I am a solo dev working on a personal web project.

As ideas for features and enhancements are starting to accumulate, I feel that I need to introduce some structure to my process. However, every time (yes, I've done this many times before) I attempt to do so or try to add tools to my workflow , things quickly get OCD for me and I spend all of my time NOT working on the project but managing the project instead.

Thanks to this latest incarnation of madness I've done the following:

• Set up projects in Notion, GitHub Projects, and Jira, and compared them to one another to make THE BEST choice.
• Began doing detailed documentation of requirements and tracking design decisions in Notion or Confluence.
• Began thinking of what kind of process would be the best for me. What Kanban columns to set up? What issue types should I create? What labels to set up? Do I need to organize user stories into epics? Etc., etc., ad nauseam.

Meanwhile, somewhere deep inside I KNOW that all this is waaay overkill. That my time would be much better spent actually designing or writing code. Keeping things minimal and frictionless.

And yet, the lure of the perfect system is ever present. Maybe, just maybe, if I set things up right, this effort will be worth it. Maybe in the future I will want to know exactly what the thought process that made me choose one font over another was. Or how I came to decide which aspect ratio to use for the images. Maybe these things are important to keep track of?

But I suspect that all this specification and documentation is just going to result in a bunch of outdated artifacts specifying and documenting time well wasted. Because experience has shown that I am at my most productive with a structureless .md file and pen&paper setup.

Do you have any suggestions? How do you stop yourself from overthinking and over-engineering task/project management? How do you determine what is worth specifying/documenting/archiving, and what should be ephemeral and only exist for the sake of facilitating taking the next step? Thanks.

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.