Do you use any Atlassian products for your personal projects?

After spinning my wheels trying to get organized enough to write a book for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) I took my affinity for Atlassian products from my work life and decided to try and use them to improve my personal life.

I get a lot of satisfaction organizing my thoughts and ideas using Confluence. That makes sense, considering a lot of my job is creating and editing Atlassian documentation using Confluence.

But I'm wondering, am I the only weirdo doing this? Am I the only one using Atlassian products, designed to help professional teams getting stuff done, in my personal life?

Would love to hear how you're using Atlassian tools in your personal life!

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Hi @Paz,

To tell an interesting story, one of my colleagues has just become a mother. She can hardly take care of twins at the same time. So she hired a babysitter.

My colleague is a senior project management. To my astonishment, she had arranged the day-to-day work schedule of the babysitter and set tasks in Jira, such as cooking, washing clothes, buying food, taking children to the hospital for vaccination etc, and using Kanban to track and run well.

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Wow !

@Ollie Guan that's brilliant! Thank you so much for sharing.

This is such a great idea!

Yes, I have the same setup of my own JIRA+Confluence+Trello

Jira for daily family tasks (working in garden, home, children tasks, every activities)

Confluence for sharing re-building a house, gardens, descriptions of all, sharing galleries, setup of other applications, links presentation of future plans and more + Great Family Team Calendar with all actions (doctor, meeting with parents, holidays, )

Trello for small parts of concrete tasks - for example detailed shopping lists

It will be great if Atlassian think about JIRA FAMILY or JIRA for personal using not only for working teams.

And I think that workflows can be useful in Health industry, for example if all doctors use tickets of patients in the hospital. JIRA Health for example :)

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@Tomas Junger I think you're onto something...

Because Jira Core is flexible enough to make that happen.

May be Atlassian share free license for cloud / server for ncomercial / private use ?

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No, they don't. But you can get free licences for secular charity organisations and for using them to support a fully open-source project.

Like • Ástor Ayllón Lázaro likes this

That is an interesting approach, to fully support open-source projects. Another +1 for atlassian! :)

Thank you just found what I need

very interesting

Interesting thread! I was looking for a tool to store my conferences' notes, some how-to, etc. I've tried tools like OneNote and Evernote but ended in using a Confluence for my personal use :) I also have a few Trello boards for to-do lists, but no Jira so far!

I still use Evernote for notes on the fly, saving web articles for reading. But I like to think of Confluence as me formally putting things into motion. Well, that's the plan anyway. Need to get better about working on my "me" projects (like most grownups).

Trello is a great place to house daily tasks, grocery lists and choirs. Additionally, I've used JIRA for event planning.

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Wonderful! Thanks for sharing.

Now, the real question is... has anyone been able to get their kids to do chores via Trello/Jira/whatever.

All I'm sayin' is... whoever solves that problem can have all my money, right now.

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Seriously? Just wondering if confluence is free or do you pay and use this for your personal use?

I run a startup of less than 5 employees and are just getting everything setup now. Always wanted to setup confluence but that was too costly for us. Is a free version available anyway ;)

Um, 5 employees can't afford a $10 licence?

There's no free version for most of us (secular charities and open source projects can get free ones), but the $10 licences are really not far off "free", and the money goes to a charity rather than Atlassian.

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@Hari Shankar _Shankar Newton_
I'm "an office" of one, and I pay for the $10 per month license for Confluence Cloud, I also pay the same for the Jira Cloud license. I love that I can add additional users as needed to collaborate with friends on projects as they come up.

Workfront is $30 a month per user
Asana is $10 a month per user (annual billing)
Evernote is $12.50 a month per user

...Its hard to pass up Confluence at $1 per user per month, assuming you have a full 10 users. $2 per user in your case.

(pricing listed is for business editions, the level that allows for team collaborations)

@Paz, yes to your question about kids. I have six children, ranging in age from 2 to 18, and we are homeschoolers. Confluence and Jira are just the thing for a big family homeschool life!

Trello adoption was easy. The kids like making their own plans for the week and working through the list. Getting my paper-preferring wife interested in a truly unified digital project management system was more challenging. Fortunately, the appeal of getting absolutely everything organized is strong—school assignments, errands, car repairs, shopping lists, agendas for our weekly family meetings, and so on.

Confluence and Jira are next, but not yet implemented at the family level. I suspect Confluence will be pretty easy, but Jira may take more work—and possibly, synchonization with Trello or something else kid-friendly. I have some idea of how this will go, because we started with Asana. There was a lot for the family to learn about the benefits of using a sharing a system, despite our individual differences. We also talked a lot about how to organize different types of projects and tasks. Now, everybody down to the 7-year-old uses the same system, but we (the parents) are ready for more.

Confluence is ideal for content such as curriculum and other resources for homeschool. Jira, is great for planning assignments and activities for the year (and beyond). Jira workflows are perfect for using with children, since parents usually want to check their children's work. The job is not done when the child says so, but only when the Jira issue passes the review and approval state. :-)

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That is... glorious...

How much to come to my house and implement?

I'll trade for server and maintenance advice! ;-)

Like • Ástor Ayllón Lázaro likes this

Hey @Paz,

Interesting question!

I use Confluence to take notes for the online courses I take. A couple of times, I prepared the assessment (e.g. a Wireframe) on Confluence and then exported it.

I also use Trello almost every day for my personal projects. For example, I manage there the tasks and activities for a meetup that I organize.

Do you have your own version of Confluence? Or do you use your personal space from your work instance?

I use my personal space from my work instance. :-)

I usually only need to share my notes with my colleagues (we take the same courses together).

I used Trello for some personal projects too.

Like • Emily Koch likes this

What kind of projects? Writing?

I've used Trello for the first time to track some issues on a personal software project. It helped me while I was at university and was useful to get more organized and syncronized with my colleagues... Although, I already used Trello to organize some personal events with my friends, camping for example 😅

Like • Emily Koch likes this

Nice! Thanks so much for sharing!

There are currently two projects that I am using JIRA and Confluence to help accomplish :

Academic Research
Wedding!!

Academic Research

I was overwhelmed by all the stuff that needed to get done in regard to writing my research paper, the project was getting just too big. I quickly set up a PostgreSQL database and JIRA/Confluence instance locally on my machine and created my project. Started building up my epics (research paper, software development, ethical approbation and experimentation) and then broke those down into simpler tasks. I used Confluence to document my meeting notes with my research director and to keep simple notes on other papers that I've read. The integration was helpful to keep everything at hand!

Wedding

This one is the coolest. I am currently using JIRA to plan my wedding, which will occur in October (yeah!!). Of course, the bride-to-be is the PO... always let her be the PO... Anyway, I am the scrum master in this case as I keep things on track to achieve what PO wants. That actually makes both of us happy as we are able to easily keep track of everything that needs to be planned and we even use monthly sprints to make sure to be able to plan ahead what we can accomplish within that time frame.

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Wonderful! Thanks so much for sharing. And congrats on getting married soon!

My partner and I use Trello for weekend activities and chores. We write everything we need/want to do for the weekend in a list, and then slot each card in to Friday, Saturday, or Sunday lists so we know when/what we're going to do. We do this when we travel, too. We also use Trello for keeping track of beers we've tasted.

One of my best friends is getting married next spring, and I told her about Trello, which she's now using to plan her wedding (thanks to the handy wedding planning template)!

Like • Andrea Lee likes this

THE BEER BOARD! Sounds... delicious! Thanks for sharing!

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Great question!

I use Trello with Zapier integration to run monthly processes: pay monthly bills, do regular activities check related to taking care of my kid, initiating weekly processes in order to work on personal projects.

Zapier Zaps creates tickets in Trello using pre-defined triggers with proper schedule and pushes checklist items to complete these processes.

Pretty neat thing!

O. M. G.

The more you share about this the better! I beg of you, write an article here in Atlassian Community! You must share this magical setup you're describing.

Thanks so much for commenting!

Same as me hahaha

I just started using Zapier along with JSD for my company, to schedule monthly and quarterly recurring activities. We have a separate JSD project (Jira+Confluence) for each company department.

Also, we use Jira to send documents to the Finance department for processing. It makes a lot of sense, now that we have set that up.

Is anyone using Zapier with Confluence yet? The integration is only in beta but I'm excited to get this piece up and running.

I think there's a general "collab support" perspective. Software is way collaborative: becomes a solution development target for doing hard collaboration, to exploit in other domains.

"If you can support developing 'software in the large' you can support anything."

"I will speak in terms of developing software, and of it's shadow, life." -- Paraphrase with apologies, from Shibumi by Trevanian.

@Paz I'm using Jira + Trello for my wedding planning.

I use Jura for tasks management and Trello for short lists, like ideas, interesting links etc.

Earlier I used Trello for my relocation.

Thanks for sharing Tomasz! I used Confluence for my relocation... Don't know how anyone else can keep track without using tools like these.

I would probably use Trello if I could access it from work. ...security...firewalls...meh.

But I do use Confluence.

I use it to keep track of things I have planted in the garden, what went well with it, what didn't. Needs more sun/water, different pot etc.

I also use Confluence to help me plan events for a social club I am a part of. We use it for meeting notes/after action reports, inventory etc.

Its super handy and I like it better than Evernote or Asana.

I'm super interested to see what you created regarding your garden!

@Paz. I would love to share it with you. Let me see if I can add a screen shot or two to this thread when I am back at my PC.

@Paz

Here's some pics :-)

Wonderful. Cheers!

Thanks for sharing

I use Trello to manage all the repairings and maintenance I need to do to my car.

Fascinating...

But, I have to ask now... do you have to do a lot of repairs? Is it an old car? Or are you a hobbyist?

Are you scheduling things?

Don't leave me hanging!

I am another solo Jira/Confluence user. I don't understand why no other software company has discovered the utility of adding feature-rich commenting on pages (not just in-line) and allowing images, tables and attachments in those comments. It's one of the reasons I keep using confluence, when there are 'lighter' alternatives.

Another mystery to me is why so few systems have a directory (or table of contents, or sitemap) to keep me oriented within the content. Even Google docs, with its nice looking gallery view, still doesn't orient me to the content. It's a process of open—look—close—open another...

I appreciate all the responses to this discussion, because I would like to see more micro Atlassian users. @Paz, am about as technical as non-developers come, but it takes a fair amount of learning to set up server installations of Jira and Confluence. Something simpler would be great for those of us with more enthusiasm than budget (thinking of plugins). Besides, at least on plugin important to me is missing from Confluence Cloud.

@siboconnection all great points, and I didn't realize the directory part of Confluence was a main attractor for me. That's brilliant.

Thanks for your response!

I use to track my expenses - scheduled all issues for bills that come every month so I dont have create them again and again - I use tempo as well to keep record of all my expenses.

- helps me understand my expenditure spikes.

Now THIS is something I think I might try with my personal Jira instance!

Walk me through this though.

Are you using custom fields? Doing calculations? This sounds awesome!

I use bitbucket for my personal coding work . Really great they provide private repo for free :)

So like for your personal website or blog? Anything notable you're working on?

I use JIRA, Confluence and Trello very single day at work. And I just planned my family vacation using Trello! #WootWoot

Like • Emily Koch likes this

Nice! How did you use it? Which parts did you use it to plan for? Don't leave me hangin'!

I used Jira in my personal life when working as a manager in my old company (so i was kept as a secret my project from everyone :) ). I have so much unrelated tasks in my life and I am trying to solve these by dividing into sprints. Jira scrum is so good for doing that.
I want to use Jira for personal life but I think paying monthly 10$ for one person so much expensive.

Most people pay more for their music streaming service =)

HOWEVER, if price is your problem, Trello might be a better bet for you.

Good luck.

This is good example , they have localized prices.Maybe that's why it looks expensive to me.

Spotify Premium ;
-USA => $9.99
-Turkey => 13.99 TL
(Actually $9.99 => 59.94 TL)

Netflix Basic ;
-USA => $7.99
-Turkey => 15.99 TL
(Actually $7.99 => 47.94 TL)

Oh my...

I use Confluence in my personal Website to provided tutorials and understand pain points of users. I also use JIRA to have users submit requests for which I can provide appropriate solutions.

Nice! Thanks for sharing.

I use Confluence as a personal KMS, for writing (professional articles), wrangling a consulting practice, my own hands-on tech stack learning, dev and admin, plus some real life on the side: each in its own space, all hosted on my laptop. I probably enjoy too much being able to tell people: I run an enterprise-grade collaboration stack on this machine. You could run a company off of this.

I also use several Atlassian products as examples / demos: "You can get tech to do something like this." or "Why not put collab tech something like this under what you are doing?" Many don't know what they can get. Do not get me started on the name-brand "alternatives": too shallow to be useful, or too rigid to be used. (Guess who each of those are?)

Back in the day I used MoinMoin similarly. Even dropped it in under a network gear product dev team: not Trac but strictly as a wiki for KM. Migrated because:

1 - The expanded feature set, integrations, sclae and plug-ins in Confluence (Atlassian products generally) gives me a grab-and-go solution when I want to do something more robust. "Just code it up." in MoinMoin is an impediment, as I don't do Python as yet.

2 - Learning tool. I know more about Java environment setup now than I ever wanted to.

3 - Intent to eventually offer: "I'll wrangle that for you." services: get paid to have fun.

4 - Potential deployment platform, solving the stack, plumbing, and context parts of a couple specialty apps for distinctive verticals: plug-ins only a few people would want, but they'd want them real bad.

Plus the company. I have been impressed to the point of fan-boy since the public transition to "agile product development" back in the day. Good, honest, problem / solution-oriented company. What you want in a vendor.

My hope for Atlassian the company, and the users around it is that adoption for broader business uses further fuels the stack's capabilities without abandoning the hard-core stuff.: Wrangling design artifacts (code) is actually a stand-in for similarly hard-core artifacts in other domains: manufacturing dev, medial products, inventory / assessment / certification, on-demand fab.

Like • Emily Koch likes this

Wonderful! Thanks so much for sharing... I too have run enterprise software on my laptop and then love telling people about it! I think Atlassian products lend themselves well for that.

And, I started as an Atlassian fanboy as well! I liked the products so much I applied for a job with them...

And this feels like a good point to mention, we're always hiring ;-)

https://atlassian.com/careers

Lemmie put in a -- er, plug -- for plug-ins. Team calendars in Confluence. CRM and contact list support in Confluence and Jira. (I'm up to un-winding application integration admin, now that I want native activitiy, and CRM plug-ins in Jira and Confluence to hot-link.) The former GreenHopper (test result capture) for Jira.

Hi @Paz ,

I'm sorry it took me so long to reply to this:

And this feels like a good point to mention, we're always hiring ;-)
https://atlassian.com/careers

Thank you for the thought. Post a TBI, I'm not up to a full-time day job, or engaging outside the city I'm in. Yet. Otherwise I'd be all over this.

I have no previous Confluence experience but have had some references and am also interested in learning some new software processes. I am going to begin Confluence use at home for writing projects and my grand attempt to organize my writing and everything else digital at home. I plan to start with $10 one time server version, is that an appropriate step?

Like • Paz likes this

That's a good start.

- Do you have any wiki experience? That'll help you get started using. The foundation of Confluence is wiki functions.

- Like many productivity tools, having it will clarify your thinking.

- Iterate: Do things kinda, sorta. Play around. Increment your configuration and use. Play around some more. It's easy to reorganize prior content w/o loss.

- Install problems can run you into some pretty deep tech, pretty quickly. You may have no issues if you go with the named platform(s). (I run a different Linux distro than officially supported. A few issues came up with platform configuration and convention choices. Took me a while to unwind: I'm not a full-time Linux sysadmin.)

- "Starter Licenses" don't get tech support. Get help from other users in the community forums and similar.

Feel free to ping me if you get stalled.

Like • Paz likes this

@John Fornace: FYI, a Cloud license would probably be a better fit. No installation needed.

Trying to get back into witing code for my own projects and looking to learn Git. So having a play with Bitbucket.

Like • Paz likes this

I only use Trello, but for bigger projects Jira could be an option.

Like • Paz likes this

I've been wondering the same since getting on Confluence and Atlassian's Tools. I'm still actively learning; discovering new features and ways to use them day to day. I hope to compile a list and share soon.

Like • Paz likes this

Try this:

5 Reasons for Using Jira and 5 Reasons for Using Trello

Like • Paz likes this

Net, they're complementary. When the tool is in the way, consider the other one. The one you are using may be either too much, or too little.

Trello for things you just came up with, to make sure you do what you just came up with.. "Hey, there are items here." and "Hey, there's a sequence toward done."

Ref Jim Benson's "Personal Kanban" book & related.

Jira for wrangling stuff that comes up all the time, through your "deal with this" process,. "Hey, doing it *this way* matters, and other people care what's going on.

Like • Paz likes this

I have started using Confluence for my personnal projects also. I capture there all the ideas I am producing and use it also as my main repository for the documentation I elaborate for different community projects I am involved in. I also use it combined with Trello for the tasks tracking and to ensure I am oncourse for different ideas.

I find it useful to be able to follow the progress of my tasks and see how things are moved on when configuring it as an Agile board with the different swimlines for progress overview.

I have used Trello also to explain some colleagues how to work with Agile methodologies and, despite them not being so technical, all of them seemed to enjoy that way of capturing on-going tasks for tracking.

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I LOVE this thread!

I've just recently got my own personal Confluence Cloud, for sharing things with family and keeping important stuff.

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