Paper notes.

These have the advantage that they are completely off the screen so they don't compete for attention with all the IDE windows, tabs, web browsers, all of that.

Don't complicate it.

Your customers should dictate what you spend your time on, not directly, but you should filter their feedback into features that fit the whole. If there's nothing filtering out of feedback yet, just work on what's interesting and what you think they'll find useful. I use GitHub issues to track the backlog. But I typically just work on what I think is important or interesting right now, which doesn't even really require a backlog. If it's not important, or if it's uninteresting, it'll probably just sit in the backlog until there's enough demand to make it interesting to work on.

It helps to dogfood your own product too, then you get a direct feedback loop on what's needed right now.

I am of the opinion those are all traps that waste time and effort unproductively.

Trello aka kanban is about reducing work in progress and improving your flow. but why stop reducing overhead at visual cards? Why not eliminate it all and go immediately to development?

I start with a TODO.md and a VSCode extension that makes it into a little KanBan. And I treat it more like notes than anything else, until the project gets much further along.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=coddx.co...