Building a Local-First Task Manager with Next.js and React — Lessons from Planow

An honest engineering breakdown of building Planow — the decisions, tradeoffs, and lessons that mattered. Syed and I had been circling around the idea of building Planow for roughly four years. Not continuously — it surfaced the way most side projects do: in moments of frustration, when existing tools felt unnecessarily complex or slow. We didn’t want another bloated productivity tool. We wanted something that answers one question instantly: “What should I do right now?” That naturally led us to