Running multiple client projects at the same time is like playing chess on several boards simultaneously. Each board has its own position, its own rhythm, its own set of pieces in motion. You make a move on board one, then rotate to board two, then three — and by the time you come back to board one, you've already half-forgotten where you left off. That's the closest analogy I have for what our first year of running a small agency felt like.
We weren't doing anything exotic. We had clients — some small, some mid-sized — and each of them had ongoing work: feature requests, bug fixes, design revisions, content updates, onboarding tasks. The kind of work that never fully stops and never fits neatly into a single to-do list.
The Problem: Losing the Thread
The core issue wasn't that we had too much work. The issue was context switching. Every time you jump from one client project to another, your brain has to reload state: where were we, what's blocked, what's waiting on the client, what did we promise by Friday? That reload takes time — sometimes five minutes, sometimes twenty — and it compounds across the day.
We needed two things above everything else:
- A single view where we could see all active work across all clients at a glance
- A way to switch context fast — open a project, immediately know what needs to happen next, close it, move on
We also needed to track time. Clients billed by the hour needed accurate timesheets. Projects billed by milestone still needed internal time data so we could understand whether we were actually profitable. Without time data, we were flying blind on pricing.
What We Tried
We didn't build SimpleBoard on day one. We tried what everyone tries.
We tried Jira. It's powerful — genuinely impressive software — but it's built for software teams of 30 or 50 people with a dedicated project manager who knows what a sprint epic is. For a small agency juggling client work, the setup overhead was brutal. We spent more time configuring workflows than doing actual work.
We tried Trello. Honestly, we loved Trello's simplicity. But the free plan caps you at 10 boards, there's no built-in time tracking, and once you start hitting the limits, the paid plan starts to feel expensive — especially when you have 15 people and you're paying per seat with no time tracking still.
We tried spreadsheets. This worked for about three weeks before the spreadsheet became its own full-time project to maintain.
We tried a handful of smaller tools. Some were abandoned projects, barely maintained. Others had the features we needed but buried them under so many menus and settings that finding anything felt like archaeology.
The Moment of Clarity
The turning point came on a Thursday afternoon when one of our project leads said something obvious that we'd somehow missed: "We don't need a project management platform. We just need a fast visual board."
That was it. We didn't need roadmaps, Gantt charts, resource allocation matrices, or quarterly OKR tracking. We needed cards we could move between columns, a way to see all active projects quickly, and a timer we could click when we started working on something. That's it. Everything else was noise.
What SimpleBoard Is Today
SimpleBoard is the tool we built after that conversation. It's a kanban-first project management tool with time tracking built in — no plugins, no integrations required, no separate subscription to a time-tracking service.
The core is intentionally simple:
- Boards with columns and cards — drag, drop, done
- A one-click timer on every card
- Time reports filterable by board, member, date range, and label
- A REST API so you can connect it to whatever else you use
- One flat price: 1€ per user per month
We didn't add roadmaps. We didn't add Gantt charts. We didn't add dependencies or story points or velocity tracking. Not because those things aren't valuable — they are, for the right teams — but because they weren't what we needed, and they're not what most small teams need either.
Built for People Who Juggle
SimpleBoard was built by people who run multiple projects simultaneously, for other people who run multiple projects simultaneously. It was built for the agency that has seven client boards open at once. For the freelancer who splits their week between four different contracts. For the small product team that needs to ship fast without spending half their day in planning meetings.
If you juggle multiple projects at once, SimpleBoard was built for you. We'd love for you to try it — 30 days free, no credit card required.