- Solo developers don't have a workflow problem, they have a context-switching problem. Every tool lives in a separate tab, and the cost is invisible until it isn't. - GitHub, Vercel, and your issue tracker were not designed to talk to each other. The gaps between them are where focus dies. - The fix isn't a new productivity system. It's reducing the number of places you have to look to understand the current state of your project. - Automating task movement via GitHub webhooks eliminates an entire category of manual busywork that most developers don't even realize they're doing. - Deployment visibility belongs next to your tasks, not in a separate dashboard you have to remember to check. - AdeptDev consolidates GitHub, Vercel, and project tracking into one workspace, built specifically for the solo developer and small team stack.

## The Real Reason Solo Developers Feel Constantly Behind It's not that you're slow. It's that you're running five dashboards in your head simultaneously. GitHub for issues and PRs, Vercel for build status, some form of task tracker for what you're supposed to be working on, maybe PostHog or Plausible for whether the thing you shipped last week actually moved the needle. Each one is a context switch. Each one costs more than the five seconds it takes to open the tab. The problem with solo development isn't the coding. Most developers who go solo are genuinely good at the craft. The problem is everything around the coding: the decisions about what to build next, the awareness of whether what you just shipped is working, the mental overhead of keeping all the moving pieces in sync without a team to distribute that load across. This article is about that overhead. Specifically, what it looks like, where it actually comes from, and how to cut it down without building a second career out of optimizing your productivity setup.

## Why Context-Switching Hits Solo Developers Harder Than Teams On a team, different people carry different context. One person knows the deployment status. Another knows what's in the backlog. A third is watching the error logs. The context is distributed, so no single person has to hold all of it. When you're solo, you are all of those people. You have to hold all of that context yourself, all the time. Opening the Vercel dashboard to check a build status is a five-second task. Do it fifteen times a day and that's ninety seconds of context-switching. Multiply that by 250 working days and you've lost six hours a year to tab management, and that's the optimistic estimate, before you account for the time it takes to re-engage with what you were actually doing. Cal Newport's research on deep work puts the re-engagement cost at twenty-plus minutes per interruption. The math gets ugly fast. The thing nobody mentions in reviews of productivity tools is that the switching cost isn't just time. It's the degradation of the mental model you're holding. Every time you leave your editor to check something external, you're partially offloading the problem you were solving. Sometimes you don't fully reload it when you come back.

## The Hidden Cost of Manual Task Updates Here's a specific scenario. You finish a feature, push a branch, open a PR. Now you have to go to your task tracker and move the card from "In Progress" to "In Review." It takes thirty seconds. It feels fine. But you do this dozens of times a week, and more importantly, you sometimes forget to do it. Then your task board stops reflecting reality. Then you stop trusting your task board. Then the task board becomes a thing you update in bursts every few days, which means it's never accurate, which means it's only useful for planning, not for understanding where things actually stand right now. This is the real problem with manual task management: it's not the time, it's the drift. The board drifts from reality, and you compensate by keeping more in your head, which is exactly the thing you were trying to avoid. Ask any developer who's tried to maintain a Notion board solo for more than two months. GitHub webhooks solve this. When a webhook fires on a push or a PR open or an issue close, the task moves automatically. The board stays accurate without you touching it. That's not a convenience feature. That's the difference between a system you can trust and one you can't.

## What a Trustworthy Solo Workflow Actually Looks Like A workflow you can trust has three properties. First, it reflects current state without manual updates. Second, it shows you the information you need without requiring you to go find it. Third, it doesn't require you to maintain the system itself as a separate project. Most task trackers fail the first test. Linear is the best pure issue tracker available right now. The obvious objection to this article is that Linear covers most of what's described above. And it does, for issue tracking. But it doesn't know whether your Vercel build succeeded. It doesn't know whether the PR that closed the issue deployed cleanly to production. For a solo developer who is also the DevOps person, that gap is real and it shows up every single day. GitHub Projects is the other obvious answer, and for a solo developer on a tight budget, it's genuinely good. The kanban view works, the GitHub integration is native, and the price is zero. But you're still switching tabs to check Vercel. You're still not seeing your PostHog event counts next to the feature that was supposed to drive them. The consolidation problem doesn't go away.

## Separating Roadmap Work from Bug Work This one gets glossed over in almost every article about developer workflow, but it matters. Roadmap tasks and bug reports are fundamentally different objects. A roadmap task is something you decided to build. A bug is something that broke. They have different urgency profiles, different sources of truth, and different resolution patterns. Mixing them into a single backlog creates a prioritization nightmare. The conventional advice is to use labels or tags to separate them. You know this if you've tried it. Labels work until the board gets busy, and then you're filtering constantly, and the filter state never persists the way you want, and you end up with a mental model of "the real backlog" that lives in your head rather than in the tool. That's the drift problem again. Two separate boards, one for roadmap and one for bugs, solves this structurally rather than by convention. The bug board can pull directly from GitHub issues. The roadmap board is where you make deliberate decisions about what to build. They don't compete for attention in the same view.

## Deployment Visibility Is Not Optional If you're shipping to production regularly (and you should be), deployment status is not a nice-to-have. It's operational information. A failed build means a user-facing feature didn't ship. A deployment with a runtime error means something is broken in production right now. You need to know this as fast as possible, and you need to know it in the context of the work you were doing, not in a separate dashboard you check when you remember to. The real problem shows up around week three of a new project. You're shipping fast, you're building momentum, and then a build fails silently. You don't notice for two hours because you were heads-down in the next feature. By the time you catch it, you've built on top of a broken deploy. Untangling that costs more than the two hours you would have spent catching it immediately. Vercel's own dashboard is good. There's no argument against that. But it's another tab, another place to look, another thing to remember. When deployment status lives next to the task that triggered the deployment, the feedback loop closes without you having to close it manually.

## The Setup That Doesn't Become a Second Job The failure mode for solo developer tooling is over-engineering the system. You've seen this. You spend a weekend building a Notion workspace with linked databases, filtered views, and rollup properties, and it works beautifully for about ten days. Then a project phase shifts, the structure doesn't quite fit the new reality, and updating the system starts to feel like work. So you stop updating it. Drift again. The rule of thumb is: if the system requires you to actively maintain it, it will eventually fail. The only systems that survive solo development long-term are the ones that maintain themselves. Webhooks that move tasks automatically. Deployment status that pulls in without a manual refresh. Analytics that surface in context rather than requiring a separate login. This is the actual design constraint for a solo developer workflow. Not "what features does it have" but "how much does it cost me to keep it accurate." The answer should be close to zero.

## Wrap Up The context-switching problem is not solved by adding another tool. It's solved by reducing the number of places you have to look. A trustworthy solo workflow keeps your task board accurate automatically, shows you deployment status in context, and separates roadmap decisions from bug triage structurally. Those three things will do more for your daily output than any productivity framework. If you're building on a modern stack (Next.js, Vercel, GitHub) and you're spending meaningful time each day just checking the state of your own project, AdeptDev is worth a look. It connects GitHub webhooks to your Kanban boards so tasks move when you push code or close issues, pulls Vercel build status into your workspace, and keeps roadmap and bug tracking separate by design. Try it free for 7 days at adeptdev.io.

## How do I stop context-switching between GitHub and my task tracker? The most effective fix is automating the link between the two. GitHub webhooks can fire when you push a branch, open a PR, or close an issue, and a connected task board can move the corresponding card automatically. That removes the manual update step entirely. Tools like AdeptDev do this out of the box. If you're rolling your own, the GitHub webhooks API is well-documented and the payload contains enough context to drive most state transitions you'd care about. ## Is Linear good enough for solo developers or is it overkill? Linear is genuinely excellent for issue tracking and it's not overkill in terms of complexity. The interface is fast, the keyboard shortcuts are real, and the cycle and project views are useful even for one person. The gap is deployment visibility. Linear doesn't know whether your Vercel build succeeded or whether a closed issue actually made it to production. For a solo developer who is also managing their own infrastructure, that missing context is a real daily friction point. ## Should I use GitHub Projects or a separate task tracker? GitHub Projects is the right answer if your budget is zero and your workflow is simple. The native GitHub integration means issues sync without configuration, and the kanban view is functional. The limitation is that everything lives inside GitHub, so your deployment status (Vercel), your analytics (PostHog, Plausible), and your roadmap planning all still require separate tabs. If you're doing more than twenty deploys a month and actively managing a roadmap alongside bug triage, a dedicated workspace that integrates those sources is worth the cost. ## What is the best way to track Vercel deployments alongside my tasks? The cleanest approach is a workspace that pulls Vercel build status directly rather than requiring you to check the Vercel dashboard separately. AdeptDev does this: deployment status, build logs, and environment info are visible inside the same workspace as your Kanban boards. The alternative is setting up Vercel webhook notifications to Slack or email, which gives you alerts but not persistent visibility. Alerts are better than nothing, but they don't give you the full build history in context when you need to debug a failed deploy two hours later. ## How do I keep my task board accurate without manually updating it? GitHub webhooks are the answer. When you configure a webhook on your repository, GitHub sends a POST request to your endpoint on events like push, pull_request, and issues. A connected task board can listen for these events and move cards automatically. The four transitions that cover most of a developer's workflow are: branch push moves a task to In Progress, PR open moves it to In Review, PR merge moves it to Completed, and issue close syncs the bug tracker. Setting this up manually requires a small server or a serverless function. AdeptDev handles it without configuration. ## Why do my task boards always drift out of sync with reality? Because they depend on manual updates, and manual updates get skipped when you're in flow. The drift is predictable: you update the board when you start a task, sometimes when you finish it, and rarely during the in-between states. After a few weeks, the board reflects your intentions rather than your actual progress. The structural fix is automation, not discipline. If the board updates when you push code, it stays accurate without requiring you to remember to update it. Discipline-based systems fail under pressure. Automated systems don't care whether you're in flow or not. ## Can a solo developer realistically maintain a roadmap and a bug tracker at the same time? Yes, but only if they're structurally separate. Mixing roadmap tasks and bugs in a single backlog creates a prioritization problem: bugs feel urgent and tend to crowd out roadmap work, even when the bug is low-severity and the roadmap item is high-value. Two boards with different intake sources (roadmap from your own planning, bugs from GitHub issues) keeps the decisions separate. You triage bugs on one board and make deliberate roadmap decisions on the other. The overhead of two boards is lower than it sounds, especially when bug cards are created automatically from GitHub issues rather than manually.