Looking for a dependency chart technique for personal project management

November 26, 2023 6:15 PM

At the moment I'm working on several different personal creative and life projects - I'm designing a game, I'm writing a show, I'm planning an event, etc. What I would love is some tool or other process that lets me track projects step-by-step, with a dependency chart. So, for instance, if I need to do three things before the next step, I want those three things in a form I can see. I don't know what form or medium this needs to take. My current "stack" in the extended explanation.

My current stack is already pretty intense:

- I have custom software that prints my daily to-do list, which is all the things I need to do every day / every week, plus any events on my calendar.

- I have a spreadsheet that has a list of all my ongoing projects that I check in with each week, and indicate any progress I've made on that project.

These work reasonably well for the day-to-day aspects of projects, but I feel they don't do a good job of tracking what has to be done quickly and what is blocked. I would like to quickly be able to see what my next steps are on any given project.

posted by LSK to Grab Bag (2 answers total)

Best answer: A gantt chart is the stereotypical answer to this question, and there are a ton of tools to generate one. Last time I had to do this for personal reasons, I used GanttProject but there are almost certainly other alternatives that might fit better with your existing stack.
posted by Alterscape at 6:21 PM on November 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

You're describing a Gantt chart, for sure.
posted by alby at 10:36 PM on November 26, 2023 [1 favorite]