I built a beautiful project tracker this week. Colour-coded, automated, three views, little status tags that change colour when a date slips. It took the best part of a day. I was very proud of it.
It is, I have since realised, a monument to avoidance.
There's a specific trap that I think small studios fall into harder than anyone, and it's this: when the real work is scary or murky, building a
system for the work feels almost identical to doing it. Same satisfaction. Same sense of progress. You close the laptop genuinely tired, genuinely convinced you put in a good day. And you produced absolutely nothing that anyone will ever play.
It's the productivity version of buying running shoes instead of going for a run. The setup feels like commitment. It is, in fact, the opposite — a way of being near the work without touching it.
What gets me is how reasonable it sounds in the moment. "We need to get organised." We do! We genuinely do. But there's a version of "getting organised" that's really just fear wearing a hi-vis vest. The hard creative problem was sitting right there, unsolved, and instead of sitting in the discomfort of not knowing how to fix it, I went and made a very tidy table about it.
A bigger studio can afford some of this. They have enough people that someone building process is fine, because someone else is making the thing. We don't have that luxury. When there are only a few of us, every hour spent grooming a system is an hour the actual game didn't get. The overhead has to earn its place, and most of it can't.
So we've made a slightly painful rule. Any new tool or process has to justify itself against the dumbest possible alternative. A shared note. A list on a whiteboard. A five-minute call. If the fancy version doesn't beat the dumb version by a wide margin, the dumb version wins. It almost always wins. We are not big enough to have problems that need software.
I kept the tracker, for what it's worth. Stripped most of it out. It's three columns now and it does the job and I don't love looking at it, which is probably the correct emotional relationship to have with a project tracker.
The actual scary problem is still sitting there, by the way. Tomorrow I'm not allowed to make anything tidy until I've touched it.
— Thiago & the Pixel Sprout team
Posted by Thiago Moreira · June 25, 2026
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