I am not a naturally organized person. My desk is a monument to chaos. My browser tabs are a multiverse of abandoned thoughts. For years, the state of my side projects reflected this. They lived in a frantic constellation of Google Docs, Trello cards I never looked at, half-filled notebooks, and frantic text files on my desktop named things like ‘IDEASFINAL(2)REAL.txt’. I would get a burst of motivation, hack away at something for a weekend, and then life would intervene. When I came back two weeks later, I’d spend an hour just trying to remember what I was thinking. It was a surefire way to kill momentum.
I realized my system wasn’t a system at all; it was a collection of dumping grounds. I needed one place to corral the madness, something fast and simple that wouldn’t become a project in itself. After trying (and abandoning) more complex tools, I found something that actually stuck. It was a minimalist outliner and note-taking app called tronco. What drew me in was its utter lack of ceremony. You just start typing. It looks like a text editor from 1995, and that’s the point. There’s no learning curve, no ‘onboarding flow,’ no feature tour. It got out of my way immediately, which was the first and most important test.
The Power of Forgetting
My old method relied on me remembering to check my project management app or my notebook. That required discipline I do not possess. The breakthrough with a simple outliner was the ability to offload everything, not just the ‘important’ tasks. I started dumping every single related thought into one expanding document. A bug I noticed at 11 PM? I’d open the tronco doc and add it under a ‘Bugs’ node. A random feature idea I had while walking the dog? I’d add it under ‘Future Maybe.’ A link to a technical article I needed to read? It went in ‘Reference.’
This meant I could truly forget about it. The anxiety of holding a mental to-do list evaporated. The document became my project’s external brain. When I had time to work, I would open it, collapse all the nodes, and see the big picture. Then I’d drill down. The act of organizing thoughts into a hierarchy, just by indenting lines, forced a tiny bit of clarity. Is this a main goal or a sub-task of something bigger? The structure emerged naturally over time, without me having to design a perfect system upfront.
Why Fancy Features Were My Enemy
I’ve used the big-name tools. I’ve created beautiful boards with custom labels, automated workflows, and integrated calendars. They felt productive for about a week. Then they became a chore to maintain. Updating a card felt like paperwork. The sheer number of options created decision fatigue: ‘Should this be a high-priority label or a critical-priority tag? Should I assign it to myself? What’s the due date?’ I’d end up spending more time managing the tool than doing the work.
A plain text outliner eliminates that completely. There is no status field. You just move the line. A task that’s done? I might put a dash in front of it or move it to a ‘Done’ section at the bottom. A feature that’s on hold? I indent it under an ‘On Hold’ header. The lack of formal structure is the structure. You invent your own conventions, and they can change from project to project. This flexibility is liberating. It accepts your chaos and lets you gently nudge it toward order, on your own terms.
The best tool isn’t the one with the most features, but the one you actually use without thinking.
My Actual Workflow for a Coding Project
Let me describe what this looks like in practice, right now, for a small web app I’m building. My main tronco document for it is a living thing. It’s not pretty, but it’s functional.
- At the top, I have the core project goal in one sentence.
- Under that, a ‘Current Focus’ section with the 2-3 things I’m actively coding this week.
- Then a ‘Next Up’ section with items that are defined and ready.
- A ‘Backlog/Ideas’ section for everything else, which I occasionally prune and sort.
- A ‘Bugs & Quirks’ list where I note anything weird, no matter how small.
- A ‘Links & Resources’ node with URLs to documentation, design inspirations, and hosting info.
- A ‘Log’ section where I just date and jot down what I did in a session (this is surprisingly helpful for momentum).
- A ‘Done’ section at the very bottom where I move completed items, so I can see progress.
The entire document is maybe 150 lines. I can see all of it in one scroll. When I finish a work session, I spend 60 seconds moving lines around, promoting something from ‘Next Up’ to ‘Current Focus,’ and that’s it. The maintenance overhead is nearly zero.
When a Simple Tool Isn’t the Right Tool
I’m not saying this is a magic bullet for everything. It works for me because my side projects are largely solo endeavors. If you’re coordinating a team of five people on a client project with hard deadlines, you probably need assignable tasks, time tracking, and a shared calendar. The friction of a formal tool is worth it for the shared understanding.
But for the personal project, the hobby, the learning experiment, or even just planning a complicated home renovation? Over-engineering your management system is a real risk. It creates a barrier to entry. Sometimes you just need to start, and a tool that feels as lightweight as a text file removes that barrier completely. It keeps the focus on the work, not on the process of tracking the work. For me, that distinction made all the difference between projects that fizzle out and projects that, slowly but surely, get finished.
The real win wasn’t finding some perfect software. It was realizing that for my brain, the simplest possible capture system was the only one I wouldn’t abandon. It met me where I was, in my chaos, and didn’t ask me to change. It just gave me a place to put it all down. And sometimes, that’s enough.
