Do project management apps help productivity?

Quote from: davidm at Apr 03, 2008, 06:20 AM

Personnaly I don’t especially agree with throwing out client emails as you never know what could come in handy (if anything, remind the client of what he decided or said on a particular matter ). Storage is cheap, search features (at least GMail’s) is great, so are labels. I don’t see the reason why you should delete those. I have no problem with keeping the 600+ emails in my professionnal Email box.

But like you, I keep a copy of important emails in my project management app, which ActiveCollab allow me to bookmark when I know I might need it and then keep them as an archive.

David, I agree. One shouldn’t mix Stever’s suggestion on "How to handle email backlog" and appropriate handling of normal emails for business. Stever (the Get it Done Guy) suggests this tack if you have gone away on vacation (and is really talking about corporate types 90% of whose emails are useless anyway). My loss of hard drive failure amounted to 10,000+ emails getting lost but (yes this was stupid) but the win was that I don’t throw any out, (thanks Google Apps Account). I file emails in @Actions, @Read/Review, @Waiting For (tags in Gmail) and leave only those things I will handle today or immediately in my inbox.

Another thing I did was start unsubscribing to all the newsletters I never read or that weren’t important to my job or motivation. I really only read four newsletters: Russ Weakley’s WSG Links for Light Reading, Duct Tape Marketing, Steve Pavlina’s Newsletter, and Michael Gerber’s In the Dreaming Room NL. I had been subscribed to dozens that would fill up my inbox daily and the work to sort them became wasteful and often led to use for procrastination (my lifelong enemy/demon).

As far as client emails are concerned, I started using Highrise when it hit public beta and using its ability to receive and email to an account, I forward all important client communication to it from Gmail. It takes all of 2 seconds and is part of my inbox process. This is different than using Gmail search (which in the new Gmail is lighting fast.) Yes, I have my information in a 3rd party system. But it can be backed up and they are using Amazon S3 for their storage now so security is less of an issue (they were using Rackspace who has been suffering some growing pains of late).

Quote from: davidm at Apr 03, 2008, 06:05 AM

Woot indeed this thread is getting quite interresting !

This being said, this is not all about prices/profitability even though it’s a given you have to put food on the table, there are "average returns projects" who are fun and/or great learning experiences (and learning is - for me - part of the ROI). I sure won’t throw them out as bigger projects are (often but not always) less fun (bigger structure who can afford higher prices are often bound by lots of rules and processes).

David,

For me it is a combination of both, some projects I take to make money (sometimes easier than others) some projects I take to learn how to do something and challenge myself and that is a paid education (although I don’t charge my clients entirely for the extra time invested if I know that I will be able to translate that into future projects and productivity. Learning MODx is a prime example of that, much of the free time I have spent and do spend mucking around reading documentation, making mistakes and more with MODx has paid off. I was contacted from the forums from a design firm to do private label MODx implementations and I am about to embark on 3 more projects for them. Woot!

I have also had someone come to me with a project and I felt that it would be a pain in the rear to do it so I quadrupled my rate on the quote. I figured that if he had more money than sense he’d do it and otherwise I’d get paid a tonne. Really the outrageous quote was my way of politely saying I didn’t want to work with him and so I also offered him the name of a couple of designers in the area.

This idea of cultivating your clientèle really became clear when I read the sample chapter of the new SitePoint Project Management book. The author suggests that someone ought to think about what benefit (other than financial) the project will have.

I am looking at refining my project types. I am planning to focus more attention on wins and benefits of projects over the pure financial outcomes (unless that is a necessity).

Sorry to get back to the tools and most specifically to my favorite one, but I have just downloaded and installed ac 1.1 beta and it seems to keep his promesses !

I have to explore those feature, but the upgrade went fine...back to report later

• Permission overhaul. Everything seems pretty consistent and we now have user based permissions on top of role based (nice).
• Timetracking is now really rocking ! Your can track time with a handy Time Widget and log time directly from tasks
• Files/Attachments in messages are listed in files listing (nice), and little details like thumbnails are created for images. Also better handling of
• multiple files
• Subscription : you can subscribe/unsubscribe from any item (message, task, milestone...) directly from the items list (cool)
• Reminders : send reminders regarding a ticket, discussion or file to assignees, subscribers, specific person or people who commented on it. This include email notification and entry in “Things that require your attention” block that is shown on dashboard (cool !).
• Reporting : Reusable reports that work both globally and on project level. Reports can list all time records or calculate how much time every user reported.

A few surprises in there, aside from full localization there are some cool new modules :

• Mobile access - Interface created just for mobile devices. iPhone support included
• Backup - automatically back up your database and files.
• Project Exporter - Export project data in series of static, HTML files that does not require activeCollab to be displayed. Burn it on a CD, upload to your website or send it to your clients.
• Public Submit - Let people submit tickets without logging into activeCollab. CAPTCHA protection included.
• Status - Simple, Twitter like notifications system built right into activeCollab.

Note : given the language files I am currently translating, it would seem a Basecamp importer module is being developped...
Also a Chat module.

Full list of improvements here : http://www.activecollab.com/forums/post/12243/#post12243

I don’t mind keeping a huge amount of emails on one of our computers. I have 7500+ from the past 4+ years in my sent box. Came in very handy when a serious issue came up. The main party claimed ignorance, saying that was the first s/he had heard of it. But I had two emails on the it days apart and an acknowledgement of it, and had documentation that indeed it was discussed at a meeting I was unable to attend.

Doesn’t mean they got caught, it just means people might be overwhelmed with details and feel paralyzed. Point: not making decisions carry consequences too.

I try to keep all project pertinant messages from all clients. I will eventually weed out the less significant messages to clear out the useless ones from time to time. I also keep messages from former clients as well. Now with gmail I can store them there as well to keep my local app lighter.

I think that people are referring to relative junk mail, not spam, but accumulated stuff that can clutter the inbox.

Here’s the thing about the email. One of the problems I had was that I used to store hundreds if not thousands of emails in my inbox so finding anything was near impossible as the desktop app searches are painfully slow. So when I had the drive failure and lost them all it made me rethink the way I kept emails. The inbox is not the place for them. Since adopting GMail I created buckets (tags) to organize my current/active emails and all the rest go into the archive. When I need them they are a fast search away from retrieval.

I am not advocating getting rid of all your emails. In business it makes sense to keep them. The idea of dumping all the backlog of an inbox was in the odd case that you went away on holiday and when you returned you had 1000+ emails in your inbox. HOw are you going to handle all of those? Do you need to. This is what Stever talks about in his podcast and what I meant.

I don’t want to confuse the two issues of organizing the email workflow (in my case based on GTD) and handling backlog (I don’t ever have this many emails because my clients tend to email only when there is work to do and/problems. Other emails I get I handle immediately. If I look at my inbox this second I have 3 emails but during the day I likely receive 100 and handle them all in a matter of a few seconds each.

On the idea of using online tools such as ActiveCollab, I am not against it but I have found that I require physical particles for certain action reminders. I haven’t been able to train myself to successfully use such tools but have rethought it since reading this thread.

It isn’t the tools though, it is the ability for the system to allow its users to work with the least amount of effort and to the best outcome. So I use paper forms for project tasks and log them into my timesheets (Freshbooks) and that works. I am sure if I worked at it I could further improve the system, reduce double work and create failsafes in the system. I like davidm’s ideas of using Knowledgebases for users and projects. I am not sure I have the discipline for that but I will see.

On a related note, do you think that you would visit a blog/site on the subject of productivity/management for web designers and small web design firms? It seems to me that there are some unique intersections between various industries that might warrant a such a site.

That’s a great idea Jay. Seems like you might be able to spin up a good site on that topic.

On a related note, do you think that you would visit a blog/site on the subject of productivity/management for web designers and small web design firms? It seems to me that there are some unique intersections between various industries that might warrant a such a site.

Sign me up. This is a great niche to get into and to have is be specific to web professionals would be very interesting.

On a note about the tools, I have a client that I am using as a ’lab rat’ to test if clients will be able to figure out the BaseCamp interface and actually be pro-active by creating to-do lists and milestones. He is a non-tech person with minimal experience with online apps. So far it has been a total failure. The system totally intimidated him and when I finally got him confident to participate somehow his first to-do list did not get saved (hard to believe but he said he built one but there is no list to show for it). He is a close friend so I have a bit of freedom here, but I would not want to go through this sort of intimidation with an official client. I am curious to know how to get the client to participate more with these apps or is it an uphill battle? Or should I think of these tools as personal or in-house management tools and not necessarily for the client to participate in but rather to monitor progress? I can imagine that it is time consuming to teach the clients to use these tools and BaseCamp is the simplest one I have seen.

I would signup aswell Jay,

For me Ive been reading about GTD the past few days and making changes but something more specific for i.e someone in development would be great.

Aaron

Quote from: dev_cw at Apr 04, 2008, 08:21 AM

On a note about the tools, I have a client that I am using as a ’lab rat’ to test if clients will be able to figure out the BaseCamp interface and actually be pro-active by creating to-do lists and milestones. He is a non-tech person with minimal experience with online apps. So far it has been a total failure.

I tried and failed with clients also. It is not suited for non tech people who just want a website. I tried BC with 3 clients, all failed to integrate. It was easier to just use email, paper and my own end system.

I think if a larger client was to have a dedicated project liaison, they might feel obligated to use such a tool because it would mean that they would be able to report to their superior in near real time. For owner managed clients that I deal with this is beyond their need so their is no reason to invest in learning it.

Freshbooks on the other hand, my clients love. They love to see their past invoices, print/reprint and get payment notifications. That I couldn’t be without (even if I had enough clients to need to pay for it).

I think I will sketch out the Web Designer Productivity site. I will see how fast I can get it up. I think that it could be a great diversion. Don’t worry about signing up since I won’t charge for content. I’d create value in content and use other means to break it even/turn profit.

Cheers,

Jay