I'm tired of sitting in a leaky rowboat... I wanna run a tight ship!

August 14, 2012 2:43 PM

I am *finally* getting an assistant to help me tackle my workload and upcoming projects, which has been a chaotic undertaking for one person. She's really smart and retentive in exactly the way an awesome assistant should be... we're determined to get super organized as a team so I want to start off on the right foot and be able to focusing on monetizing instead of answering email all day. Here's my question: what are the best apps/sites/software nowadays to manage and document big workloads, contacts, meetings, tasks brainstorms, and overall projects and stay organized easily as a team? I know there has to be some great new stuff out there that I haven't heard of.

We are entirely Mac based: MacBook Pro, ipad, iphone. We'll be managing events, web content, and various other community, writing, consulting and marketing projects. I've got OmniFocus and Office installed, that's about it. Up until now I haven't been really using either much except to check mail and make word docs.

Thanks in advance for your help!!! :D

posted by miss lynnster to computers & internet (12 answers total)

Bonus points for stuff that's not cost prohibitive, btw.
posted by miss lynnster at 2:43 PM on August 14, 2012

I've been hearing some good things about Podio lately. It might be helpful for tackling project collaboration.
posted by samsara at 2:50 PM on August 14, 2012

Trello is really good for this stuff.
posted by grouse at 2:53 PM on August 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

After a lot of time with both Podio and Trello, I moved (and moved several of my clients) to Asana, which is free. Very useful.
posted by judith at 3:09 PM on August 14, 2012

Seconding Trello. I use it every day for managing workflow on big projects, and it's absolutely invaluable. They have an iOS app, I believe.
posted by sonmi at 3:12 PM on August 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Thirding Trello, we've been using it for the last few months for task management. It's simple enough to have virtually no learning curve before you can start using it and fairly flexible.
posted by doctor_negative at 3:38 PM on August 14, 2012

I liked Asana for this when we actually had our team building to-dos. While it's awesome for its ability to write tasks and assign them to team mates, t's not good for content, if you intend on sharing a lot of documents.

My current team uses Basecamp+Dropbox and it's pretty good. "New" Basecamp is pretty nice in that you can have a core team per project and add other people per discussion rather than adding everyone... it really depends on how many projects and people work on them at once time if the cost is worth it though.
posted by thirdletter at 4:23 PM on August 14, 2012

I use a combination of Google Docs plus Trello to manage my freelance business.

I've used Asana - it's nice, but a little overkill for two people I imagine.

A personal "wiki" is really nice, Hackpad is awesome for this.
posted by swizzle_stik at 6:14 PM on August 14, 2012

We just started using Basecamp and have found it much to our liking.
posted by HappyHippo at 6:15 PM on August 14, 2012

There are good suggestions upthread, but I think you should ask your assistant to research them and make a recommendation to you. If she's experienced, she'll know what to look for.
posted by snickerdoodle at 6:15 PM on August 14, 2012

I'm always on the lookout for new tools in this category.

One thing I wish I had now was an easy way to connect to my email, e.g. by forwarding messages (from Outlook) to the task tracking system and easily get them into categories that way, and keep visibility of seperate projects happening simultaneously or that need follow up in X days or months. I've done this with various to-do and ticket tracking systems, and I think Evernote can do this?, and I you can sort of do this within Outlook (but its clunky and obscure), but often the messages you forward to these other applications loose much of their email attributes and it becomes tough to continue using them as emails by replying to other participants, etc.

Does this make sense? Any tools out there that include this combined email-task-project idea?

Anyway, I have also used Trello, Basecamp, Evernote and wiki pages for this kind of thing but none of my co-workers were interested in adopting any of those tools just to work with me, in my company culture I guess I found it easier to use whatever I want for myself, but when connecting with other people summarize and filter my information manually into something easily sent by email or presented in a meeting -- simply having regular communication this way is the important thing.
posted by thefool at 4:29 AM on August 15, 2012

Just saw this by the way

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/08/14/trello-versus-asana/

Trello versus Asana
posted by thefool at 7:45 AM on August 15, 2012