How I run my client work on
Flowgrid .

I have tried every tool. Notion, ClickUp, Trello, Asana, Linear, Basecamp, a graveyard of Google Docs, and at one point a spreadsheet I am embarrassed to admit was called MASTER_clients_FINAL_v3.xlsx. None of them fit the shape of how I actually work with clients. So I built Flowgrid, and now it is the only tab I keep pinned.

Client work is not really project management. It is a messy stream of emails that turn into requests, requests that turn into projects, projects that turn into tasks, tasks that generate questions back to the client, and meetings that quietly contain every important decision I will forget by Friday. Most tools handle one slice of that well and leave you to glue the rest together with willpower. Flowgrid puts the whole loop in one place: inbox, work, clients, meetings, and billing. It does not feel like enterprise software, because I built it for one person running a studio, not a department.

My mornings follow the same shape every day. I open the dashboard to an Active Work First view, with anything completed hidden by default, because I do not want to scroll past finished tickets to find what is actually on fire. From there I triage the inbox, where Gmail is synced in, threads are grouped, and promotions and social updates stay out of the way so the primary mailbox is just real work. Anything that is actually a task gets turned into a request or a project with one click, subject and snippet prefilled, client matched automatically if I have emailed them before. Tickets from the client portal and requests from email or me live in one sorted list, color coded so I can tell them apart at a glance. Then I open a project and do the work, kanban or list depending on my mood, everything editable inline, every task carrying branded links for Figma, Loom, GitHub, and fifty or so other tools that get auto detected. The whole loop from email to request to project to task is the same surface. I am not switching apps to move work forward.

Gmail sync is real two way email, not a half baked import. I authorize with progressive scopes, read only to start, more only if I need it, and Flowgrid pulls the last sixty days of threads, deduped by Gmail's own IDs so nothing doubles up. Replying to a client and replying to a thread linked to a project are the same action. Granola is the integration that quietly changed my week. It syncs in through its official API, and Flowgrid auto maps each meeting to the right client and project. The summary lands as plain markdown, and a single click turns the action items into tasks. I do not take meeting notes anymore. I show up, talk, and the work appears on the other side.

Underneath that, Supabase and Resend handle the plumbing. Every status change, portal reply, file upload, and new ticket fires a notification to the right person. Clients get branded emails from my own domain, and I get owner alerts that link straight back to the context. It runs through Supabase Edge Functions with real JWT auth, so nothing is exposed that should not be. There is an AI workspace that knows my business profile, what I do, who I serve, how I write, and uses that context everywhere it shows up, whether I am thinking through a hard client problem, turning a wall of pasted text into structured tasks, or quietly getting a first pass of tasks the moment I start a new project so the canvas is never blank. The client portal gives each client a vanity URL with their own brand colors applied automatically. They can file tickets, check project status, leave notes I choose to make public or keep internal, and upload files into a private bucket protected by signed URLs. No login, no account creation screen. It works, and clients notice.

A lot of the satisfaction is not in the big features. It is in the small decisions. Button hovers that scale up just slightly with a soft shadow and springy easing, so they feel expensive instead of cheap. A Midnight Gradient theme running slate to indigo, with real dark mode that does not wreck form contrast. A floating timer that follows me across the app and rolls up to the project level so invoicing is accurate instead of guessed. Inline editing everywhere, click a field, type, done, no modal asking if I am sure. Scroll position holds when I switch tabs, which sounds tiny until you have used a tool that forgets it. Project progress calculates client side in real time, so checking off a task feels instant. None of these win awards on their own. Together they are why I do not want to leave.

Last Tuesday a client emailed to say the login button was broken on Safari. The email landed in the synced inbox at the top of the list. I hit Create Request, the subject prefilled, the client matched automatically. The request showed up in Incoming, and I linked it to their existing project without a full conversion. I opened the project, dropped a task into the In Progress column, attached a Loom of the bug through a branded link that got auto detected and displayed inline, fixed it, and marked the task done. The completion cascaded backward: the request closed and billing flipped to ready on its own. The client got a branded resolved email from my domain and replied in the portal to say thanks, which pinged me with a direct link back to the ticket. Start to finish, I touched one app.

Flowgrid is opinionated because client work is opinionated. Active work comes first. Workspaces are the unit of multi tenancy. Roles live in their own table. Portal tokens are intentional, not an afterthought. Every one of those decisions exists because I got bitten by the opposite in some other tool. If you run a small client business and you are duct taping five apps together, build the tool you wish existed. Worst case, you understand your own work better. Best case, you never have to open a spreadsheet called MASTER_clients_FINAL_v3.xlsx again.