Shimon Rura recently launched his awesome voo2do task management website. I had a chance to check it out a few months ago while it was under development. It’s great to see it come to life for others to use, too.
So, I thought I’d compile and describe some of the tools I use to keep my work world organized.
Basecamp
When I first started to use Basecamp last year I used it extensively to manage client and internal projects. These days I’m mostly using it as a knowledgebase and not for tasks and milestones/calendars. Basecamp is an essential part of my world and is the first thing I see when I open up Firefox.
iCal and phpicalendar
I use iCal to manage calendars and tasks. In order to easily share this information with clients and collaborators, I publish the calendars and tasks to a private area on my website with phpicalendar. Everyone can subscribe via RSS, mobile phone or on their computer via the published iCal file. One of my collaborators has bluetooth on his cellphone so he is able to receive alerts on tasks and appointments that I’ve added an alarm to. (This can be an amusing feature since I can use it to send out alerts like “Hey, call me back!”, etc.) The only reason I’m not using voo2do is that I like being able to keep the data on my own server for work related tasks.
del.icio.us
I use delicious as my bookmark manager. I’ve created special “bundles” that group different tags together. For example, I have a “PR” bundle that compiles anything PR-related for my work including the Joshua Darden Studio. How it works is that the “PR” bundle is the overall box for the collection and then I associate specific tags to the bundle such as “pr:joshuadarden.” I use the “for:” bundle to drop bookmarks into other people’s accounts. It’s a handy way to share a website with someone without having to email the URL or bug them in instant messenger. (I’m hopeful that spammers won’t figure out a way to tap into this.) For example, I added the for:pc4media to my bookmark to Google’s page about their “Google Advertising Professionals” program. By using this tag, it drops it into his account and creates a special RSS feed for all the bookmarks that everyone else has tagged “for:pc4media.”
I will probably add more to this page; but for now, that’s it!