A Personal Project Management Dashboard You Actually Own

Most project management tools are built for teams — shared boards, permissions, assignees, notifications. If you're a team of one (a freelancer, an indie hacker, a solo founder, a student running a thesis), that machinery is overhead you don't need. You end up paying a per-seat subscription to a cloud tool that treats your one project like a company.

Baton Board takes the other path. It's a local-first widget board you fully own, and its parts assemble into a personal project cockpit: what to do, what's due, what you decided, and how far along you are — all on one screen, on your device.

To be clear about what this is: Baton Board is a single-user, local-first dashboard, not a team collaboration suite. There are no shared boards, no real-time multi-user editing, and no assignees. If you need to coordinate a group in real time, a tool like Jira, Trello or Asana is the right choice. If you want a private, no-account cockpit to run your projects, read on.

Your project, as widgets

A project is really a handful of moving parts. Here's how each becomes a widget on your board:

• Next actions → a Tasks widget (free). The list of what to do next, each with a priority and a due date. Use the board's filters — priority, overdue, today, this week — to see only what's actionable now.
• Multi-step work → a Tasks widget with subtasks (free). Anything bigger than one step becomes a task with its own subtasks, so the outcome and its steps live together.
• Milestones and deadlines → Calendar and Countdown widgets (free). A hard launch date gets a countdown; scheduled dates land on the calendar.
• Decisions and scope → a Notes widget (free). The design calls, the "why", the things you don't want to re-litigate later — in Markdown you own.
• Resources → a Links widget (free). The repo, the spec, the analytics — one click away.

That alone is a complete, private project board with no account and nothing to pay for.

See progress, not just a to-do list

A to-do list tells you what's left. A dashboard tells you whether you're winning. Baton Board's analytics widgets — part of Pro — turn a task pile into a project you can steer:

• Goal (Pro). Set a completion target (features shipped, chapters written, deals closed) and watch the percentage climb.
• KPI (Pro). Track a single number that defines success for the project, updated by hand or from a read-only feed.
• KPI Tree (Pro). Break a big objective into a north-star metric and its drivers — a visual tree that shows how the small numbers roll up into the outcome. It's the widget that makes a solo project feel strategic instead of just busy.
• Activity (Pro). A running log of what changed — including updates written by your AI agents — so you can see momentum at a glance.
• PDCA (Pro). A plan-do-check-act panel for a lightweight retrospective at the end of each sprint, so the next one is better than the last.
• Agenda (Pro). Pulls due and upcoming items from every widget into one place, so nothing hides in a collapsed list.

The free widgets run the project. The Pro widgets tell you how it's really going.

Humans and AI, one board

Baton Board is built for the age of AI: you and your agents read and write the same board through a single data.json. An assistant can add next actions, tick off finished steps, or append to the activity log while you're away — and it's all there, reflected live, the next time you look. Your project runs itself a little, without ever leaving your machine.

Why local-first matters for project work

The work you care about shouldn't live at the mercy of someone else's server:

• No account, no cloud. Your board lives in this browser, on this device. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to leak, and it keeps working offline.
• No lock-in. Export the whole board to a data.json file whenever you want, and import it anywhere. Your project is a file you keep, not a database someone else holds.
• Yours to shape. No app author decides what a "project" looks like. You arrange the widgets, so the board matches how you actually work.

Build a project board in five minutes

1. Add a Next Actions (a Tasks widget) and dump every step you can think of into it, each with a priority.
2. Add a Countdown for the deadline that matters most, and a Calendar for scheduled dates.
3. Add a Notes widget for scope and decisions, and a Links widget for your resources.
4. Add a Goal widget and set a completion target — then a KPI Tree to connect that goal to the drivers underneath it.
5. Add an Agenda widget so a two-minute daily glance shows everything due across the board.

Frequently asked questions

Is Baton Board a Jira or Asana alternative?

For a solo user, it can replace them — you get tasks, subtasks, priorities, deadlines, notes and a real progress view without a subscription or an account. But it is not a team tool: there are no shared boards, assignees, or real-time collaboration. It's a personal project cockpit, not a company one.

Can I manage more than one project?

Yes. Use multi-board profiles to keep a separate layout per project and switch between them instantly, or run several project widgets on one board — whichever matches how you think.

Where is my project data stored?

In your browser's local storage on this device. There's no account and no server copy. Export to a data.json file any time to back up or move your board to another machine.

Do I need Pro to manage a project?

No. The task, calendar, countdown, notes and links widgets are free and cover the whole workflow. Pro adds the analytics layer — goal, KPI, KPI Tree, activity, PDCA and agenda — for when you want to measure progress, not just list tasks.

Can my AI agent update the board?

Yes. Agents read and write the same data.json, so an assistant can add next actions, complete steps, or append to the activity log — and the changes appear on your board live.