Actual question: Tell me which project management software you use and what you hate about it. What do you like about it, if anything?

what do you use at the moment?

@heyheni Nothing, I'm designing a new one.

I've been working on and off on something similar myself. Would live to see which direction you take it to.

I love the collaborative aspect of www.notion.so and for serious projects https://clickup.com/

for medium sized personal projects i use https://zenkit.com

And code related project management have a look at GitKraken Boards. https://www.gitkraken.com/boards Which integrates the git progress into the planing tool. And with GitKraken Timeline you can hold meetings to show off the progress.
https://www.gitkraken.com/timelines

I second what @heyheni says about ClickUp. It even generates branch name for each task. Visual editor may be a jerk around <code>, but overall experience is sleek so far.

If project is open source, then for self-hosted solution I can recommend only Phabricator.

Notepad++...

I use MS project sparringly, though this applies to office in general; I like how easy it is to modify things via code. But I really hate working with visual basic.

there are 5 giant white boards in my office. and if for whatever reason that don't cut we start post-it wars

We're on Jira. Good for reading through the exact history of old issues when maintaining code, too many mouse clicks to get around the interface and not intuitive sometimes as to finding things. It's pretty slow to load and render ticket information as well, which is annoying

Jira, the gitlab one, trello.

Jira was shit, but had a few good burndown charts and whatnot. And well, multiple levels of subtask. Gitlab has this shortcut for timing things, where you can write down hours you've spent. The charts are pretty useless tho. Trello, back when I used it, it didn't connect to jackshit including git.

I can suggest you do check git commits. Being able to close a ticket or show progress on a ticket or subtask or subsubtask via a commit is really handy. As well, have appropriate charts. Managers in reality use fairly few charts for most of their work.

What software to use to manage projects that focus on content creation groups, design, etc. In general, anything related to creativity.

@Skiribans

There is a lot of software oriented to project management. But unfortunately, they are all focused on IT project management for software development. From my practice, I can tell you only this creative management software https://krock.io/project-management... Everything is done there for easy management of such projects. You can also easily communicate with the client and show him the ready stages of the project.

How best to monitor the time that employees spend on the project. So that we can understand how much time a programmer manager spends on one task, etc.

What is the Jira Time Tracking Plugin https://activitytimeline.com/how-to...

The Jira Time Tracking Plugin is a plugin that enables teams to track the amount of time spent on different issues or tasks within a project. This plugin helps teams to accurately track how much time has been spent on each task, which can be useful for billing clients, estimating future project timelines, and identifying areas where more time or resources may be needed.

The Jira Time Tracking Plugin works by enabling team members to log the amount of time they spend on different issues or tasks within a project. This can be done manually, by entering the time spent directly into Jira, or automatically, by using a timer that tracks the time spent on each task.

Trello and TickTick. Sometimes Craft is very handy.