Article
My personalized productivity tool (Corvid)
How I manage context and my workload with a custom built-for-me tool.
- Maturity
- Seedling · Draft
- Published
- Reading time
- 1 min read
This is a draft: an early, rough idea. Expect gaps and opinions that may change.
The problem
As I previously wrote, I've been dealing with the change in our industry by adapting my skills and expanding my context when working. In this post, I'm going to explain exactly how I've done that with the product that I built for myself, Corvid.
The goal of this post isn't for you to use the tool that I've built. Quite the opposite: it's to encourage you to build something for you that matches the needs that you have. You can draw inspiration from the things I've done and the features that I've added to my tool, but primarily this is built for me.
The needs
Top priority for me is being able to see as much relevant information as I can about every single project that's on my plate at a glance. Hiding important context behind links or conversation threads means I'm more likely to lose them in the shuffle. This means I care a lot about seeing exact statuses on projects, pull requests, and links to relevant conversations to minimize the looking.
not worded great, working on it
Specifically, here are the things that I care about for tasks that I'm working on:
- What tasks am i working on
- What kind of task is it (bug/feature) and for what stakeholder (product/marketing/operations)
- What's most important to me right now
And for tasks that I want to keep on my radar:
- What high-impact project am I working on next
Per-project needs
- Github PR statuses
- Links to slack conversations, docs, figma
- Links to linear projects/tasks and overall status
- Links to conductor workspace for AI tasks
How do I use all this day-to-day
Up next, I'll discuss wow I actually use this tool. Day to day, how do I actually get items onto it? How do I move things along, and how do I actually interact with the work that I'm doing?