Clarifying what I mean by “projects”
The various responses I’ve gotten to yesterday’s post tell me that I need to be a bit more specific about what I mean by a “project,” because how it relates to my work is very different than how the various project-tracking tools do it.
Project-tracking tools think of a project as being a distinct set of work items, often shared by an entire team, going for a single end-goal deliverable. The tasks for a single project live on the project’s own board, and they do not intermingle.
However, in my situation, I am making music for a whole bunch of separate projects (external to me and my own planning), but which I want to all have visible in a single place. Some of these projects might only need one track. Some of them might need a dozen or so.
So, let’s say that I am currently making music for three games (call them Floop, Ploop, and Bungtris) and one short film (Debbie’s Day). Floop and Ploop each have three tracks to be made, Bungtris only has one track to start with but might need more down the road, and Debbie’s Day is just one long continuous soundtrack but it is broken up into, say, five scenes.
What I’d really like is a planning mechanism that has two views:
- A Kanban-style board
- A nested list of tasks and subtasks
The nested task list is the easier one to demonstrate, since I can just write up a simple outlined list to demonstrate how it should kinda-sorta operate:
Floop [IN PROGRESS]
Stealth puzzle-platformer, music style should be similar to Super Hexagon meets Animal Crossing Wild World.
Title track [DONE]
Stealth action [IN PROGRESS]
Credits [PLANNING]
Should be whimsical and full of fruit
Ploop [IN PROGRESS]
Game description goes here, etc. etc.
Reference art:
Track 1 [PLANNING]
Track 2 [PLANNING]
Track 3 [DONE]
Bungtris [PLANNING]
Game will be about fitting bungs into shapes. Designer still working on the visual design.
- Main theme [PLANNING]
Debbie’s Day [IN PROGRESS]
Rough workprint delivered 2/30/2025
Anyway, then the kanban board would need to be able to show tasks and subtasks with a visual distinction between the two, and ideally be able to filter it to only show subtasks that are part of a specific task. Maybe it could use colors to tie them together or something, like maybe the background color of a task becomes the border color of a subtask?
It’d also be nice if on the kanban board I could set the size of a card based on its total effort remaining, which should automatically include the size of subtasks. For example, if a game has 10 tracks which will each take 2 “story points” (ugh), then the game’s card should appear to be 20 units large at first, but it should shrink as the work items complete. But that doesn’t work with kanban columns so maybe a presentation where like, subtasks are grouped by their parent task within each column?
Something like this:
The key things that are part of my requirements here:
- All of the separate projects I’m working on need to go onto a single planning board
- There needs to be a clear visual association between projects and their individual work items
- I need to be able to focus on a single project sometimes, and at other times I need to see the broad view of everything that’s on my plate
- Basically it needs to be, like, a “board of boards”
And then the nice-to-have would be the ability to share a top-level board showing my current time commitments to potential clients, but without any confidential information visible. But that’s just a nice-to-have (as a useful thing for letting people know if they should even approach me for a job to begin with) and really this idea is more about my own planning.
I’m also not beholden to the specific things I showed above! But I definitely need the ability to track all of my projects simultaneously while also being able to keep the individual tasks strongly associated with each project.