No one loves their task manager.
Surprisingly, it’s because software is expensive to make. For software to be economically viable, a lot of people need to buy it. To make something a lot of people need to buy, it needs to work for a lot of people. To make something work for a lot of people, you have to compromise on how it works.
That’s why you end up with the same task manager used by freelancers for client work, engineers for sprints and students for homework assignments. The features that would make it great for freelancers (like per-client billing) are useless to the others. So they get cut. It reminds me of these composite images created by averaging thousands of faces. A face created from many but of no one in particular. That’s your task manager.
Some products handle this compromise better than others. If the product has a universal task (search, maps, calculators) almost everyone wants the same experience. If you designed a calculator specifically for freelancers, engineers and students, they would all be the same.
If the product has a personal workflow (task manager, note taking, bug tracking), almost everyone wants a different experience. If you designed a task manager specifically for freelancers, engineers and students, they would all be different.
That’s been the deal for software since it existed. Everyone got the average.
This has all changed in the last 6 months. AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) have gotten dramatically better. Companies are forcing engineers to adopt them. Non-engineers have started using them too. Creating software is now cheap.
Since it’s cheap, it’s now economically viable to build a product for a small group of people. That allows you to design specifically for how those few people work. Instead of a single task manager for freelancers, engineers and students, there can be one for freelancers, another for engineers and another for students.
Why stop there? If the cost of writing software approaches zero, it becomes economically viable to do it for a single person. If software is built just for you, there’s no need to make design compromises for anyone else. It will fit your exact specifications. If you don’t love that product, I don’t know what to tell you.
Who would write software just for you? Well… you would. People who build software (designers, engineers, product managers) are already doing it but the tools are good enough for anyone to use. Automate your own workflows, build internal or personal tools you wish existed, make a tracker for whatever you’re tracking now in a spreadsheet.
Every weekend, I build something new. This post is about task managers because that’s what I was working on when I had the idea. It runs in the terminal, built for agents and has exactly the right level of structure (areas, initiatives, projects, tasks). It works exactly the way I want. If it doesn’t, I change it so it does.
I love my task manager. You would probably hate it. That’s the point.