The whole reason all the beautiful project management structures that exist prioritize the prominent display of whatever is going wrong is that that's where the hyperspecific novel work always is. The way a firm metabolizes uncertainty is via its network of cooperating agents; ideally, if the game theoretic architecture of the coalition of people is resilient to the challenge introduced by a problem, the uncertainty propagates through it, often via bookkeeping tools like these, to an agent who makes a decision that is then fractally semi-destructively implemented by the whole coordinating organism.
• I want better metabolic processes at my level, and I want them to actually have representation in this system.
• I can surface these exceptions for myself, and over time it's started sucking less for me emotionally. Staring into the abyss as a core life skill has been very helpful for me in that regard. I get real-life vertigo from doing it, which was a fun bit of somatic consonance to discover on a third-floor balcony in Manali.
• I don't know what it is about project management software that seems to make its project lifecycles as toxic as they seem to be from the outside. If feels like you just can't get the smell of enterprise off of them.

Perhaps I've got to shadow somebody who's that good at this. Somebody whose work and methods i can fall in love with.

Who writes to help you build an ear for this stuff? The way good books about writing do?

Lit specific to consultants, or independent creatives, or software engineers, may be more helpful in a cookbook kind of way. Lit specific to anything might help me build a taste for cookbooks and how they relate to cooking.

I need to learn this in a shop that does it well – actually well – and pick it up as I go along.

Maybe we just have to pay close critical attention to the cream of the LinkedIn crop, and see what we find.

She's Actually Good at this. I'm allergic to a bunch of her advice, in that I instantly viscerally hate a lot of what she says to do, but it's also good advice a lot of the time, in that when I breathe my way through my reaction, and evaluate the advice for its logical consistency and applicability to the world, it all typechecks; and when I apply it, it often works well. (Am I already in an apprenticeship? Am I a shitty apprentice?)