- Most solo developer-founders don't have a workflow problem. They have a context-switching problem disguised as a workflow problem. - The instinct to add more tools almost always makes it worse. The fix is reducing the number of places you have to look, not increasing them. - GitHub, Vercel, and your issue tracker are three separate systems that don't talk to each other by default. That gap costs you more than you think. - A good developer workflow isn't about discipline or morning routines. It's about making the right next action obvious without having to think about it. - Automating state transitions (task moves when you push code, not when you remember to move it) is the single highest-leverage change most solo founders can make. - AdeptDev connects GitHub, Vercel, and your task board into one workspace so you're not stitching this together yourself.

## The Real Problem Isn't Productivity You don't have a productivity problem. You have a coordination problem, and you're the only person on the team, so it's invisible. When you're a solo developer-founder, every context switch is a full context switch. There's no colleague to hold the thread while you check the Vercel dashboard, no standup to force you to articulate what you're actually working on. You carry everything in your head, which works fine until it doesn't, and it usually stops working around the point where you have more than two things in flight. The conventional advice is to pick a productivity system. GTD, time-blocking, Pomodoro. That advice is mostly wrong for developers. The problem isn't time management. It's that your tools don't know what each other are doing, so you have to be the integration layer, manually, all day.

## Why Five Tabs Is the Default Here's a typical feature ship for a solo founder. You write the code. You push to GitHub. You open the Vercel dashboard to watch the build. You go back to your issue tracker to move the card. You check your analytics tool to see if the change affected anything. That's four or five context switches for one unit of work, and none of those tools told the others what happened. This isn't a discipline failure. It's a systems design failure. The tools were built independently, for teams with dedicated roles, and they assume someone else is doing the coordination. When you're the whole team, that coordination falls on you. The real cost isn't the five seconds it takes to open a tab. It's the three minutes of mental re-entry after each one. Do that fifteen times a day and you've burned through a meaningful chunk of your deep work capacity on tab management.

## The Tool-Adding Trap The instinct when you feel disorganized is to add a new tool. A better Notion setup. A new Obsidian plugin. A time-tracking app. This almost always makes it worse. Every tool you add is a place you have to check. Every place you have to check is a place where information can go stale. The solo founder who has GitHub, Linear, Notion, Vercel, PostHog, and Slack open simultaneously isn't more organized than the one with three tabs. They're just more anxious. The right question isn't "what tool am I missing?" It's "what information do I need in one place to make the right next decision without thinking about it?" That reframe changes everything about how you set up your workflow.

## What a Developer Workflow Actually Needs Strip it down. A solo developer-founder needs to know three things at any given moment: what they're supposed to be working on, whether the thing they just shipped is working, and what's broken that they haven't fixed yet. That's it. Everything else is noise. Your workflow should make those three things visible without requiring you to open multiple tools or remember to update anything manually. The failure mode is a workflow that requires discipline to maintain. If you have to remember to move a card, you'll forget. If you have to manually check a build log, you'll stop checking. Good workflow design removes the human memory requirement from the loop entirely.

## GitHub Webhooks Are the Unlock Most Developers Ignore If you're using GitHub and you haven't set up webhooks to automate state transitions, you're leaving the highest-leverage workflow improvement on the table. A webhook fires when you push a branch, open a pull request, or close an issue. That event can move a task, update a status, trigger a notification, or log a deployment without you touching anything. The practical version of this: you push a branch named `feature/onboarding-flow`. A webhook fires. The corresponding task in your tracker moves from **Todo** to **In Progress** automatically. You open a PR, it moves to **In Review**. You merge and close the issue, it moves to **Completed**. You never touched the board. The board stayed accurate. This sounds small. It isn't. When your task board reflects reality without manual updates, you can actually trust it. When you can trust it, you stop carrying the state in your head. That's the cognitive offload that makes everything else work.

## The Deployment Visibility Gap Linear is the best pure issue tracker available right now. Shortcut is solid. Plane is a good open-source alternative if you want to self-host. But none of them know whether your Vercel build succeeded. None of them show you the build log next to the task that triggered the deployment. That's a real gap, and it matters more than most reviews acknowledge. The workflow break happens here: you merge a PR, your issue tracker marks the task done, but the build failed silently. You don't find out until a user reports something broken, or until you happen to open the Vercel dashboard. The task says **Completed**. The feature isn't live. Those two things are now out of sync and you're the only one who knows it. Deployment visibility inside your task context isn't a nice-to-have. For a solo founder shipping to production, it's the difference between knowing your work is done and thinking it is.

## Roadmap vs. Bug Tracker: Keep Them Separate One of the most common workflow mistakes solo founders make is tracking features and bugs in the same list. It feels efficient. It isn't. Features and bugs have different urgency profiles, different decision criteria, and different emotional weights. A bug that's affecting users needs to interrupt whatever you're working on. A feature idea that came up in a customer call needs to be captured without interrupting anything. When they live in the same list, bugs get buried under features and features get anxiety-promoted to the top of the queue by whatever you're currently worried about. Two boards, one for your roadmap and one for your bug tracker, is the right separation. It's not about process for its own sake. It's about making the right next action obvious: if there's something in the bug tracker, it takes priority. If the bug tracker is empty, you work the roadmap. The decision is made by the system, not by you in the moment.

## Analytics in Context Most solo founders check their analytics in a separate tab, on a separate schedule, disconnected from whatever they're building. That's fine for weekly reviews. It's useless for understanding whether a specific change had an effect. The useful version is: you ship a change, you watch the relevant metric, you draw a conclusion. That feedback loop requires your analytics to be visible in the same context as your deployment. PostHog is particularly good for this because it's event-based and you can set up custom events that map directly to the features you're shipping. Plausible is better if you just want traffic and don't need product analytics. Either way, the goal is to close the loop between "I shipped this" and "here's what happened." Without that loop, you're building on intuition. With it, you're building on evidence. The difference compounds over months.

## What Good Actually Looks Like A workflow that works for a solo developer-founder looks like this: one place to see what you're working on, one place to see whether it's live, and one place to see whether it's working. Those three things should be visible without switching contexts. The specific tools matter less than the integration between them. A developer using GitHub Projects with a well-configured webhook setup and Vercel notifications piped into a Slack channel they actually check is in better shape than someone with a beautiful Linear workspace they have to manually update. Automation beats aesthetics every time. AdeptDev is built around exactly this structure. Two Kanban boards (roadmap and bug tracker) that move automatically based on GitHub events, Vercel deployment status and logs visible inside the workspace, and PostHog or Google Analytics connected so you can see impact next to the work that caused it. It's not trying to replace GitHub or Vercel. It's the layer that makes them talk to each other so you don't have to be the integration layer yourself. Try it free for 7 days at adeptdev.io.

## What's the best project management tool for solo developers? The best tool is the one that stays accurate without requiring manual updates. Linear has the cleanest interface and the best keyboard shortcuts, but it doesn't know about your deployments. GitHub Projects is free and lives next to your code, but the automation is limited. If you want GitHub events to move tasks automatically and Vercel build status visible in the same view, AdeptDev is built specifically for that workflow. The right answer depends on whether deployment visibility matters to you. ## How do I stop context-switching so much as a solo founder? The root cause is usually that your tools don't share state. You check Vercel because your issue tracker doesn't know the build status. You update cards manually because nothing is watching your Git activity. Fix the integrations first. Set up GitHub webhooks to automate task transitions. Get deployment status into the same view as your tasks. Reduce the number of places you need to look to three or fewer, and most of the context-switching disappears. ## Should I use Linear or GitHub Projects as a solo developer? Linear if you want the best issue-tracking experience and don't mind opening a separate tab for deployment status. GitHub Projects if you want everything in one place and you're comfortable with its more limited automation. Linear's keyboard-driven interface is genuinely faster for triage. GitHub Projects has the advantage of living where your code already is. Neither gives you Vercel deployment visibility out of the box. ## How do GitHub webhooks work for task automation? A webhook is an HTTP request GitHub sends to a URL you specify when something happens: a push, a PR opened, an issue closed. You configure the events you want to listen to, point them at a receiver (your task tool, a serverless function, or a service like AdeptDev), and define what should happen when each event fires. The most useful automations are: push to a branch moves the task to In Progress, open a PR moves it to In Review, merge and close moves it to Completed. Setup takes about twenty minutes and saves you from manually updating your board forever. ## Why do my tasks always fall out of sync with what I'm actually working on? Because manual updates require discipline, and discipline fails under pressure. When you're deep in a debugging session, moving a card is the last thing on your mind. The fix is to remove the manual step entirely. Automate task transitions based on Git events so the board updates when you push code, not when you remember to update it. A board that stays accurate automatically is one you can actually trust and use for planning. ## How should a solo founder separate features from bugs in their workflow? Keep them on separate boards with separate priority logic. Bugs get triaged first, always. Features get worked when the bug tracker is clear. This isn't process overhead; it's a decision rule that removes the cognitive load of prioritization in the moment. When a user reports something broken, you know exactly where it goes and what it means for your current work. AdeptDev gives you two boards per workspace by default: one for your roadmap, one for bug tracking synced with GitHub issues. ## How do I know if a feature I shipped actually worked? You need a closed feedback loop: deploy the change, watch a specific metric, draw a conclusion. Set up a custom event in PostHog or a goal in your analytics tool before you ship, not after. Check the metric 24 to 48 hours post-deploy, not immediately (traffic noise makes same-day reads unreliable). If you can see your deployment timestamp and your analytics in the same view, the pattern is obvious. If they're in separate tabs with no shared context, you're comparing numbers without knowing what caused what.