Why I'm Building One Dashboard Instead of Five Dashboards

<p>Right now I've got AIREP, Find a Sign, Sweeper Parts, and Nova all moving at once, plus client website work in the gaps. Each one has its own repo, its own issue list, its own half-finished thought from three days ago that I need to pick back up. The problem isn't the work itself — it's that every time I switch projects I'm also switching mental context, and that switch costs more than people give it credit for.</p><p>I've tried the obvious fixes. A notes app per project. A shared kanban board. Sticky notes on the actual desk, which is somehow still the most reliable one. None of them solved the real issue, which is that I don't need five separate views of my work — I need one view that tells me, honestly, what's in progress, what's blocked, and what I said I'd do last week and didn't.</p><p>So I'm building a multi-project orchestration dashboard. Not a project management tool in the Jira sense — I don't need story points and burndown charts for a one-person operation. I need something closer to a status board: what's the state of AIREP's multi-tenant work this week, what's open on Find a Sign, is Sweeper Parts waiting on Wayne for domain input or waiting on me for code, and where did I leave off on Nova's self-improvement loop.</p><p>The interesting part is that this isn't a UI problem, it's a data aggregation problem. The information already exists — it's in git commits, in notes I've taken, in conversations with Nova, in half-written task lists. The dashboard's job isn't to be another place I manually update. It's to pull from where the truth already lives and present it without me doing extra data entry. If I have to maintain the dashboard as a separate source of truth, I've just built a sixth tab, and I will abandon it within two weeks like every project tracker I've ever adopted.</p><p>This is also where Nova earns its keep as more than a chat interface. Nova already has visibility into a lot of this — conversations about what I'm working on, notes I've archived, decisions I've made and why. The dashboard becomes a surface for that memory rather than a new system I have to feed. That's the actual point of building Nova as a multi-agent system in the first place: it's not supposed to be a novelty, it's supposed to reduce the cognitive load of running four things at once as one person.</p><p>There's a broader thing here about how I think about tooling generally. I distrust tools that ask you to change your workflow to fit them. The dashboard I want has to fit around how I already work — jumping between projects based on urgency and energy, not a fixed schedule — and surface the state of things without demanding ceremony. If it needs a daily standup with myself to stay accurate, it's already failed.</p><p>None of this is built yet in any real form — I'm still in the phase of figuring out what data sources actually matter versus what I think should matter. Git activity is an obvious one. Open issues per project is another. But there's a temptation to over-engineer this into something that tracks everything, and I've been burned by that before. The version that survives contact with actual daily use is going to be smaller and dumber than the version I'm imagining right now, and that's fine. I'd rather ship a thin dashboard that I actually open every morning than a comprehensive one that dies in a browser tab I forget exists.</p><p>Next milestone is getting the git and issue aggregation working across AIREP and Find a Sign specifically, since those are the two with the most day-to-day churn. Sweeper Parts and Nova can wait a beat — they move on a different rhythm right now anyway.</p>