I built a project tracker because every one I tried lied to me

I run more things than I can hold in my head. An agency, two software products, a couple of side projects, and the writing on this site. For about two years I kept all of that in whatever tool was fashionable, and every one of them had the same flaw, which took me a long time to name.

They all had a number that was meant to tell me how a project was doing, and every one of those numbers could be moved without doing any work.

The number that lies

Notion has "last edited". Rename a page and it is fresh. Trello sorts by activity, and dragging a card to a tidier column counts as activity. Linear has cycles and velocity, which are honest about a team's throughput and say nothing about the six things you started on your own with nobody assigning them. Every to-do app I tried let me add ten sub-tasks to something and feel like I had made progress on it, when what I had done was describe the work in more detail.

The effect is subtle and it compounds. After a few months the tool is full of things that look recently touched and are not. The projects you are genuinely working on and the ones you quietly gave up on in March are indistinguishable, because the tool records that you looked at them, not that anything happened. So you stop trusting it, and then you stop opening it, and then it is another abandoned system with your ideas inside.

What I wanted instead

One number per project, and a rule about when it moves: only when something real happened.

Finishing a step moves it. Deciding the next step moves it, because that is often the only thing standing between a project and motion. Changing the stage moves it. Renaming does not. Dragging it somewhere neater does not. Adding five steps you have not done does not, because planning is not progress, and a tool that rewards you for planning will get a lot of planning.

I could not find that anywhere, so I built it. It is called Brassdeck, and the honest clock is the whole design. Everything else follows from it.

What follows from it

If the clock is honest, a project that has not moved in forty days should look like it. So cards fade as they go quiet. Not red, not a streak, not a badge with a number in it. They recede, the way a piece of paper on a desk gets covered by the newer pieces, and the ones you are actually pushing stay bright.

If the clock is honest, stopping has to be a real outcome rather than a failure to be nagged about. Most of my ideas should be stopped. That is not a problem with me, it is what having ideas is like. So a card can be parked, with a date it comes back, or dropped, with the reason. Both are kept forever. I can see the thing I decided against in June and why, which is worth more than the thing itself was.

If the clock is honest, it must not run over things that are not projects. I keep notes in the same place, because I keep notes everywhere and I wanted them next to the work. A note has no stage and no clock. It never fades and it never asks anything of me. That distinction sounds small and it is most of why I still open the thing.

The part I did not expect

Because the numbers cannot be gamed, the board tells me things I did not want to know. It told me a product I thought I was building had not moved in a month. It told me the side project I felt guilty about was actually fine, because I had deliberately parked it and the parking date had not come. It told me which of my ideas I abandon at the same stage every time.

That last one is the point. A tracker that lets you feel busy will never tell you that, because it does not know. One that only counts real movement knows exactly.

It is free to start, with no card, and the manual is public if you want to see how it works before signing up for anything. I wrote it for myself and I am not sure how many other people have this exact problem. If you do, it is at brassdeck.com.