A Few Tools I Use for Productivity
- Thread starter potentialeight
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If you want something that handles the most features my bet would be on TeamworkPM. They don't advertise it as a CRM too, but you could use it as that.
"Traditional Project Management Tactics"
I've yet to work with 1 company that did anything "traditional", everyone does things their own way even if all 5 companies we're comparing use BaseCamp they probably all use it uniquely, and likely not to fullest extent. This is what I think you're missing. Not everything fits in one box or is the right answer from 1 tool.
I've picked at your points but mostly I've picked at your conjecture about what "others" need to be doing, even myself
I think we agree on more than you think you're just very stuborn in your ways of admitting it... or I'm blind as bat and it's too late to work. LOL, you pick 
Of course the software was not free, but the time it took to make the "Message" system probably was equal or less than integrating the SAME THING with basecamp from a code standpoint. The entire thing still needed to "be there" just use their API instead of MySQL's for "me" to store it. It makes no sense when it could be 100% integrated, and owned by me and controlled by me, on my system. That's why I did 100% integrate it and not use BaseCamp or any other 3rd-party management system for my custom project management solution for this service/business.
I think my views are also a bit jaded as having developed myself for over a decade I have a bit more insight than the average marketer, entrepreneur or project manager when it comes to how web applications should work, how to organize business tasks, and more.
IF you want to talk about the volume and companies I deal with/manage day to day feel free to PM me, I think you'd be really surprised what can be done with custom integrated solutions vs. jamming people into a pre-made solution. I'm not talking about clients you get for 1-off services, I'm talking legit businesses that are dealt with day-to-day that have B&M stores, huge online ecom businesses, and more. The PR business, and other basic service businesses are completely simplistic compared to "REAL" business logistics for project management, scheduling, approval, and more.
"Traditional Project Management Tactics"
I've yet to work with 1 company that did anything "traditional", everyone does things their own way even if all 5 companies we're comparing use BaseCamp they probably all use it uniquely, and likely not to fullest extent. This is what I think you're missing. Not everything fits in one box or is the right answer from 1 tool.
I've picked at your points but mostly I've picked at your conjecture about what "others" need to be doing, even myself
Of course the software was not free, but the time it took to make the "Message" system probably was equal or less than integrating the SAME THING with basecamp from a code standpoint. The entire thing still needed to "be there" just use their API instead of MySQL's for "me" to store it. It makes no sense when it could be 100% integrated, and owned by me and controlled by me, on my system. That's why I did 100% integrate it and not use BaseCamp or any other 3rd-party management system for my custom project management solution for this service/business.
I think my views are also a bit jaded as having developed myself for over a decade I have a bit more insight than the average marketer, entrepreneur or project manager when it comes to how web applications should work, how to organize business tasks, and more.
IF you want to talk about the volume and companies I deal with/manage day to day feel free to PM me, I think you'd be really surprised what can be done with custom integrated solutions vs. jamming people into a pre-made solution. I'm not talking about clients you get for 1-off services, I'm talking legit businesses that are dealt with day-to-day that have B&M stores, huge online ecom businesses, and more. The PR business, and other basic service businesses are completely simplistic compared to "REAL" business logistics for project management, scheduling, approval, and more.
I'm afraid this has gotten way off point and you're still getting personal just calling me stubborn, not sure why you think that's ok. Also, not sure if you're assuming I do one-off services with clients...
If you're building a custom project management solution that clients are not interacting with, meaning it's not apart of the service experience then yea, I think you should have just used a pre-made tool. It would have been quicker and more feature rich, not sure how anyone could disagree with that, it's simply less coding/work. If having the revisions is client-side and apart of the user's experience then yea that's going to be better (better meaning you building it), but at the same time that's not the project management systems we're referring too (in this discussion).
Hey when you two get finished with your circle jerk, could one of you answer this question?
Thought you were kidding, sorry. To compare to casino world: 'a stack of cards' which you know as the deck/game-playing cards. I'm not sure if it's considered slang or not, but people will refer to other items they use together in a system as a stack.
When someone says like "here's my project management stack" it means the tools they use in combination of each other for one purpose (which is project management).
Potentialeight is a complete idiot so even basic words like "stack" confuse him.
Oh okay. I was initially thinking stack like a data structure and couldn't figure out what in the fuck you guys were going on about. Sorry I don't know the cool kid slang. Carry on bashing each other.
Hey while I've got your attention, do you have any suggestions for email clients other than Thunderbird? It's been pissing me off lately.
You always have my attention PotentialEight.
Unfortunately no, email is not my strongest area. Someone can prob help you out more there.
1) Pen
2) Notepad (a real one that you can like write on and shit)
3) Kitchen Timer or gym boss
4) Desire to achieve great results, not fuck around on FB all day like the rest of the sheeple we're supposed to be shearing.
5) Set the timer to 20 minutes. If you have a gym boss, set it to run 4 cycles of 20 minutes/5 minutes.
6) Hit start. Plan out your day in the first 20 minutes. Try to break it up in to projects that take 20 minutes. Yes, you'll have to break down bigger projects into smaller chunks. It's worth it. 20 minutes of no distraction balls to the walls racing the clock is plenty hard enough mentally.
If you get it completely dialed out in 20, you probably didn't do a good job of breaking tasks down into compatible chunks but if you did, cheat and start working on the first project. Something along the way will take longer than you allocated and you'll want the extra time.
6) When the timer goes off, step away (or stand up if you're still a chair dwelling denizen) from your computer and go do something else for 5 minutes. This is why you have a physical timer and not some desktop app that chains you to your work mode. I like to work out or just walk around and stretch, you can waddle the fridge, if your mom is keeping it stocked with enough N0S or w/e young neckbeards chug these days.
7) After the 4th cycle of 20/5, take an extra 10 minute break (turning your final break into 15). Then start over. At some point in the day after working this hard and focused, you'll burn and out need to go do something else. But up until that point, it'll be your most productive day yet.
8) This has changed my life, both in work productivity and working less/doing more fun shit away from computers. YMMV. You may need a 5 part 3 software 9 buzzword stack to feel like you're accomplishing something. That's fine. The key takeaway is to improve your productivity in some way every day. Work smarter, harder. Work harder, not longer. Charge crystals all the days.
2) Notepad (a real one that you can like write on and shit)
3) Kitchen Timer or gym boss
4) Desire to achieve great results, not fuck around on FB all day like the rest of the sheeple we're supposed to be shearing.
5) Set the timer to 20 minutes. If you have a gym boss, set it to run 4 cycles of 20 minutes/5 minutes.
6) Hit start. Plan out your day in the first 20 minutes. Try to break it up in to projects that take 20 minutes. Yes, you'll have to break down bigger projects into smaller chunks. It's worth it. 20 minutes of no distraction balls to the walls racing the clock is plenty hard enough mentally.
If you get it completely dialed out in 20, you probably didn't do a good job of breaking tasks down into compatible chunks but if you did, cheat and start working on the first project. Something along the way will take longer than you allocated and you'll want the extra time.
6) When the timer goes off, step away (or stand up if you're still a chair dwelling denizen) from your computer and go do something else for 5 minutes. This is why you have a physical timer and not some desktop app that chains you to your work mode. I like to work out or just walk around and stretch, you can waddle the fridge, if your mom is keeping it stocked with enough N0S or w/e young neckbeards chug these days.
7) After the 4th cycle of 20/5, take an extra 10 minute break (turning your final break into 15). Then start over. At some point in the day after working this hard and focused, you'll burn and out need to go do something else. But up until that point, it'll be your most productive day yet.
8) This has changed my life, both in work productivity and working less/doing more fun shit away from computers. YMMV. You may need a 5 part 3 software 9 buzzword stack to feel like you're accomplishing something. That's fine. The key takeaway is to improve your productivity in some way every day. Work smarter, harder. Work harder, not longer. Charge crystals all the days.
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This is great it works for you, but here's where my issues are:
- Nothing I said was buzzwords. Time management, task management, scheduling, etc. are all important areas for managing any project. Pen and paper with a buzzer barely covers this.
- How can you accurately see what tasks you need to get off your plate? If you have a record of tasks that take the most time/tasks you do frequently then you know who to hire. Yea, you can write comprehensive notes on your paper with time and save every piece of paper -- but why? That's a bitch to sort through, and imagine trying to hire a project manager and giving them that?
- Many of us work with team members or will be hiring soon. We all know how important communication is for a business, any open system where people can see who is working on what helps that communication.
- It's not like I need the tools to feel like I'm accomplishing something, it's a necessity. I'm also accomplishing more... * The same reason people record their workouts, I record my work. Sure in the gym you can use pen/paper but everyone is moving to apps for a reason (personal trainers too, I know through research for I project I worked on).
- * This is a big separate point, but I can accomplish more because I can automate these things. What are you going to automate with pen/paper? Online tools have API's that allow me to automate messaging/emails, tasks/lists, time, alerts, etc. if these features aren't already included in the settings.
If I remember right, you used to love Asana, what happened? I mean if you're using Asana and then writing down your tasks anyways, that's cool, but I'm guessing from your post above you're not doing that.
Obviously I respect your opinion and always appreciate your thoughts, but this sounds like old man 'back in my day'. If I told you 'build all your links manually because too many of these SEO's are out here automating all their shit; it doesn't matter as long as links are built'? No, you would come back and praise technology.
As far as pomodoro, I do that myself too. I personally just use a computer app and it pauses the screen (for a moment) when it hits 25 minutes.
I'm not trying to sound defensive or anything, just a discussion point.
I do something similar to this in general, though it's only for planning out the next few hours at a time. I re-evaluate around the middle of the day when I have lunch for an hour or so, and then I come back for another set of sessions like this.
I feel like it's important to note that this is for only planning out my own personal tasks and that it's not an overall substitute for systems that manage your projects and what you have going on with my overarching workflow. It's basically a layer of focusing on a specific set of tasks for a period of time and eliminating distractions.
I don't use pomodoros though. I tend to do something more along the lines of 45-50 minutes on/10-15 minutes off since it gives me more time to disengage completely and come back to what I was doing fresh.
I use Outlook (I pay for the Office suite, it's been a great experience thus far (I mostly use it for Excel, Outlook and Skydrive/Onedrive. Word could be replaced with a bunch of other tools fairly easily (although it's great in it's own respects too))). Bonus: you can put all of your home movies in OneDrive and watch them from nearly any device you want. I have like 10TB of storage or something ridiculous.
I'm happy with LibreOffice, and Thunderbird has been great up until recently. Maybe my settings have went wonky or something. Thanks for the suggestions.
I use Trello. One board per project. As many lists as needed to effectively get projects launched. One board with an overview of projects. This board is open when I plan my time. If I'm really on it, I plan my time the next day at the end of the current day but that's rare.
You should know from twitter I'm a massive smartass. I'm not calling you out personally. If what you're doing works, do it. If all that shit is too much, what I laid out is a good starting point. If I had clients, I'd probably have to evolve beyond it. I don't. It's works well enough to manage my people and my projects. For the guys spinning their wheels getting nothing done each day and wondering why, trying something simple like that will be a game changer.
Used Asana one time as joint venture, it was ok I guess. Used basecamp twice, better the second time but I always come back to Trello.
I'd address your other points but I'm tired and wasn't looking to join this pissing contest, just offer up a system that will allow peeps to power thru serious work if they want to.
Yea I didn't take it as personal, more so just defending points, like a debate; no offense taken on my side. And yea I'm not saying any of those tools you mentioned were better than others, people live by Trello. It's no pissing contest at all, this is something I simply enjoy discussing.
Cool, same. Check this out.
If This Then Trello: Introducing The Trello IFTTT Channel! | Trello Blog
If This Then Trello: Introducing The Trello IFTTT Channel! | Trello Blog
There was a recent relevant discussion on reddit with people comparing lots of different project management tools too. Interesting comments on different use cases, listing pros/cons and talking about specific business processes when using tools like trello, pivotal tracker, asana, jira, targetprocess, slack etc:
Trello, Pivotal Tracker, Asana, or Jira for project management... Strengths? Weaknesses? Likes/dislikes? Any others? : startups
Trello, Pivotal Tracker, Asana, or Jira for project management... Strengths? Weaknesses? Likes/dislikes? Any others? : startups