We have had a Basecamp account since we began toggle. We were completely sold on the idea of allowing our clients to login and track the progress of projects as well as allowing us to organise and manage our time.
We felt it was like putting a designer into the office of every client, a way to improve communication and bring them closer to the design process. Eight months later and we have decided to change the way we work… Basecamp no longer rocks our socks.
I think our biggest problem with Basecamp has been getting clients to accept it into their workflow. The truth is that nobody wants to sign in to yet another website to see a visual or make comment on it. Basecamp will send out a notification that a new file has been added to the project and that notification is delivered via email. What’s wrong with that? Well it would have been easier to simply send an email with the visual attached in the first place. Email is something everyone understands, its integrated into our lives and the way we work. Making use of it is not only easier for us, but for our clients to0. The more I think about email the more I feel the modern web needs to make MORE use of it, take a look at Posterous (they understand completely).
Having learned the lesson that email works much better for our clients we decided to keep using Basecamp for ourselves. The main sections of Basecamp we used frequently were the to-do lists, writeboards and occasionally the time tracking. By far the most important to us were the to-do lists. Both Gemma and myself are big fans of creating to-dos, nothing feels better than checking off an item from the list, you can feel the progress rush every time you do it. The thing is with Basecamp your to-dos are all over the place, each project has its own to-do list (which makes sense on first look) but in reality all we wanted to know is: “What needs to be done today?”. Navigating back and forth between projects to check the various to-do lists is slow progress in Basecamp (why is it so slow to load a page?) and it simply was not working for us. We also did not have a project for “everything else”, a place where we could set non-project related to-do notes such as “ring the tax man”. So we created a nice generically named project called “General” and set up a to-do area that looked a little like this:
It worked out very well for us, suddenly the time we spent clicking around Basecamp fell dramatically and my internal productivity monkey was smiling again.
Over time our usage of Basecamp began to fall, the writeboards were not as feature rich as Google docs (or as convenient) and the time tracking kept being forgotten. We found the best way to manage our time is with Google calendars and its built in reminders. The only thing we could not replace was the to-do lists until I decided to investigate Remember the Milk and found that it now integrates with Gmail:
We now have all our to-do lists right where we need them, they are shared between us and can be added to very easily via Gmail, Email, mobile phone, Google calendar and even Twitter. So the time has come to say goodbye to Basecamp, our new setup is simpler, fresher and most importantly saves us time.
9 Comments
Yes, I love Google…but I’ve been testing some pretty cool project management software that integrates with Google docs call Torch. Check them out –> http://torch.wbpsystems.com
Hi Nate, I like the integration with Google Docs… that seems like a smart move. Also the invoicing is a welcome addition and something Basecamp could do with. On the whole though I am enjoying the fact that most of what we need can be handled from within one Gmail window. I might give torch a try at a latter date though so thanks for the heads up.
Don’t forget to finish those TPS reports :D
Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler… I need it for my reports.
How are the tasks shared across users? Do you have a shared email address or is there an actual sharing feature?
Hi Ben. Remember the Milk offers a sharing feature for chosen to-do lists. We have a shared toggle list and also have private to-do’s as well. Every time you add a new to-do you can choose which list (shared or private) it is assigned to.
Hey Scott, We’re trying to solve some of these problems at GeniusRoom. What if when you posted a file to a room, it also went out as an email attachment to the members? That way they’d get access to it without changing behavior, but you also have a single spot to refer to when you’re looking for it later. Anyway, we’d love to have your feedback.
Hey Scott, I too am weighing walking away from Basecamp. You really got me thinking. Can you play devils advocate? What about the commenting – on both tasks and documents (including uploaded documents) available on Basecamp? Do you miss that? Right now, neither RTM nor Google seem to offer the idea of ‘”commenting” outside of a document and notifying someone of your comment to their email.’ This allows email conversations to be linked to the task or document in question, which saves lots of searches for old email conversations…
We do not miss commenting much and Google Docs now supports notification via email so that is progress in that department.
We try to keep conversations in email threads with clients. As we are not sharing to-do’s with clients they can remain very separate and we only share documents when it makes sense.