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Entry tags:
Project planning software
This summer, I had two really big, multi-month projects at work I needed to make progress on and I noticed that (lacking any urgent deadlines for either of them other than "everything needs to be done by the end of the summer"), my natural inclination was just to work at a very leisurely pace and make extremely slow progress on them. This is exactly what happened to me last year, meaning that a lot of my plans to revamp my curriculum fell through and I needed to push them back a year to this summer. And this summer it was happening again!
I clearly needed to make short-term deadlines to give me a sense of being on-track or behind schedule. The issue, though, was how did I know what I needed to work on, and how long it would take me, and how to make reasonable goals, and how to rework my timeline and priorities if I fell behind where I expected? The projects I'm talking about here are BIG with a lot of different components that take an unknown amount of time. Short-term planning was difficult without some serious long-term planning.
Basically, I decided I might want to take a page from my software-engineering students' books and do some project management, like sprints and agile methodology and Gantt charts to make a rough, prioritized plan for these projects to make sure I was on track throughout, and be able to detect when I'm veering off track and replan as needed to make sure I'll still have the high-priority components done before the end of summer. But then as I set about doing some serious project planning work, one of my toxic traits immediately kicked in, which is that basically, before I had even been able to plan my projects in any detail, I instantly fell down a productivity tools research hole that lasted over a week where I spent all my time at work (AND all my free time over the weekend!) just trying out project-planning software and combing through documentation desperately trying to find a tool I liked that would help me with the project planning I wanted to do. Initially, I thought this task would take, IDK, maybe half a day at the most and then I'd move on to the other tasks I had planned out for the early project period. Instead, work entirely ground to a halt for over a week in early July as I spent all my time on this one task, and then another half a week or so actually using the tools to come up with a project plan. I had tackled the first/preliminary task -- only to find myself two weeks behind schedule already. Fun!
In my defense, I've had to try out a LOT of different software, and each one I've had to use for quite a while before I could figure out whether it actually had the feature set I needed, so that was quite the timesink. And the reason why it took me so long to figure out if the feature set was sufficient was basically due to non-transparent or -- in some cases -- broken functionality or unclear or missing documentation, so that's been frustrating.
In the end, for my particular needs (a one-person project; no internet connection or integrations into other software needed; need the ability to cover project planning at both a high-level/long-term scale (via Gantt charts) AND at a medium-length scale (through weekly, sprint-level kind of goals); being able to sort and color-code tasks coming from 4+ different streams of work, by the stream generating that task), I ended up picking Obsidian. (I'm also using TrackBear lightly just to make sure I'm putting in a reasonable amount of work into my important long-term projects each week.)
But along the way, I tried out and rejected: Monday.com, Microsoft Planner, GanttProject, Agantty, and ClickUp. I also looked into but ended up rejecting ProjectLibre, OpenProject, and TaskJuggler without trying them because they didn't look like what I needed or looked too difficult to install. I also had Asana, Wrike, and Notion on my list of things to look into, but they didn't seem particularly promising compared to the options I had already checked out, so I didn't get to those.
If anyone is interested in my adventures with and evaluations of various productivity/project management software...
First, I'll talk about the software I ended up using. I've heard about Obsidian because I'm in a writing community (![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
getyourwordsout ❤️), and a lot of writers use Obsidian both to draft and sort/organize/file their various writing projects, both past and ongoing. That said, this was NOT the first tool I tried and it didn't appear in lists of productivity, project management, or Gantt chart-making tools I found on the internet, and it never occurred to me that Obsidian could be used to do Gantt charts/project management at all, because it is a very plain-text/markdown-based tool.
However, one of the aspects of Obsidian is that there are ways of scanning through plain-text/markdown files and extracting information, and coming up with fancy ways to visualize this information, and there are a lot of community-created plugins that do these kinds of things. So it is essentially possible to overlay visualizations and styling over the plain text documents, as long as someone has put the work into doing this. Therefore, Obsidian unexpectedly does have a lot of productivity and project management type functionality, as long as you're willing to poke around and investigate and do a bit of setup/configuration. It's a bit of a manual/user-driven process, though.
Okay, so let me do a brief overview of what helpful functionality I was able to find for Obsidian to help with project management:
So in summary:
Pros of Obsidian: Lightweight, downloadable software suitable for 1-person projects. Can handle short-, mid-, and long-term planning through to-do lists, Gantt charts, files/different sections of files, and tagging. It is also useful for taking detailed text notes alongside your to-do lists and other more table-like information.
Cons of Obsidian: Plain text format means that more complicated organizational tools, querying/filtering, and visualizations have to be implemented on top to translate plaintext files into meaningful data and visualizations -- the format of files is not inherently "database-like," even if you would want it to be for most project planning applications. As a result, you are also fairly heavily reliant on community-developed plugins and custom solutions for a lot of helpful "productivity software"-type functionality.
Now let's go back in time to the first tool I used, which was Monday(.com). This web application has a LOT of functionality but in my case that functionality was overkill. The site is designed for coordinating large teams which might also be using various other workplace or process management software like Github or JIRA, which is nice but not something I happened to need for my planning my personal 1-person project. Another nice thing (that I did appreciate) is that it has a lot of functionality for adding metadata to tasks, which helps you neaten/sort/organize them, which is very helpful. I liked that amount of power and flexibility.
However, the main issue, in terms of my personal need, was that Gantt chart visualization was not included in the free account level. Also, the site starts you on a pro trial, which basically hides which of the features you are using are packaged with which account levels. Very non-transparent and frustrating! I didn't want to pay for an account just to use this for my summer project, so the lack of Gantt charts at the free level was a dealbreaker, but even if that hadn't been a dealbreaker, the manipulativeness of the two-week Pro trial probably would have been. The other issue is that Monday is a very heavyweight tool AND browser-based (which is a very slow, unwieldy tech stack in the first place, compared to standalone applications). This makes it very useful (again) for large teams coordinating largely online. However, for my purposes, it made for a very bloated, slow-loading website that didn't need to be that way as I do not even need an internet connection to do my project planning.
Pros of Monday.com: Features out the wazoo. Customizable categories and labeling of tasks, including tags. Lots of sprint and time-management functionality.
Cons of Monday.com: Not clear WHICH features come with your account level unless you dig pretty deep into the documentation. No Gantt chart visualizations in the free account. Very slow web-app -- slow-loading and also bloated due to the one-stop-shop type approach to functionality. Takes a long time for the functionality to become apparent, which wastes a lot of time if the functionality is not actually sufficient for your purposes. Requires an account and internet connection to use.
The second tool I used was Microsoft Planner. One con about this software is that it had a recent rename and there's now a whole cluster of related products with slightly different names, which makes it hard to find accurate, up-to-date information and documentation. But as far as I can tell, Planner is a light version of the various project-planning tools, and it comes free with Teams? Or at the very least, Planner comes free to me as part of my work's Microsoft web software suite, which is convenient to me personally.
I did not use this one very long because it quickly became apparent to me that it has NO support whatsoever for Gantt charts, at least in the non-paid version. However, from my brief time using and playing around with it, it did seem pretty good at basically everything else I needed. You can make fairly intense project plans and share/associate them with specific teams you're part of in Teams (or just keep them private to you).
Just based on what I saw in the example/demo project, you can do fairly detailed task planning and intuitively arrange/group tasks visually in the form of grouped to-do lists (buckets of tasks) or in kanban format. For both to-do list and kanban forms, you have a wide variety of ways to group tasks: by user-defined "buckets," by task priority, by task progress, and by color-coded labels that you can name/define per plan.
The UI is very pleasingly simple, clean, and responsive. Also, you can use Planner to manage your daily to-do list as well. From what I saw of it, it had helpful features for dropping undone tasks from the previous day or copying them over to today if you want to finish them up. It seemed like there were also ways to incorporate tasks from your plans into your daily planner, so it just seemed like generally quite good both at long-term planning and translating those plans into daily to-do lists.
However, the major problem -- for my purposes, at least -- was the lack of Gantt chart functionality. As far as I could tell, there IS a paid (subscription-based only) version of Planner, confusingly called something like "Microsoft Planner Plan 1 (formerly Project Plan 1)" that probably has Gantt chart functionality. However, I was not willing to subscribe to a service for Gantt chart functionality so it was a pretty easy decision to abandon exploration of this option and move on, despite the fact that I did actually quite like the to-do list features and detailed project planning functionality (decent custom metadata and visualization options).
Pros of Microsoft Planner: Relatively simple and clean interface good for both daily to-do lists and more detailed project planning. Good visualization tools outside of Gantt charts. Free/accessible productivity software due to Teams integration(?).
Cons of Microsoft Planner: NO Gantt chart functionality. Finding relevant documentation and advice/descriptions of functionality is difficult due to renames and changes to the software, meaning that some FAQs just give out-of-date information.
Basically, after using two tools that were fairly feature-intense web applications that didn't have Gantt charts in their free version functionality (particularly the very slow, memory-intensive Monday.com), I decided to look into complete desktop applications/software that could be installed and run locally, especially free and open source software (FOSS) options, possibly very narrowly specialized in Gantt charts in particular. My thinking was, Microsoft Planner does 90% of what I wanted from a project management system, but I just needed some basic Gantt chart software to augment it.
The clear best option in the space laid out above was GanttProject, a FOSS multiplatform, standalone software very easy to download and install. Its Java-based GUI is a bit dated/clunky but functional enough. Overall, this looked pretty promising for my purposes, but I quickly ran into several issues that together added up to a dealbreaker:
1. For some reason I don't understand, the interface just wouldn't save my work most of the time. I would regularly try to change start/end dates for tasks, either through the draggable interface or by pulling up the task info dialogue for a specific task, and in both cases, most of the time, no changes would be made and the old values of the date would remain. This would happen maybe five times, failing, before inexplicably working on the sixth attempt. Very mysterious. It's possible I could have figured out a fix with further investigation, but:
2. The help/support/documentation for this software is basically non-existent, heavily reliant on (a small number of) user-made YouTube videos made 2-13(!) years ago to explain/demonstrate/make users aware of functionality.
3. Finally, while there is an ability to color-code tasks, color is set manually PER TASK with a very finicky color-picker. Even though this tool allows multilevel task nesting (! very useful!), the task hierarchy does not have any effect on task color-coding (e.g. setting the color for one parent task doesn't affect all its children or anything; all tasks start out with the same black color...), nor does there seem to be some other way of automatically coloring tasks based on some other piece of metadata associated with the task. It is therefore quite difficult/tedious to set task colors for all tasks in a consistent manner.
One or two of these issues may have been tolerable enough for me to stick around and try to make this software work for me, but the combination of all three made me decide to just quickly move on to search for better options.
Pros of GanttProject: Powerful Gantt chart functionality supporting multilevel task hierarchies. Conforms to existing project management file formats/standards. Light, standalone software with no limits on number or complexity of projects, with all data stored locally. Ability to assign color to tasks, although in a highly manual way.
Cons of GanttProject: Buggy?? Interface requires a lot of manual work, making it hard to quickly and easily create tasks. Default task metadata is a bit limited, and custom metadata has limited functionality. Basically no documentation.
I did look at some other options aside from GanttProject but I either wasn't able to get them working or I just quickly moved on without trying them that much. These included Agantty, ProjectLibre, OpenProject, and TaskJuggler.
Agantty: A free online web application for making Gantt charts. I didn't spend long with this one because from what I saw from using it a bit, it had less functionality than GanttProject -- the same issues with non-automatic setting of colors for tasks and similarly limited custom metadata, and also with an interface that seemed clunky and unwieldy for trying to quickly make a bunch of tasks. And unlike GanttProject, this site did not seem to be using some standard Gantt chart/project file format but seemed to just be making up its own task data structure. Plus, you need to create an account to use it. At least it didn't seem buggy? But making new tasks was a sufficiently tedious process that I basically wasn't interested in exploring this one further.
ProjectLibre Desktop: This is downloadable software with I guess some general project management functionality? But its main functionality seems to just be making Gantt charts. I didn't actually try this one out. I think the whole product website just turned me off. But from the website screenshots, it seems kind of similar to GanttProject with a similarly plain and outdated Gantt-chart-focused set of functionality. I guess that was why I decided to skip this one (in addition to the weird website aggressively pushing AI and a subscription plan on you, even though the (presumably very old) downloadable, desktop, AI-less, and subscriptionless software seems very much still available).
OpenProject: I looked into this one briefly but this seemed more like if you have a big team/organization and need a project management software for everyone to use, but you don't want to have to pay for services like Monday.com -- so instead you have your own webserver hosting a free version of project management web application software that you direct all your employees to access and use. This was not really what I needed for my solo personal project purposes, but seems nice if you need productivity software for like a big political organization or nonprofit or major open-source software development team or something like that, where you don't want to have to rely on third-party team productivity software/hosting.
TaskJuggler: I... could not really figure out what this was or how it worked. The two things that seemed to be true about it, though, was that (1) installation seemed to be non-trivial and required going via installing Ruby, and (2) it seemed mostly command-line/plain-text based, which I couldn't really understand how that works/why you would want to do project management that way (ironically, the solution I ended up going with (Obsidian) is also a plain-text way of defining Gantt charts...). I'm guessing this software is also designed to allow you to deploy project management web applications through your browser, similar to OpenProject, but just a bit more older, dated, and lo-fi way of doing that... It seemed unappealing and too reliant on manual labor, so I quickly abandoned this.
After being a bit frustrated with my foray into FOSS options, I decided to return to the list I had of free web-based tools, which still had a few unexplored options: ClickUp, Asana, Notion, and Wrike. Of these four, it was hard to tell from the outside whether the latter three had Gantt chart functionality, whereas ClickUp clearly did, and at the free account level too, so I decided to explore that one first.
However, I ended up quickly abandoning this one after initial tests. Unlike Monday.com, it was more difficult to figure out how to set the values/colors of various dropdown columns without just creating a new, custom column. In Monday, the former was quite easy/intuitive, whereas in ClickUp, I could not figure out how to do this so settled on doing the latter. Unlike with GanttProject, however, custom columns here seemed very powerful and quite useful. And there were indeed Gantt chart views bundled with the free account that you could use custom column values to color-code, and it was also easy to click and drag to make quick adjustments to task start/end dates using the visual interface. All things that I had difficulty doing in GanttProject. (However, here too, there was some mild bugginess where sometimes colors were not applied to the Gantt chart tasks and the bars showed up as white (unfilled).) But, overall, promising.
However, when I happened to be looking into just how many projects and how complex projects could be on a free account just to make sure ClickUp would be able to support the kind of project-planning I needed, I came across a FAQ saying that free accounts could make use of custom columns, but they came with a limited number of times that values in those columns could be set (i.e. a limited number of rows/tasks that could have that column non-empty). Since custom columns were the only way I could figure out how to translate task metadata into colors on the Gantt chart (which itself was not ideal functioning), basically what this meant was that there was a hard cap on the number of tasks I could put into my project before those custom columns were rendered unusable. NOT good for my purposes.
At this point, I was getting real tired of inputting a small set of example tasks with deadlines into each software I was trialling -- just enough test data to experiment with the main functionality that I would need when making my Gantt chart for real. And, like with Monday.com, I was a bit annoyed that info on free account limitations was so difficult to find. In this case, I hadn't actually hit the limit -- it would be a while until I did, and I might have even been able to make the full Gantt chart I needed without bumping up against that limit to custom column value slots. But I was just tired I'd only found out about that limitation after I'd taken the time to put in some tasks, plus not too keen on the unwieldy, memory-hungry, web application format anyway, and also a bit frustrated that columns were less easily customized/altered here than on Monday.com (although who knows -- for all I know, those customizable columns could have been a paid feature on Monday.com ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), that I just wasn't very happy with ClickUp as a solution overall and decided to quickly move on. I know sites need to get paid for the cost of hosting and software development/maintenance, but I just really didn't like that an important limitation like this wasn't very clear and would only kick in like ~80 items deep into a project if I hadn't been doing a bit more research on free accounts generally. I need more transparency!
Pros of ClickUp: Gantt charts in free accounts with ability to color-code charts with custom column values. Lots of other project-planning functionality.
Cons of ClickUp: Some aspects of the interface are difficult to use/get to do what it is you want. Hard limit on how many custom column uses a free account can apply. Free account limitations not particularly clear. Rendering of Gantt chart elements' color appears to be slightly buggy.
At this point, I still had other options on my list to investigate, although I wasn't feeling particularly optimistic about what level of functionality I would find regarding Gantt charts. At this point in time, I talked to a student and shared my frustrations over trying to find project planning software that had the exact set of functionality I needed. She said that most people use Notion for that kind of thing (doing detailed project planning on your own rather than in teams), but that sometime last year(?), Notion had a major outage that caused people to freak out since their data was not accessible and also possibly lost. Notion restored service with everyone's files intact, but it made some people wary and paranoid about that happening again, and so at that point, a lot of people switched to Obsidian.
This is what made me look into Obsidian a bit closer, as it hadn't really been on my radar before, especially for Gantt charts. (And in the end, I did not actually get around to checking out Asana, Notion, or Wrike, so they are still unknowns to me.) As the main thing I still needed at this point was Gantt chart functionality (since Microsoft Planner seemed to have decent ability to pick up the rest), I first needed to look into whether Obsidian had this functionality at all. As mentioned above, Obsidian was extremely plain-text based and so, while it was clear that people put Obsidian to various helpful note-taking uses and could do some powerful customizations of their vaults, it was not clear to me whether Gantt charts were viable. A quick search for Gantt-chart-related Obsidian plugins turned up two options, which was both promising and risky -- promising that there were plugins here at all but risky in that they might be incomplete, not be actively maintained, not contain the particular set of functionality I needed, etc. and I would be stuck with those two offerings and nothing else.
Obsidian is quite reliant on a volunteer developer community and what it happens to look like (e.g. what it decides to work on and maintain, etc.). That said, it does seem to have fairly robust options for Gantt charts, with a dedicated plugin as mentioned above (Markwhen) but also a build-it-yourself option with generic chart/visualization frameworks that can be used to define your own Gantt chart display. In both cases, Gantt charts here are complicated visualizations built on parsing correctly-formatted text lists of tasks -- it's a bit clunky but it works well enough. At this point, I was just happy to have something (1) free; (2) downloadable and geared toward individual (rather than team) usage; (3) that has Gantt charts (4) with some amount of color-coding capability. Some minor quibbles (e.g. the fact that Markwhen, unlike GanttProject, doesn't have an option for omitting weekends from view) were a price I was willing to pay to have something with the basics.
In addition to the Gantt chart and general task/to-do list functionality, another benefit of Obsidian is that it is indeed good at being a place where you can stash a whole bunch of assorted notes on various topics (having a kind of lab book). Previously, I was using Word docs on OneDrive to track all my various to-dos and fiddly details related to my classes (I had one Word doc per class). Now, I've moved all those notes to Obsidian where I can have a bunch of clustered groups of files, one folder for each class, and it opens much quicker on my own computer without an internet connection, and the plain formatting is much easier to handle as well as opposed to Word's unwieldy rich-text formatting. Being able to have detailed lab notes (e.g. my notes on all the subject material and potential coursework technologies I've been researching) right next to detailed to-do lists has really been a big step up compared to what I was doing before.
(The sad/ironic thing is that immediately after completing this extensive research on project planning tools and finally making a detailed Gantt chart for my project in Obsidian, I basically fell down a second, unrelated two-week hole at work (a mix of vacation / team Away Days plus an extremely time-consuming and time-sensitive batch of marking that ran me over like a truck). By the time I could return to my long-term projects two weeks later, (1) I needed to replan everything and retriage as all my time estimates were no longer realistic, and (2) the timeframe of my summer work had gone from about 8 weeks down to just one month (the lost time included: time spent researching tools, time spent in the unexpected work hole, and time spent recovering from hole and doing replanning), which meant that "long-term planning" was no longer even needed at this point! It's much easier to figure out how to prioritize and make goals when you only have one month to finish everything, so I did replan my project but in a way that ended up bypassing the Gantt chart entirely this time. All of the above chaotic/unexpected stuff couldn't be helped, but it is just ironic that I spent SO much time finding and learning how to use the right tool for this job only to get, like, one day's utility out of the Gantt chart it took me two weeks to make before immediately needing to throw it away. 🤣 Oh well, not all that planning work was wasted as it helped me at least understand my goals and scope better. And if I ever need to do a big project next year...)
Anyway, aside from Obsidian, I just wanted to take this time to mention a couple more tools in this space:
In my particular case, another thing that was helpful to me was to make goals to dedicate X hours per week to pushing forward these long-term projects as I tend to work slower when I don't have hard deadlines, and it's also easy to get distracted from hard, long-term projects with easy, short-term, but less-important tasks. So I wanted to make sure I am making constant progress on these. While setting deadlines/milestone-type-goals can be pretty effective at making project work more urgent, they also tend to be quite inaccurate in their estimations of how long something will take, or even whether that particular task/goal is feasible at at all or whether it should eventually be dropped and the time reallocated to something else. Also, the more difficult and complicated the work, the more likely it is that you can't actually completely tick off tasks because some part of them remains unfinishable or unknown or they're just too big to tackle in one week and give you a sense of accomplishment. So making goals in this kind of situation can be quite unrealistic or difficult to achieve, which is actually DEmotivating; therefore, it can be helpful to have just pure time goals, both to force these difficult long-term tasks to be allocated some priority AND to give a sense of accomplishment/on-track-ness that isn't reliant on being able to check some specific, quite difficult task off your list.
So time-tracking is another piece of functionality that was helpful to me. While some of the software mentioned above has time-tracking functionality bundled with it, I personally just opted to use yet another tool I heard about via writer circles (GYWO), which is TrackBear. TrackBear is a very simple, lightweight online tool for time (or word, page, etc.) tracking, which lets you set goals over timeframes of your choice (weekly goals in my case) and then automatically generates neat graphs to help you see whether you're on track or not for hitting that goal, and also helps you see your project progress/effort over time. I used this tool in the past to keep on track with myfffx projects where I needed to write 10k on a strict deadline. However, I don't normally use it for tracking my writing because I use GYWO's tools for that and I don't typically need detailed "am I on track" type tracking for my projects. But with my work project, it's a really helpful side tool for making weekly progress goals and ensuring a minimum amount of slow, steady progress each week.
Pros: Simple, lightweight online tool for numerical goal-making and tracking progress against those goals. Nice graphs.
Cons: A bit buggy. For example, if you use tags, you need to sign out and sign in again for them to show up, I think. Sometimes dropdown menus won't disappear after you select an option from the dropdown, which makes it hard to fill in the rest of the form. Project progress totals don't update automatically and require a hard Ctrl+R refresh for the numbers to update, etc.
Finally, one other major option I kind of neglected to look into throughout this process (especially toward the latter half when it became clear I mainly needed a Gantt chart option) was just using a spreadsheet of some kind (e.g. Google Sheets). This option became more salient to me recently (i.e. after I had already completed my tool research) because for some reason, about a week ago, Sheets kept displaying a tooltip on all my spreadsheets saying that I can now make Gantt charts in Sheets. News to me. However, I dismissed those pop-ups at the time because I didn't have time at the moment to look into that further and I just wanted to access my damn spreadsheet I was doing other work in. And now, not only are the pop-ups gone, but I literally cannot find any utilities or help documentation related to making Gantt charts in Google Sheets other than people's custom solutions from years ago. So, Google, what is the truth.
Anyway, this MAY be a viable Gantt chart option, but generally, in the past, I have found the graphing capabilities of spreadsheet software to be pretty limited, inflexible, and tedious (i.e requiring a lot of manual labor) to use. Probably because of this, the Gantt chart templates I found seemed largely to rely on using the physical spreadsheet cells themselves to visually represent timeline "bars" rather than use any graphing functionality.
There might be a solution here, and I know some people who use an elaborate spreadsheet as their main way of project-planning and managing deadlines in general. I am not sure how well this works for me, personally, as project planning makes more sense in my mind as something primarily text-based rather than something where a tabular format makes sense, and I find the table/cell format of spreadsheets very rigid and inflexible in a way that hinders my ability to visually rearrange and organize my to-dos, which is the main thing I need some kind of software to help with. So yeah, I did not do much to explore plain spreadsheets as a possible project management tool, but I just mention it as an option in case it jives better with other people.
So in the end, Obsidian + TrackBear were sufficient for my project-planning purposes -- it's odd but I guess not really surprising that tools writers recommend for helping them make progress on their big writing projects ended up also being useful for my big solo projects as well. I'm posting this in case this saves some time for anyone else who might potentially be in a similar boat in the future, at least for this very specific kind of project-planning and this particular set of project planning needs (one-person project planning, with both long- and medium-term planning needed, with some ability to group tasks into clusters and automatically color-code those in a Gantt chart visualization). (I spent something like 20+ hours on this tool research task... 😭)
I clearly needed to make short-term deadlines to give me a sense of being on-track or behind schedule. The issue, though, was how did I know what I needed to work on, and how long it would take me, and how to make reasonable goals, and how to rework my timeline and priorities if I fell behind where I expected? The projects I'm talking about here are BIG with a lot of different components that take an unknown amount of time. Short-term planning was difficult without some serious long-term planning.
Basically, I decided I might want to take a page from my software-engineering students' books and do some project management, like sprints and agile methodology and Gantt charts to make a rough, prioritized plan for these projects to make sure I was on track throughout, and be able to detect when I'm veering off track and replan as needed to make sure I'll still have the high-priority components done before the end of summer. But then as I set about doing some serious project planning work, one of my toxic traits immediately kicked in, which is that basically, before I had even been able to plan my projects in any detail, I instantly fell down a productivity tools research hole that lasted over a week where I spent all my time at work (AND all my free time over the weekend!) just trying out project-planning software and combing through documentation desperately trying to find a tool I liked that would help me with the project planning I wanted to do. Initially, I thought this task would take, IDK, maybe half a day at the most and then I'd move on to the other tasks I had planned out for the early project period. Instead, work entirely ground to a halt for over a week in early July as I spent all my time on this one task, and then another half a week or so actually using the tools to come up with a project plan. I had tackled the first/preliminary task -- only to find myself two weeks behind schedule already. Fun!
In my defense, I've had to try out a LOT of different software, and each one I've had to use for quite a while before I could figure out whether it actually had the feature set I needed, so that was quite the timesink. And the reason why it took me so long to figure out if the feature set was sufficient was basically due to non-transparent or -- in some cases -- broken functionality or unclear or missing documentation, so that's been frustrating.
In the end, for my particular needs (a one-person project; no internet connection or integrations into other software needed; need the ability to cover project planning at both a high-level/long-term scale (via Gantt charts) AND at a medium-length scale (through weekly, sprint-level kind of goals); being able to sort and color-code tasks coming from 4+ different streams of work, by the stream generating that task), I ended up picking Obsidian. (I'm also using TrackBear lightly just to make sure I'm putting in a reasonable amount of work into my important long-term projects each week.)
But along the way, I tried out and rejected: Monday.com, Microsoft Planner, GanttProject, Agantty, and ClickUp. I also looked into but ended up rejecting ProjectLibre, OpenProject, and TaskJuggler without trying them because they didn't look like what I needed or looked too difficult to install. I also had Asana, Wrike, and Notion on my list of things to look into, but they didn't seem particularly promising compared to the options I had already checked out, so I didn't get to those.
If anyone is interested in my adventures with and evaluations of various productivity/project management software...
Obsidian
First, I'll talk about the software I ended up using. I've heard about Obsidian because I'm in a writing community (
getyourwordsout ❤️), and a lot of writers use Obsidian both to draft and sort/organize/file their various writing projects, both past and ongoing. That said, this was NOT the first tool I tried and it didn't appear in lists of productivity, project management, or Gantt chart-making tools I found on the internet, and it never occurred to me that Obsidian could be used to do Gantt charts/project management at all, because it is a very plain-text/markdown-based tool.However, one of the aspects of Obsidian is that there are ways of scanning through plain-text/markdown files and extracting information, and coming up with fancy ways to visualize this information, and there are a lot of community-created plugins that do these kinds of things. So it is essentially possible to overlay visualizations and styling over the plain text documents, as long as someone has put the work into doing this. Therefore, Obsidian unexpectedly does have a lot of productivity and project management type functionality, as long as you're willing to poke around and investigate and do a bit of setup/configuration. It's a bit of a manual/user-driven process, though.
Okay, so let me do a brief overview of what helpful functionality I was able to find for Obsidian to help with project management:
- For daily to-do lists and tasks, Obsidian makes it fairly easy to get clickable checkboxes in its rich-text/styled-HTML view. You basically put "- [ ]" at the start of the line in the plain text in order to get a list containing unchecked tasks. You can then check them off in the HTML view, which styles them as faded and crossed off in that view, and changes the [ ] to an [x] in the underlying plaintext (source mode).
- Another general feature of Obsidian which is helpful for managing to-do lists is that you can add tags to various parts of a document by using # followed by tag text (e.g. #backlog). Not only are these tags styled in a way that makes them visually stand out but they can also be incorporated into the functioning of various plugins. For example, the DataView plugin allows you to essentially trawl through your various Obsidian documents looking for specific information (such as tags) and then collects all the information it found into a data display, or a custom visualization. This is quite powerful, although requires a lot of manual setup to configure your DataView queries and visualization in the way that's helpful to you.
- However, I decided to go a different route from the powerful/flexible DataView. I instead installed a Gantt chart plugin called Markwhen. Markwhen is basically a markdown-based system someone made for specifying Gantt charts using plaintext lists of items organized into groups and sections as desired. I think it was developed with its own web-based renderer in mind rather than Obsidian, but installing the Obsidian plugin gets you access to its specialized Gantt chart specification syntax and its calendar and timeline visualization tools. So with very little work or custom code, you get an easy way to specify Gantt chart items in plaintext and get nice Gantt chart visualizations for them straight out of the box. One thing that is nice (for my purposes) is that you can specify what color each tag should be displayed as, allowing you to use a tagging scheme that separates tasks by the type that they are and displays them differently. That said, the mildly frustrating thing is that items do NOT just inherit the tag of their parent by default, so you have to manually tag each and every item, even though you've also already established them as part of the same group. A bit annoying, but at least it is fairly easy to copy and paste tags around as needed.
So in summary:
Pros of Obsidian: Lightweight, downloadable software suitable for 1-person projects. Can handle short-, mid-, and long-term planning through to-do lists, Gantt charts, files/different sections of files, and tagging. It is also useful for taking detailed text notes alongside your to-do lists and other more table-like information.
Cons of Obsidian: Plain text format means that more complicated organizational tools, querying/filtering, and visualizations have to be implemented on top to translate plaintext files into meaningful data and visualizations -- the format of files is not inherently "database-like," even if you would want it to be for most project planning applications. As a result, you are also fairly heavily reliant on community-developed plugins and custom solutions for a lot of helpful "productivity software"-type functionality.
Monday.com
Now let's go back in time to the first tool I used, which was Monday(.com). This web application has a LOT of functionality but in my case that functionality was overkill. The site is designed for coordinating large teams which might also be using various other workplace or process management software like Github or JIRA, which is nice but not something I happened to need for my planning my personal 1-person project. Another nice thing (that I did appreciate) is that it has a lot of functionality for adding metadata to tasks, which helps you neaten/sort/organize them, which is very helpful. I liked that amount of power and flexibility.
However, the main issue, in terms of my personal need, was that Gantt chart visualization was not included in the free account level. Also, the site starts you on a pro trial, which basically hides which of the features you are using are packaged with which account levels. Very non-transparent and frustrating! I didn't want to pay for an account just to use this for my summer project, so the lack of Gantt charts at the free level was a dealbreaker, but even if that hadn't been a dealbreaker, the manipulativeness of the two-week Pro trial probably would have been. The other issue is that Monday is a very heavyweight tool AND browser-based (which is a very slow, unwieldy tech stack in the first place, compared to standalone applications). This makes it very useful (again) for large teams coordinating largely online. However, for my purposes, it made for a very bloated, slow-loading website that didn't need to be that way as I do not even need an internet connection to do my project planning.
Pros of Monday.com: Features out the wazoo. Customizable categories and labeling of tasks, including tags. Lots of sprint and time-management functionality.
Cons of Monday.com: Not clear WHICH features come with your account level unless you dig pretty deep into the documentation. No Gantt chart visualizations in the free account. Very slow web-app -- slow-loading and also bloated due to the one-stop-shop type approach to functionality. Takes a long time for the functionality to become apparent, which wastes a lot of time if the functionality is not actually sufficient for your purposes. Requires an account and internet connection to use.
Microsoft Planner
The second tool I used was Microsoft Planner. One con about this software is that it had a recent rename and there's now a whole cluster of related products with slightly different names, which makes it hard to find accurate, up-to-date information and documentation. But as far as I can tell, Planner is a light version of the various project-planning tools, and it comes free with Teams? Or at the very least, Planner comes free to me as part of my work's Microsoft web software suite, which is convenient to me personally.
I did not use this one very long because it quickly became apparent to me that it has NO support whatsoever for Gantt charts, at least in the non-paid version. However, from my brief time using and playing around with it, it did seem pretty good at basically everything else I needed. You can make fairly intense project plans and share/associate them with specific teams you're part of in Teams (or just keep them private to you).
Just based on what I saw in the example/demo project, you can do fairly detailed task planning and intuitively arrange/group tasks visually in the form of grouped to-do lists (buckets of tasks) or in kanban format. For both to-do list and kanban forms, you have a wide variety of ways to group tasks: by user-defined "buckets," by task priority, by task progress, and by color-coded labels that you can name/define per plan.
The UI is very pleasingly simple, clean, and responsive. Also, you can use Planner to manage your daily to-do list as well. From what I saw of it, it had helpful features for dropping undone tasks from the previous day or copying them over to today if you want to finish them up. It seemed like there were also ways to incorporate tasks from your plans into your daily planner, so it just seemed like generally quite good both at long-term planning and translating those plans into daily to-do lists.
However, the major problem -- for my purposes, at least -- was the lack of Gantt chart functionality. As far as I could tell, there IS a paid (subscription-based only) version of Planner, confusingly called something like "Microsoft Planner Plan 1 (formerly Project Plan 1)" that probably has Gantt chart functionality. However, I was not willing to subscribe to a service for Gantt chart functionality so it was a pretty easy decision to abandon exploration of this option and move on, despite the fact that I did actually quite like the to-do list features and detailed project planning functionality (decent custom metadata and visualization options).
Pros of Microsoft Planner: Relatively simple and clean interface good for both daily to-do lists and more detailed project planning. Good visualization tools outside of Gantt charts. Free/accessible productivity software due to Teams integration(?).
Cons of Microsoft Planner: NO Gantt chart functionality. Finding relevant documentation and advice/descriptions of functionality is difficult due to renames and changes to the software, meaning that some FAQs just give out-of-date information.
GanttProject
Basically, after using two tools that were fairly feature-intense web applications that didn't have Gantt charts in their free version functionality (particularly the very slow, memory-intensive Monday.com), I decided to look into complete desktop applications/software that could be installed and run locally, especially free and open source software (FOSS) options, possibly very narrowly specialized in Gantt charts in particular. My thinking was, Microsoft Planner does 90% of what I wanted from a project management system, but I just needed some basic Gantt chart software to augment it.
The clear best option in the space laid out above was GanttProject, a FOSS multiplatform, standalone software very easy to download and install. Its Java-based GUI is a bit dated/clunky but functional enough. Overall, this looked pretty promising for my purposes, but I quickly ran into several issues that together added up to a dealbreaker:
1. For some reason I don't understand, the interface just wouldn't save my work most of the time. I would regularly try to change start/end dates for tasks, either through the draggable interface or by pulling up the task info dialogue for a specific task, and in both cases, most of the time, no changes would be made and the old values of the date would remain. This would happen maybe five times, failing, before inexplicably working on the sixth attempt. Very mysterious. It's possible I could have figured out a fix with further investigation, but:
2. The help/support/documentation for this software is basically non-existent, heavily reliant on (a small number of) user-made YouTube videos made 2-13(!) years ago to explain/demonstrate/make users aware of functionality.
3. Finally, while there is an ability to color-code tasks, color is set manually PER TASK with a very finicky color-picker. Even though this tool allows multilevel task nesting (! very useful!), the task hierarchy does not have any effect on task color-coding (e.g. setting the color for one parent task doesn't affect all its children or anything; all tasks start out with the same black color...), nor does there seem to be some other way of automatically coloring tasks based on some other piece of metadata associated with the task. It is therefore quite difficult/tedious to set task colors for all tasks in a consistent manner.
One or two of these issues may have been tolerable enough for me to stick around and try to make this software work for me, but the combination of all three made me decide to just quickly move on to search for better options.
Pros of GanttProject: Powerful Gantt chart functionality supporting multilevel task hierarchies. Conforms to existing project management file formats/standards. Light, standalone software with no limits on number or complexity of projects, with all data stored locally. Ability to assign color to tasks, although in a highly manual way.
Cons of GanttProject: Buggy?? Interface requires a lot of manual work, making it hard to quickly and easily create tasks. Default task metadata is a bit limited, and custom metadata has limited functionality. Basically no documentation.
Other FOSS software I rejected
I did look at some other options aside from GanttProject but I either wasn't able to get them working or I just quickly moved on without trying them that much. These included Agantty, ProjectLibre, OpenProject, and TaskJuggler.
Agantty: A free online web application for making Gantt charts. I didn't spend long with this one because from what I saw from using it a bit, it had less functionality than GanttProject -- the same issues with non-automatic setting of colors for tasks and similarly limited custom metadata, and also with an interface that seemed clunky and unwieldy for trying to quickly make a bunch of tasks. And unlike GanttProject, this site did not seem to be using some standard Gantt chart/project file format but seemed to just be making up its own task data structure. Plus, you need to create an account to use it. At least it didn't seem buggy? But making new tasks was a sufficiently tedious process that I basically wasn't interested in exploring this one further.
ProjectLibre Desktop: This is downloadable software with I guess some general project management functionality? But its main functionality seems to just be making Gantt charts. I didn't actually try this one out. I think the whole product website just turned me off. But from the website screenshots, it seems kind of similar to GanttProject with a similarly plain and outdated Gantt-chart-focused set of functionality. I guess that was why I decided to skip this one (in addition to the weird website aggressively pushing AI and a subscription plan on you, even though the (presumably very old) downloadable, desktop, AI-less, and subscriptionless software seems very much still available).
OpenProject: I looked into this one briefly but this seemed more like if you have a big team/organization and need a project management software for everyone to use, but you don't want to have to pay for services like Monday.com -- so instead you have your own webserver hosting a free version of project management web application software that you direct all your employees to access and use. This was not really what I needed for my solo personal project purposes, but seems nice if you need productivity software for like a big political organization or nonprofit or major open-source software development team or something like that, where you don't want to have to rely on third-party team productivity software/hosting.
TaskJuggler: I... could not really figure out what this was or how it worked. The two things that seemed to be true about it, though, was that (1) installation seemed to be non-trivial and required going via installing Ruby, and (2) it seemed mostly command-line/plain-text based, which I couldn't really understand how that works/why you would want to do project management that way (ironically, the solution I ended up going with (Obsidian) is also a plain-text way of defining Gantt charts...). I'm guessing this software is also designed to allow you to deploy project management web applications through your browser, similar to OpenProject, but just a bit more older, dated, and lo-fi way of doing that... It seemed unappealing and too reliant on manual labor, so I quickly abandoned this.
ClickUp
After being a bit frustrated with my foray into FOSS options, I decided to return to the list I had of free web-based tools, which still had a few unexplored options: ClickUp, Asana, Notion, and Wrike. Of these four, it was hard to tell from the outside whether the latter three had Gantt chart functionality, whereas ClickUp clearly did, and at the free account level too, so I decided to explore that one first.
However, I ended up quickly abandoning this one after initial tests. Unlike Monday.com, it was more difficult to figure out how to set the values/colors of various dropdown columns without just creating a new, custom column. In Monday, the former was quite easy/intuitive, whereas in ClickUp, I could not figure out how to do this so settled on doing the latter. Unlike with GanttProject, however, custom columns here seemed very powerful and quite useful. And there were indeed Gantt chart views bundled with the free account that you could use custom column values to color-code, and it was also easy to click and drag to make quick adjustments to task start/end dates using the visual interface. All things that I had difficulty doing in GanttProject. (However, here too, there was some mild bugginess where sometimes colors were not applied to the Gantt chart tasks and the bars showed up as white (unfilled).) But, overall, promising.
However, when I happened to be looking into just how many projects and how complex projects could be on a free account just to make sure ClickUp would be able to support the kind of project-planning I needed, I came across a FAQ saying that free accounts could make use of custom columns, but they came with a limited number of times that values in those columns could be set (i.e. a limited number of rows/tasks that could have that column non-empty). Since custom columns were the only way I could figure out how to translate task metadata into colors on the Gantt chart (which itself was not ideal functioning), basically what this meant was that there was a hard cap on the number of tasks I could put into my project before those custom columns were rendered unusable. NOT good for my purposes.
At this point, I was getting real tired of inputting a small set of example tasks with deadlines into each software I was trialling -- just enough test data to experiment with the main functionality that I would need when making my Gantt chart for real. And, like with Monday.com, I was a bit annoyed that info on free account limitations was so difficult to find. In this case, I hadn't actually hit the limit -- it would be a while until I did, and I might have even been able to make the full Gantt chart I needed without bumping up against that limit to custom column value slots. But I was just tired I'd only found out about that limitation after I'd taken the time to put in some tasks, plus not too keen on the unwieldy, memory-hungry, web application format anyway, and also a bit frustrated that columns were less easily customized/altered here than on Monday.com (although who knows -- for all I know, those customizable columns could have been a paid feature on Monday.com ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), that I just wasn't very happy with ClickUp as a solution overall and decided to quickly move on. I know sites need to get paid for the cost of hosting and software development/maintenance, but I just really didn't like that an important limitation like this wasn't very clear and would only kick in like ~80 items deep into a project if I hadn't been doing a bit more research on free accounts generally. I need more transparency!
Pros of ClickUp: Gantt charts in free accounts with ability to color-code charts with custom column values. Lots of other project-planning functionality.
Cons of ClickUp: Some aspects of the interface are difficult to use/get to do what it is you want. Hard limit on how many custom column uses a free account can apply. Free account limitations not particularly clear. Rendering of Gantt chart elements' color appears to be slightly buggy.
Final options
At this point, I still had other options on my list to investigate, although I wasn't feeling particularly optimistic about what level of functionality I would find regarding Gantt charts. At this point in time, I talked to a student and shared my frustrations over trying to find project planning software that had the exact set of functionality I needed. She said that most people use Notion for that kind of thing (doing detailed project planning on your own rather than in teams), but that sometime last year(?), Notion had a major outage that caused people to freak out since their data was not accessible and also possibly lost. Notion restored service with everyone's files intact, but it made some people wary and paranoid about that happening again, and so at that point, a lot of people switched to Obsidian.
This is what made me look into Obsidian a bit closer, as it hadn't really been on my radar before, especially for Gantt charts. (And in the end, I did not actually get around to checking out Asana, Notion, or Wrike, so they are still unknowns to me.) As the main thing I still needed at this point was Gantt chart functionality (since Microsoft Planner seemed to have decent ability to pick up the rest), I first needed to look into whether Obsidian had this functionality at all. As mentioned above, Obsidian was extremely plain-text based and so, while it was clear that people put Obsidian to various helpful note-taking uses and could do some powerful customizations of their vaults, it was not clear to me whether Gantt charts were viable. A quick search for Gantt-chart-related Obsidian plugins turned up two options, which was both promising and risky -- promising that there were plugins here at all but risky in that they might be incomplete, not be actively maintained, not contain the particular set of functionality I needed, etc. and I would be stuck with those two offerings and nothing else.
Obsidian is quite reliant on a volunteer developer community and what it happens to look like (e.g. what it decides to work on and maintain, etc.). That said, it does seem to have fairly robust options for Gantt charts, with a dedicated plugin as mentioned above (Markwhen) but also a build-it-yourself option with generic chart/visualization frameworks that can be used to define your own Gantt chart display. In both cases, Gantt charts here are complicated visualizations built on parsing correctly-formatted text lists of tasks -- it's a bit clunky but it works well enough. At this point, I was just happy to have something (1) free; (2) downloadable and geared toward individual (rather than team) usage; (3) that has Gantt charts (4) with some amount of color-coding capability. Some minor quibbles (e.g. the fact that Markwhen, unlike GanttProject, doesn't have an option for omitting weekends from view) were a price I was willing to pay to have something with the basics.
In addition to the Gantt chart and general task/to-do list functionality, another benefit of Obsidian is that it is indeed good at being a place where you can stash a whole bunch of assorted notes on various topics (having a kind of lab book). Previously, I was using Word docs on OneDrive to track all my various to-dos and fiddly details related to my classes (I had one Word doc per class). Now, I've moved all those notes to Obsidian where I can have a bunch of clustered groups of files, one folder for each class, and it opens much quicker on my own computer without an internet connection, and the plain formatting is much easier to handle as well as opposed to Word's unwieldy rich-text formatting. Being able to have detailed lab notes (e.g. my notes on all the subject material and potential coursework technologies I've been researching) right next to detailed to-do lists has really been a big step up compared to what I was doing before.
(The sad/ironic thing is that immediately after completing this extensive research on project planning tools and finally making a detailed Gantt chart for my project in Obsidian, I basically fell down a second, unrelated two-week hole at work (a mix of vacation / team Away Days plus an extremely time-consuming and time-sensitive batch of marking that ran me over like a truck). By the time I could return to my long-term projects two weeks later, (1) I needed to replan everything and retriage as all my time estimates were no longer realistic, and (2) the timeframe of my summer work had gone from about 8 weeks down to just one month (the lost time included: time spent researching tools, time spent in the unexpected work hole, and time spent recovering from hole and doing replanning), which meant that "long-term planning" was no longer even needed at this point! It's much easier to figure out how to prioritize and make goals when you only have one month to finish everything, so I did replan my project but in a way that ended up bypassing the Gantt chart entirely this time. All of the above chaotic/unexpected stuff couldn't be helped, but it is just ironic that I spent SO much time finding and learning how to use the right tool for this job only to get, like, one day's utility out of the Gantt chart it took me two weeks to make before immediately needing to throw it away. 🤣 Oh well, not all that planning work was wasted as it helped me at least understand my goals and scope better. And if I ever need to do a big project next year...)
Anyway, aside from Obsidian, I just wanted to take this time to mention a couple more tools in this space:
TrackBear
In my particular case, another thing that was helpful to me was to make goals to dedicate X hours per week to pushing forward these long-term projects as I tend to work slower when I don't have hard deadlines, and it's also easy to get distracted from hard, long-term projects with easy, short-term, but less-important tasks. So I wanted to make sure I am making constant progress on these. While setting deadlines/milestone-type-goals can be pretty effective at making project work more urgent, they also tend to be quite inaccurate in their estimations of how long something will take, or even whether that particular task/goal is feasible at at all or whether it should eventually be dropped and the time reallocated to something else. Also, the more difficult and complicated the work, the more likely it is that you can't actually completely tick off tasks because some part of them remains unfinishable or unknown or they're just too big to tackle in one week and give you a sense of accomplishment. So making goals in this kind of situation can be quite unrealistic or difficult to achieve, which is actually DEmotivating; therefore, it can be helpful to have just pure time goals, both to force these difficult long-term tasks to be allocated some priority AND to give a sense of accomplishment/on-track-ness that isn't reliant on being able to check some specific, quite difficult task off your list.
So time-tracking is another piece of functionality that was helpful to me. While some of the software mentioned above has time-tracking functionality bundled with it, I personally just opted to use yet another tool I heard about via writer circles (GYWO), which is TrackBear. TrackBear is a very simple, lightweight online tool for time (or word, page, etc.) tracking, which lets you set goals over timeframes of your choice (weekly goals in my case) and then automatically generates neat graphs to help you see whether you're on track or not for hitting that goal, and also helps you see your project progress/effort over time. I used this tool in the past to keep on track with my
fffx projects where I needed to write 10k on a strict deadline. However, I don't normally use it for tracking my writing because I use GYWO's tools for that and I don't typically need detailed "am I on track" type tracking for my projects. But with my work project, it's a really helpful side tool for making weekly progress goals and ensuring a minimum amount of slow, steady progress each week.Pros: Simple, lightweight online tool for numerical goal-making and tracking progress against those goals. Nice graphs.
Cons: A bit buggy. For example, if you use tags, you need to sign out and sign in again for them to show up, I think. Sometimes dropdown menus won't disappear after you select an option from the dropdown, which makes it hard to fill in the rest of the form. Project progress totals don't update automatically and require a hard Ctrl+R refresh for the numbers to update, etc.
Spreadsheets:
Finally, one other major option I kind of neglected to look into throughout this process (especially toward the latter half when it became clear I mainly needed a Gantt chart option) was just using a spreadsheet of some kind (e.g. Google Sheets). This option became more salient to me recently (i.e. after I had already completed my tool research) because for some reason, about a week ago, Sheets kept displaying a tooltip on all my spreadsheets saying that I can now make Gantt charts in Sheets. News to me. However, I dismissed those pop-ups at the time because I didn't have time at the moment to look into that further and I just wanted to access my damn spreadsheet I was doing other work in. And now, not only are the pop-ups gone, but I literally cannot find any utilities or help documentation related to making Gantt charts in Google Sheets other than people's custom solutions from years ago. So, Google, what is the truth.
Anyway, this MAY be a viable Gantt chart option, but generally, in the past, I have found the graphing capabilities of spreadsheet software to be pretty limited, inflexible, and tedious (i.e requiring a lot of manual labor) to use. Probably because of this, the Gantt chart templates I found seemed largely to rely on using the physical spreadsheet cells themselves to visually represent timeline "bars" rather than use any graphing functionality.
There might be a solution here, and I know some people who use an elaborate spreadsheet as their main way of project-planning and managing deadlines in general. I am not sure how well this works for me, personally, as project planning makes more sense in my mind as something primarily text-based rather than something where a tabular format makes sense, and I find the table/cell format of spreadsheets very rigid and inflexible in a way that hinders my ability to visually rearrange and organize my to-dos, which is the main thing I need some kind of software to help with. So yeah, I did not do much to explore plain spreadsheets as a possible project management tool, but I just mention it as an option in case it jives better with other people.
Conclusion
So in the end, Obsidian + TrackBear were sufficient for my project-planning purposes -- it's odd but I guess not really surprising that tools writers recommend for helping them make progress on their big writing projects ended up also being useful for my big solo projects as well. I'm posting this in case this saves some time for anyone else who might potentially be in a similar boat in the future, at least for this very specific kind of project-planning and this particular set of project planning needs (one-person project planning, with both long- and medium-term planning needed, with some ability to group tasks into clusters and automatically color-code those in a Gantt chart visualization). (I spent something like 20+ hours on this tool research task... 😭)
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