Last year, I tried — for what was probably the fourth time — to make Notion work for our agency. As we’ve grown and expanded our team and client base, managing our projects, tasks, and team members has become harder without some form of organisational system. So I decided to give it another serious shot.

As with all doomed Notion onboarding journeys, I watched three tutorials and started with that sad, empty dashboard. I figured the first thing to set up should be the client database. Then projects. Then core team members. Then, external consultants. Then financials. Then the relationships between all of these things…? By the time I reached the actual task management bit — the reason I had opened Notion in the first place — I needed a lie-down, and possibly an IV drip.

Inexplicably, the more context I added to the platform, the more complicated and confusing it seemed to get, not less. Shouldn’t it work the other way around?

I needed a project management tool that made my life easier, but onboarding the tool itself meant figuring out a million different connections and mountains of context, stumbling and banging my head on my desk at every step.

So, predictably, I gave up on Notion again, in a matter of a week. Next on my trial list was Trello.

Trello is a simpler tool, sure. But the issue of “context poverty” remained — it knew nothing about me. I could “sign in with Google”, but all that gave the tool was my name, profile photo, and email address. It made the user management easier for the tool, sure, but as a user, I had to start over every time I signed in to a new platform with my Google credentials.

Given how much of my context now lives in Google Workspace — Gmail, Drive, Docs, Slides — you’d think “signing in with Google” could mean sharing some of that context with the tool I was signing into, with the necessary privacy guardrails and explicit permissions in place, obviously. But no!

In the age of AI, this felt especially absurd. We now have models that can do a lot of the structural work quite easily. Why was it unreasonable to expect a project management tool to let me paste in a meeting transcript, and have it pull out the tasks, identify likely assignees, infer deadlines, and create the cards for me?

This is something I could do with my regular Claude chats already, because across enough conversations, I’ve given Claude a fair amount of context about my work, clients, projects, and team. If I took a meeting transcript, pasted it into a regular Claude chat, and asked it to pull out the action items, due dates, and possible team assignees into a structured list, Claude could probably do that with just the basic knowledge it has about me and my work. Why the hell can’t I expect that of the most cutting-edge project management tools, then?

The problem is no longer that the tools lack features. It’s that they lack context.

Build It, and the Context Will Come

Faced with disappointment yet again, I came to the same conclusion I come to with most frustrations — “Fuck it, I’ll just build something myself.”

I started with ‘Twotion’, a standalone project management tool I built over a weekend. The main feature I needed, which took about a day to perfect, was the ‘brain-dump’ — a way to paste in a meeting transcript, voice note, or simple natural language text instruction, and have the tool do the work of creating/updating the task cards, assigning relevant team members to them, and adding due dates, automatically. It worked surprisingly well.

Sure, Twotion lived in its own little sandbox too, but it was way easier to add my context to it because I could just tell Claude Code who I was, who our clients were, what projects we were working on, and who our team members were and what their roles and responsibilities were, during the build stage. And then Claude Code just baked that into Twotion’s backend and made whatever connections it needed to.

What I underestimated was the creative professional’s abject opposition to task management tools in general.

While Twotion worked great for me, I noticed my team was less than thrilled about that level of sudden accountability. Understandable, of course. I’d probably be resistant too, in their shoes.

Around the same time, Mimir, the intelligent, mini-OS I built for myself, was beginning to evolve into a beast of its own, and I was using it more and more for many aspects of my work. So adding a project management mini-app to Mimir just made sense.

And for the first time, I didn’t need to add my context while I onboarded a new tool. Because the tool was built on top of my context. Mimir already had all of my work information, clients, team members, etc. The new Kanban mini-app simply needed access to that context and to be able to “talk” to the other mini-apps in Mimir. Everything else then just fell neatly into place.

Tick Talk

Build completed, I could now dump an entire meeting transcript into the new “Kanban” mini-app in Mimir, give it a few seconds, and then get a ready list of task cards, and all I had to do was edit or approve them. Done.

For example, I could just type/speak into the Kanban mini-app’s “Brain Dump” box, “Send two new design options for Acme Corp’s new social media campaign before next week’s check-in call,” and because Mimir knows who on my team handles social media design, and it knows our weekly check-in with that client is Tuesday, it creates a new card with that task, due date, and assigns the right team member to it.

What’s even more fun is that the information from the new Kanban mini-app flows both ways, as it does with all of Mimir’s mini-apps. This morning, while I was at the gym, Mimir messaged me about an upcoming meeting with a client, let’s call him Ravi.

“You have a meeting with Ravi at Globex at 1.30pm, to discuss the new brochure design project. I checked your recent emails with Ravi, and he mentioned that he’s keen to discuss timelines soon. That will probably come up in today’s meeting, so you might want to figure that out beforehand. Our designer, Rohini, has a relatively light task load on Kanban board for the next couple of weeks, so she might have the bandwidth to take this on. Good luck with the meeting!”

That’s my calendar talking to my email, my daily brief, my task manager, and my Telegram messaging service. All while I struggled through 12 reps in a bench press workout.

The Old Switcheroo

Of course, I get that not everyone can, or should, have to build their own tools to make their lives easier. That would be a slippery slope, and I say that as someone who has slid down many of my own.

But the gap between our specific frustrations and our specific solutions is shrinking.

For years, every new app or platform I onboarded began the same way. I had to introduce myself, add my work context, connect the dots, and hope that somewhere along that convoluted process, my life actually got easier.

Mimir changed that order.

I no longer add my context to tools.

I build the tools on top of my context.

Once your tools already know you, software that’s built for everyone starts to feel oddly impersonal.

Sign me up with Google.

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