The switch to Linear

Quick update on my switch to Linear, which is like Jira 2.0. Yes, I am going even further down the meme of tech people using Jira for their actual real life¹ 😂

I’ll cover the why, and what I like about it (as well as a few things I don’t like!)

Why switch?

I’ve used Reminders on my Apple stuff for a long time, but occasionally, tasks spill both out of Reminders - to my virtual assistant team that helps with my side projects, daily life admin, etc - or they spill in to Reminders from that same team.

Reminders is great, and they’ve actually iterated on the product significantly over the years. But fundamentally, 80% of my tasks live outside of Reminders - via GitHub, Slack, or even on 𝕏.

So Linear has been a great solution for improving that. I’ll keep paying for it and I’m investing heavily in my team getting familiar with it: basically - how do I train them to think “Linear-first”?

Slack integration

This is one of the coolest things you can do with Linear. You can sync Slack threads with a Linear issue, and then any conversation in that thread gets automatically synced to the issue as comments (and vice-versa). We use this feature a lot: our #general channel is basically becoming a collection of Linear/Slack threads - and from there, we can spin out new tasks, sub-issues, etc. Really cool.

GitHub integration

The GitHub integration in Linear is also great. You can drop “Fixes $issue_url” into a pull request description, and it automatically links to the ticket in Linear. You can even set up automations so when a PR is opened with that link, the issue gets set to a status of your choice (e.g. “In Progress”, or “Ready for Review”), and then when the PR is merged, it gets set to “Done”. To be honest, I wasn’t doing many PRs on my side projects (see “IDGAF git commit”), but now that I’m using Linear, I’m doing a lot more of them.

Personal workspace

My personal workspace - literally, called “Kristian” - is something only I can access. That makes it a GTD-style “brain dump” of my personal tasks. And then once a task is ready, it often gets migrated into one of the public workspaces, either for me to action on “in public” with my team, or to delegate to one of them.

I think this is working. Reminders is not great at differentiating “status” of tasks - it’s binary “done” or “not done”. But in Linear, I can mark things as “Up Next”, “Backlog”, or whatever I want really - the status “lanes” are totally customizable².

Linear Terminology

Linear is really opinionated. I’m not sure I’m fully with it yet. The Concepts page in Linear’s docs lay out the way that the product is organized. And it’s a whole thing. Like damn - the terminology is a bit overwhelming:

• Workspace
• Team
• Issue
• Project
• Cycle
• Initiative

What is the difference between an initiative and a project? What’s a team, and what’s a workspace? It’s a lot to learn. I’m sure that some of this is scaling stuff: if I was a founder of a co with thirty team members doing really different functions and trying to wrangle it all together, maybe these would come in handy. But for now, I’m getting by with a few workspaces, where my team has varying degrees of access, and a big list of issues.

Conclusion

Overall, it might seem like a bit of a lift to switch not just my company’s life to Linear, but my personal life/todos as well. Even at the small scale I’m working with it, it’s been great. Both for me to track my personal backlog better, but to get visibility on what my team is doing.

Footnotes

1. See tweet: “My wife and I have been happily married for 5 years. Here is our marriage stack” ↩

2. This isn’t just a Linear thing, obviously. But I like the way it’s laid out in Linear, and it’s nice to be able to do different lane structures per workspace. ↩