My journey

I have a long history with using project managers, in my latest video I shared a bit of that experience. There are 3 main tools which I actually used for a long period of time. Let’s go over them and I’ll explain which project manager I ended up on choosing for GoZen.

Notion

Notion is great in terms of customizing everything. Databases are its strongest feature and they keep improving their service. Although lately they really focus heavily on the AI part of Notion which I found kind of useless when I gave it a go.

Good points

The freedom of making everything look, somewhat, the way you want is great. Its flexibility and the fact that Notion is free is a great plus! You don’t need to pay for different types of views and all views can be customized to a good extent.

Biggest weakness

What makes Notion great also makes it my least favorite tool to use: customization! I spend way too much time customizing my views and pages to make it look better. Maybe it’s because I am bad at designing stuff, but I could never quite achieve the way I wanted my Notion to look.

Ended up wasting so many hours on trying to make it work because I really did want it to work as I can see a ton of potential in having a system fully setup and running. But yeah, I’m looking for a project manager, not a project postphoner.

Trello

Trello was, and is still, one of my most favorite tools to use. Not much customization, but enough to make it look clean. This is probably one of the strongest points of Trello.

Strong points

Not having unlimited customization is awesome as they basically force you to keep everything clean looking and easy to use without over complicating things. Another feature of Trello which I really like are the automation options, you can make things happen on a schedule and even make Notion send you mails which I really like to receive a mail each morning with my to-do’s and things which really need to be done that day.

Bad points

Although I say that the limitations in customizing are a strong point, it also brings me to the weak points as views are a paid feature in Trello. I tried the trial to see if I’d like those views, but ended up never using them anyway, except for the calendar for which there is a plugin available.

Although Trello did not make me waste time, there was a better option available so I decided to not go with Trello either (at least not for GoZen).

GitHub Projects

As I already use GitHub for the GoZen repo, I decided to give it a proper try and ended up loving the experience.

Customization?

Forget about it, not possible to change that many things. But there are enough views which make working with GitHub projects a nice experience. You can also create custom tags/variables for each entry which is helpful.

Integration

The integration you have with a GitHub project makes it sooo easy to maintain the project and the automation may be limited, there is enough to not over complicate things and to not require too much unneeded manual intervention.

Decision

So yeah, I went for GitHub projects. I like the simplicity which is similar to Trello, and the flexibility of views which you would have with something like Notion but without all the beautification options. ^^