Managing Side Projects

Side projects die from lost context. You spend a weekend building something, making real progress, feeling momentum. Then Monday arrives, your day job pulls you back in, and by the time you have another free weekend two weeks later, the project is a stranger. You open the repo and stare at half-finished code. You cannot remember what worked, what did not, or what you planned to do next.

The usual response is to dump everything into a single task manager alongside your work tasks. But that creates its own problem: your side project ideas pollute your work board, your work deadlines crowd out your personal projects, and everything blurs into one undifferentiated list. You need separation without isolation -- distinct spaces that still give you the full picture when you need it.

ContextSwitch uses separate .db files for each project. Keep work.db for your day job, side-project.db for your app idea, personal.db for life admin. Each database has its own kanban board with its own columns and swimlanes. There is no pollution between contexts -- your work sprint tasks never appear next to your weekend project ideas.

Because databases are just SQLite files, they are portable. You can store a project database in the project repo itself, right alongside the code. Clone the repo on a new machine and your task board comes with it. No syncing, no accounts, no wondering where your tasks went.

Separate databases do not mean separate worlds. ContextSwitch provides a unified timeline view that shows everything due across all open databases. Monday morning, you see that your work project has a sprint deadline on Wednesday and your side project has a beta invite going out on Friday. Both deadlines, one view. You can plan your week knowing what matters across every context.

This is the balance most tools get wrong. They either force everything into one bucket or silo things so completely that you lose the big picture. ContextSwitch gives you isolation where you want it and visibility where you need it.

The project diary is the killer feature for side projects. Each database has a built-in diary where you log what you did, what you were thinking, and what to do next. These are timestamped, searchable entries that capture your mental state at the moment of writing.

When you come back to a side project after two weeks away, you do not have to reconstruct your mental state from git diffs and half-remembered Slack messages. You read your last diary entry: "Got the auth flow working. Payment integration is next -- looked at Stripe docs, their checkout session API is the right approach. Start with the webhook handler." That is your on-ramp. You are productive in minutes instead of spending an hour trying to remember where you were.

ContextSwitch ships with a built-in MCP server, which means Claude Code can read and write to your boards directly. This is especially powerful for side projects where you are the only developer and the only project manager.

Ask Claude "What was I working on in my side project?" and it pulls the latest tasks and diary entries from your side-project.db. Say "Add a task to research payment APIs" and it goes straight to the right database without you opening the app. After a coding session, tell Claude to log what you accomplished and it writes a diary entry capturing everything while the context is fresh.

For solo builders juggling multiple projects, this turns your AI assistant into a project manager that never loses track of where things stand.

Get ContextSwitch on the Mac App Store