How I run six projects from one canvas
An agency, two products, three blogs and a business partner, on one screen. This is the actual layout, what I share with whom, and how the assistant reads the same board I do.
People ask how I keep track of everything, and the honest answer used to be "badly". This is the current answer. It is a description of one canvas, what is on it, and the three habits that make it work, using Brassdeck, which I built and wrote about here.
The layout
One card per thing I am carrying. Not per task, per thing. Right now that is an agency website, two software products, a blog for each of them, a project with a friend, and a handful of ideas at the spark stage that may never become anything.
They sit on a canvas, and where a card sits is memory. The product I am building most actively is in the top row. The blogs sit directly under the thing they are about. Ideas I have not committed to sit off to the right, and when one of them starts to matter I drag it left. Nobody arranged this for me and no tool sorted it. That is the point of a canvas over a list: position is a fact I chose, and I remember it the way I remember which drawer the scissors are in.
Every card is the same width and one of three heights. I resisted that for a long time, because free resizing sounds like freedom, and then I noticed I was spending time tidying cards that had grown taller because I added a step. Three sizes and nothing in between turned out to be the whole difference between a canvas that looks arranged and one that looks like a desk after a bad week.
Habit one: write it on the board, not to a person
When I notice something about one of my products, a bug, a feature, a thing I want to change, I do not message anyone about it. I open the card and write it as a step. Sometimes I am on my phone. Sometimes I am not at work and do not want to be, and I know that if I do not write it down I will forget it, and if I message someone about it I will have started a conversation I did not want to have yet.
The board is where the work is described, in my words, with the annoyance still attached. That turns out to be more useful to whoever picks it up than a tidy ticket would be, because the annoyance is the requirement.
Habit two: share a view, never the board
My business partner needs to see the agency work and does not need to see my side projects. A client needs to see their thing and nothing else. So I do not share the board. I make a view, a named subset of cards, and share that. The link shows exactly those cards, laid out however I arranged them inside that view, and nothing else, and it does that at the query rather than by hiding things after the fact, so there is nothing to find in the page source.
A viewer link is read-only and asks for nothing. An editor link asks the person for a name and a colour, and everything they tick carries that colour, so I can see who did what on a board without anyone printing their name against every line.
Habit three: let the assistant read the same board
The thing I did not expect to rely on. Brassdeck has a connector for Claude and ChatGPT, so when I am working with one of them on a product, it can read the card, see what is left, add steps I decided on in the conversation, and tick things off as they get done. Same board, same vocabulary, no copying between windows.
It is also instructed, deliberately, never to create a card without asking. An assistant that quietly fills your canvas with its guesses has stopped being useful. It offers once, in one sentence, and makes the card only if I say yes. That rule has held.
What I do not do
I do not set due dates, because I am the only person on most of these and a date I set for myself is a date I will move. I do not assign anything. I do not have a "backlog" column, because a backlog is where ideas go to be forgotten with a clear conscience. If I am not going to do a thing, I park it with a date or drop it with a reason, and it stays on the board saying so.
And I do not review the whole board every morning. I look at what has gone quiet, because the cards that faded are the only ones with a question in them. The bright ones are fine. They are bright because I am on them.
If you carry more than you can hold, the free tier is enough to try this with your own things: brassdeck.com.