Closer To The Ideal

Last year we used Remember The Milk as our project management tool for a major project. At first we loved it, but then we hated it. It helped us get organized, but it didn’t help us get the client organized.

So we switched to Basecamp as our main project management tool. It is great at facilitating conversations with the whole team, including the client.

But Basecamp does not remove the need for email – rather, the opposite, it sends out a flood of email. It encourages “send to all” communications. That is good for most of our projects, most of the time. But Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 tends to crash a lot on my Ubuntu 8.04 machine. In fact, all versions of Thunderbird have tended to crash a lot, and that causes me to lose track of the emails that I was about to respond to.

Remember The Milk lets me send my email to it. So when I’ve got an email that I need to respond to, but I don’t have the time to respond to it right now, I can send it Remember The Milk. Remember The Milk won’t let me forget that email.

And potentially, I might start sending out tasks from Remember The Milk. It encourages a 1 to 1 style of communication, which is appropriate, on our projects, as often as Basecamp’s many-to-many conversations are.

To the extent that email is essential for getting a project organized, then getting email organized is also essential to getting a project organized. And Remember The Milk offers a much better interface (than Thunderbird or Basecamp )for converting email into assigned tasks.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 9:46 pm and is filed under basecamp, email, remember the milk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.