I wrote a couple of weeks ago about moving to a more digital life. Less and less paper because technology allows for us to either scan our docs or manage our lives with various online apps. Of course, this is nothing new and many of us have been doing this for many years. A digital life is relatively simple as long as you are only managing your own personal world, but what happens when you are responsible for many individuals and numerous projects?
We have historically used email as the main source of task management and day-to-day communications. The problem with email is most of us may receive 100+ each day and if it comes in too quickly then we probably get lost in the email mayhem. Along with not being able to maintain our email cues, we also need to be able to manage the communication per the project. With email and a standard to-do list we struggle to keep all the tasks properly prioritized.
For the past year, I have tried multiple task and communication systems. Some of them would be applications resident on my hard drive while others were services hosted online. It became easily apparent that the online services ruled the day.
37Signals crated a project management tool that is head and shoulder over all others. This tool is called Basecamp. Basecamp does an amazing job of organizing your projects and task lists. However, one of the greatest components of Basecamp is that you can have ongoing dialogue under each task. In other words, if I want to comment to my colleagues about a to-do list item I can make some notes in the comment section and then whomever I select to see these comments can either log in to see my notes or, when they receive an email about the comments I made, they can instantly reply from their email and their thoughts will then be captured under the individual task. This then allows all correspondence to be listed inside the various projects not in some eternal email cue.
37Signals also boasts of some additional resources that will help manage corporate communication and schedules. More to come on these valuable tools in future posts. Go to 37Signals (and scroll to the bottom of the page) and check out Highrise, Backpack and Campfire along with Backpack.
Allow technology to organize your lives in such a way that we better learn how to maximize both time and communication.
Peace on your day!
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I have found Basecamp to be the best project management tool out there as well. 37Signals is also currently moving to a single user sign-on for all of their apps, I believe in an attempt to integrate all their apps more closely.
Scott- do you use google docs for file sharing…or just basecamp? I have fallen in love with google docs and I am not sure I could make the switch to basecamp full-time….although I could be convinced!
Also, are you familiar with JING? It’s is transforming the way I communicate on the web….and it’s free for a restricted package…just like basecamp.
Hey Phil:
For file sharing I use DropBox but for the thousands of tasks and dozens of people who might be involved, I have found Basecamp to be the most effective. I have to admit the cocktail of both DropBox and Basecamp are how I organize the organizations with which I work.
I use Google Docs for some projects but have not used GD’s as much as I probably should…
I have checked out JING and it looks like something that might be useful. Thanks for the heads-up…
Do you do a lot of collaboration with your word and excel docs with others? GD is nice in that you don’t have to repost..and you can do live adding with 3 people on skype. I find it very effective. We have the free account with basecamp…so no docs there yet, although that may change real quick. Dropbox is new to me….so thanks! GD also allows you to easily give public access (and a URL) to any file. We use this a lot too.
I love the conversation….keep it going
Phil: we use Google Docs (GD) for just a few things that we have to maintain daily, but most of the files we share with each other are PDF’s and various Adobe files. Our organization has gone completely paperless. our virtual file cabinet is on DropBox and our projects on Basecamp. very few of us ever pull out pen and paper to take notes in our staff meetings. We all live on our Mac’s.
If we had more document editing we would probably then us GD.
Thanks for your input…