I bought a six-pack of sand timers. They are silent, require no apps, have no screens, and are beautiful. They will probably outlive solutions such as these.
Plain old AM/FM radios are cheap and super efficient. Everyone should have one! I have a portable radio that I use regularly and its AA batteries often last a few years!
We have to use Jira at my current workplace and it's so complicated. Pivotal Tracker, which I used at previous workplace, was so simple and focused. Sad to hear it's shutting down!
Yes, _and_ having recently learned it and created my team's new board, the first thing I did (and you can to!) is disable all the extra features and issue types besides epices and issues. Kinda simplifies things.
I've never used Pivotal Tracker, but at my dayjob we're moving from Jira to Azure DevOps (ADO) - due to supposedly high Jira license costs...Now, historically i have been quite critical of Jira - because its always felt so complicated for me. But, now having lived in ADO for about 6 months, i hate it! I hate ADO with a passion! At first, i thought that its simplicity was great...and then started running into loads of walls - even for simple things. I never thought i'd live to see the day when i wish to go back to Jira. Then again, as others here have noted, maybe the complexity of Jira is not necessarily native, and simply a fact that jira *allows* for way too much complexity, but that, it can be made more sane/sensible (such as by shutting off a bunch of customization, etc.). And, who knows, maybe the crappy over-simpleness of ADO that i'm painfully living through might also be a thing that was poorly customized at my dayjob...But regardless, i guess right now I *prefer* the pain of Jira vs the pain of ADO. Clearly, there must be other products that sit in the happy Goldi locks middle (not as complex as Jira, but not as simplistic as ADO) that help teams actually get work done, and that are not so costly, etc.!
I have a theory: Back in 1996 Bugzilla worked very well. It had been designed, and honed, by a bunch of senior developers who also wrote the bug management system. So lots of dog food eaten. iirc it was written in Perl.
Then, someone I believe decided to make a "Bugzilla in Java", because they didn't like Perl (reasonable).
But whoever that was didn't have the deep knowledge of how the thing was supposed to be used. Lacking that insight, they created a "Swiss Army Chainsaw", implementing simultaneously everything, and nothing.
Next, some MBAs got hold of the thing, and made everything 10X worse.
Meanwhile, Bugzilla is still the same and still the best software project management tool, if you know how it's intended to be used.
> We originally used Bugzilla for bug tracking and the developers in the office started calling it by the Japanese name for Godzilla, Gojira (the original black-and-white Japanese Godzilla films are also office favourites). As we developed our own bug tracker, and then it became an issue tracker, the name stuck, but the Go got dropped - hence JIRA.
TL;DR it's so completely customizable that it's more like a DIY project management toolkit. Pivotal and Linear have/had a more opinionated approach: "here's how you manage projects. Good luck and have fun!" Jira almost seems to push otherwise rational people to build the most baroque processes imaginable.
I love a good PM. Trust me, you don't want to be responsible for all the reporting and status updates and all that they have to deal with daily.
It's just that I've never worked with someone I considered a good PM who loved Jira. The great ones wouldn't care if we did all the planning on papyrus because they were more concerned with getting things done than documenting them in excruciating detail.
I feel like there's a bias for this, where you likely wouldn't register seeing a mundane number a bunch (like say, 378), but 666 and 420 would stick out even once, so you'll remember all the other times you've seen them. From googling though, I'm having trouble finding a name for this that I'm familiar with; the best I can find seems to be salience bias[1], but I'm not sure if that's what I was thinking of; I've certainly never heard of it before.
