Like most people I know, I consider myself a busy person. As a small business owner, I wear many hats in the company, dipping my hand into sales, marketing, finance, management, and client services.
Over the years, I've tried using a number of different strategies to keep all of my tasks, ideas, and projects organized. I've used Outlook Tasks, email folders, file folders, and enough post-it notes to fill a small landfill.
About a year ago, I discovered Basecamp, and I've been hooked on it ever since. Many of you have probably heard of Basecamp, and some of you may already use it. In short, Basecamp is a web- and mobile-based task- and project-tracking system. It lets you create “Projects,” where you can add team members (internal or external to your company), create task lists, assign tasks to team members, and set due dates. That pretty much covers all the basics.
Where Basecamp really shines is in its simplicity. It takes about 15 minutes to learn. The User Interface is amazingly fast and responsive; you can drag and drop tasks into a list to re-order them, or between lists to move them. You receive a daily-digest email every morning, giving you a summary of what everyone on your team did the previous day (this is one of my favorite features), and it automatically, via email, notifies anyone involved in a project when there are task updates.
Like I said—the functionality here is not earth shattering, but the simplicity is. As for the price, it's very inexpensive, starting at $20 per month. At Tabush, I use Basecamp to manage everything from our recent VoIP upgrade, our constant datacenter and cloud enhancements, all of our R&D efforts, to even simple office administrative tasks.
For client projects, on the other hand, we use a different project management system that is built into our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, and designed specifically for our industry.
I'm curious - what task and project management software does your business use? Leave a comment below.