- Context-switching between GitHub, Vercel, and your issue tracker isn't a minor inconvenience — it's a compounding tax on your ability to ship. - Most developer workflow tools solve one layer of the stack and ignore the rest, which means you're still stitching things together manually. - The right workflow isn't the one with the most features — it's the one with the fewest gaps between where work is tracked and where work actually happens. - Automating status updates via GitHub webhooks eliminates an entire category of manual overhead that most developers don't realise they're carrying. - Deployment visibility belongs next to your tasks, not in a separate tab you check out of habit. - AdeptDev consolidates GitHub issues, Vercel deployment status, and task tracking into one workspace — worth trying if tab-switching is genuinely slowing you down.

## The Real Cost of a Fragmented Developer Workflow Every developer has a tab problem. GitHub for issues, Vercel for deployments, Linear or Notion for the roadmap, PostHog for what users are actually doing — and none of them talk to each other in any meaningful way. The work gets done, but the coordination overhead is invisible and relentless. The conventional wisdom is that this is fine. "Use the best tool for each job." That's a reasonable principle until you're a solo founder or a two-person team where every minute of coordination overhead comes directly out of building time. The best tool for each job stops being the best tool when switching between them costs you focus. Here's the thing nobody puts in a blog post: the problem isn't the tools. It's the gaps between them.

## What "Developer Workflow" Actually Means in Practice A developer workflow isn't a flowchart on a whiteboard. It's the sequence of micro-decisions and context switches that happen between "I know what needs to be built" and "it's live and working." For most developers building on a modern stack, that sequence looks roughly like this. You pick up a task from your issue tracker. You write the code. You push to GitHub, which triggers a build on Vercel. You check Vercel to see if the build passed. You go back to GitHub to open a pull request. You update your task status manually because nothing did it for you. Then you do this fifteen times a day. Each individual step is fast. The switching is what kills you. Research on task-switching suggests that every interruption to focused work carries a recovery cost measured in minutes, not seconds — and checking a Vercel build "real quick" is still an interruption.

## The Tools Most Developers Actually Use (and Where They Break Down) **Linear** is the best pure issue tracker available right now. The keyboard shortcuts are fast, the UI doesn't get in your way, and the GitHub sync is genuinely useful. The gap is deployment visibility. Linear knows your PR was merged. It doesn't know whether the Vercel build that followed it succeeded or failed. That's a real gap if you're shipping multiple times a day. **GitHub Projects** is the honest free answer. If you're a solo developer on a tight budget and your workflow lives entirely inside GitHub, it's genuinely good. The moment you want to see deployment status, analytics signals, or a clean roadmap view next to your tasks, you're opening other tabs. **Notion** gets used as a project management tool by a lot of small teams, and it's a reasonable choice for documentation and light planning. But it's not connected to anything. Your Notion board doesn't know your build failed. It doesn't know your PR is waiting for review. It's a static layer on top of a dynamic process, which means it's always slightly out of date.

## Why Automation Is the Lever Most Developers Underuse The most underrated improvement you can make to a developer workflow isn't a new tool. It's removing the manual status updates that nobody wants to do but everyone knows matter. When a task stays in "In Progress" for three days after the PR was merged, it's not because the developer is careless. It's because updating the board is friction with no immediate reward. GitHub webhooks solve this. When you push code, open a pull request, or close an issue, a webhook can move the corresponding task automatically. You've probably known this was possible for years. The reason most developers don't set it up is that configuring webhooks, writing the handler, and keeping it working across projects is its own small project. It's one of those things that's worth doing but easy to deprioritise. The workflow improvement you actually get from automation isn't speed. It's accuracy. Your board reflects reality instead of reflecting the last time someone remembered to update it.

## Deployment Visibility Is a First-Class Workflow Concern Checking Vercel is a five-second task. Do it fifteen times a day and that's ninety seconds of context-switching. Multiply that across 250 working days and you've lost six hours a year to tab management — and that's a conservative estimate for anyone actively shipping. The number goes up fast if you're managing multiple projects or working across environments. But the raw time isn't really the point. The point is that checking Vercel is a reactive behaviour. You push, then you wait, then you check. That waiting-and-checking loop pulls you out of whatever you were doing next. If deployment status lived inside your task workspace, you'd see it without looking for it. This is why deployment tracking belongs in the same place as your tasks, not in a separate dashboard you navigate to out of habit.

## How to Actually Improve Your Workflow Without Rebuilding It From Scratch Start with the gap that costs you the most time. For most developers, that's one of three things: manual status updates, deployment checking, or losing track of what's actually blocking a task. Pick the worst one and fix it before touching anything else. If manual status updates are the problem, set up GitHub webhook automation. If you're using a tool that supports it natively, turn it on. If you're not, it's worth evaluating whether your current tracker is the right one. The configuration overhead of switching tools is real, but so is the overhead of maintaining a board that nobody trusts because it's always out of date. If deployment visibility is the problem, the honest answer is that you either need a tool that surfaces Vercel build status inside your workspace, or you need to accept that tab-switching is part of your workflow and optimise around it. Both are valid choices. The mistake is pretending the gap doesn't exist.

## Kanban for Developers: Why the Column Structure Matters More Than You Think Most developers who use Kanban boards use three columns: Todo, In Progress, Done. That's fine until you have code that's written but not reviewed, or reviewed but not deployed. "Done" means different things at different points in the delivery process, and collapsing them into one column means you lose visibility into where work actually is. A four-column flow — Todo, In Progress, In Review, Completed — maps directly to how code moves through a modern delivery pipeline. In Progress means someone is writing code. In Review means a PR is open. Completed means it's merged and deployed. Each column corresponds to a real state that a GitHub webhook can detect and update automatically. This isn't a philosophical argument about Kanban methodology. It's a practical observation: if your board columns don't match your actual workflow states, the board stops being useful as a coordination tool and becomes a reporting artifact that someone updates before the weekly meeting.

## Wrap Up A fragmented developer workflow isn't a tool problem. It's a gaps problem. The tools you're using are probably fine individually. What's costing you time and focus is the space between them — the manual updates, the tab-switching, the deployment checks, the board that doesn't reflect what's actually shipping. Fix the worst gap first. Automate the status updates if you can. Get deployment visibility into the same place as your tasks. And be honest about whether your current setup is serving you or whether you're serving it. If consolidating GitHub, Vercel, and task tracking into one workspace sounds like it would actually help, AdeptDev is built for exactly that use case. Try it free for 7 days at adeptdev.io.

## What is the best project management tool for solo developers? The honest answer depends on what your workflow actually looks like. If you live entirely in GitHub, GitHub Projects is free and surprisingly capable. If you want faster keyboard-driven task management, Linear is the best pure tracker available. If you want GitHub and Vercel status visible in the same place as your tasks, AdeptDev is built specifically for that. The best tool is the one that matches how you actually work, not the one with the longest feature list. ## How do GitHub webhooks work with project management tools? A GitHub webhook sends an HTTP POST request to a URL you configure whenever a specified event happens — a push, a PR opened, an issue closed. Your project management tool (or a custom handler) receives that payload and takes an action, like moving a task to "In Review" when a PR is opened. Most modern tools support this natively. AdeptDev uses GitHub webhooks to move Kanban cards automatically as code moves through your pipeline, so your board reflects reality without manual updates. ## Why do developers keep switching project management tools? Usually because the tool they're using solves one layer of their workflow but creates friction somewhere else. Jira has too much overhead for small teams. Notion isn't connected to anything live. GitHub Projects lacks roadmap flexibility. The switching cycle tends to continue until developers find a tool that matches their actual delivery pipeline, not just their task list. The gap most tools miss is deployment visibility alongside task status. ## How can I reduce context switching as a developer? The highest-leverage change is getting the information you check reactively — build status, PR state, issue updates — into the same view as the work you're actively managing. Tab-switching is a symptom of information living in the wrong place. Webhook automation helps by pushing state changes to your task board instead of requiring you to pull them from a separate dashboard. Fewer tabs open means fewer reasons to break focus. ## What is a good Kanban board structure for a development team? Four columns map cleanly to a modern delivery pipeline: Todo, In Progress, In Review, and Completed. Todo is backlog. In Progress is active development. In Review is open PRs waiting for merge. Completed is merged and deployed. Each of these states is detectable by a GitHub webhook, which means a well-configured board can update itself automatically as code moves through the pipeline. Three-column boards collapse In Review and Completed, which hides where work is actually getting stuck. ## Is Vercel deployment tracking worth setting up separately? If you're deploying multiple times a day, yes — but "separately" is the wrong framing. The value of deployment tracking comes from seeing build status in context, next to the task or PR it relates to. A standalone Vercel dashboard tells you what happened. Deployment tracking inside your task workspace tells you what happened and why it matters right now. AdeptDev surfaces Vercel build status, logs, and environment info inside the workspace so you don't have to navigate to a separate dashboard to find out if your last push succeeded. ## How do small development teams stay coordinated without a project manager? The honest answer is that coordination overhead doesn't disappear when you don't have a project manager — it gets distributed across the team and usually falls on whoever cares most. The way to reduce it is to automate the status updates that would otherwise require a standup or a Slack message. GitHub webhook integration, automatic task movement on PR events, and deployment visibility in one place replace a significant portion of the coordination work that a project manager would otherwise handle manually.