After having worked with Jira and Todoist in professional and personal contexts respectively, I have come to a conclusion that if you can code then you ought to create your own productivity tracking app. This conclusion has been made after seeing a high-performing senior member in my org dogfood his own to-do list app and achieve high levels of productivity. Though Jira is good for conducting sprints in a collaborative environment it doesn’t kill to have a to-do list for yourself with bare minimums. I know this sounds crazy because you gotta develop and maintain it, but if you take the exponential outcomes into consideration, it’s one of those low effort and high impact projects where the project itself gets better along with time. It’s not like you’re conceiving a startup idea, cause it has no commercial viability. It’s just that it helps you organize your shit better in a more customizable manner which can yield better productivity.

Of course, the pre-requisite to building this in-house productivity cum todo-list application is to observe a lot of existing ones and strip off the complexity which gets added because it has to be commercially viable. Notion, Todoist, Jira are all actually great but they all fall apart when you put them to personal use. What you need is a programmable todo-app like Emacs ( I didn’t get a chance to use Emacs in a professional context, but it is quite daunting than Vim even for simple tasks). The absolute minimums to build a customizable productivity app is a database and the ability to build views on top of it. Nothing more than that, just the ability to manipulate data of your own will.

So if there were a way to compress this post into a one-liner then that would be “build a productivity app that facilitates to manipulate your data at your will”.