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Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

droptask.com

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Re: Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

#61
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with lists is not boredom, it's importance overload. When you have 1000 items (conservative for our business, in Asana we must have at least that many), the problem is that no matter how many categories or hierarchies you make, there's no way to make sense of the information overload. I call it importance overload because that's what it is: when everything looks the same and feels the same, everything bec…

I'm no programmer but I suddenly thought of a possible solution - adaptive sizing. Depending on the importance, the first few words of the task would appear bigger or smaller appropriately. I'm sure this would work great on the desktop but I have no idea how good this can be designed to appear on a mobile phone screen (3.5-4.5inches).

Yes, I'm thinking along those lines. I have a product idea for solving this problem... just no time. :)

Re: Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

#62
This is visually very interesting. You can tell that there is a lot of care being put into the transitions and all. It's a pretty competitive market out there in terms of "to do lists". With a good UI, it gives you a fighting chance. Sure it might not be for everyone, but that's the point. Segment the market and fight for your share.

How did you find backbone and D3. Do they play well together in terms of overall code maintainability? What worked and what didn't?

Re: Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

#63

Have to admit - from the video and a five minute play I find it very hard to imagine using this for anything. The information density is very low. Doesn't seem to allow you to easily order tasks beyond dates. Lousy on phones. I could go on. List aren't boring... there useful. I don't go to my project management software to be entertained - I go there to get shit done ;-) What I want to know when I go to project manag…

The problem with lists is not boredom, it's importance overload. When you have 1000 items (conservative for our business, in Asana we must have at least that many), the problem is that no matter how many categories or hierarchies you make, there's no way to make sense of the information overload. I call it importance overload because that's what it is: when everything looks the same and feels the same, everything bec…

The problem with lists is not boredom, it's importance overload.

The product video emphasised "say goodbye to boring lists of tasks" which was why I mentioned it ;-)

The point I was trying to make was that boredom wasn't really a pain point for PM software.

When you have 1000 items (conservative for our business, in Asana we must have at least that many), the problem is that no matter how many categories or hierarchies you make, there's no way to make sense of the information overload. I call it importance overload because that's what it is: when everything looks the same and feels the same, everything becomes the same importance. And when you have 1000 items of the same importance, nothing is important. This is a design paradigm used on information. I think it works well to describe the problem.

You stated the problem very well - if everything looks equally important then nothing is.... so don't do that ;-)

I've easily about 500 items organised on various kanban style boards ATM (not all in trello). That's actually pretty low for us. I've worked with places that successfully do this with many, many more than that.

The thing that the OP missed in comparing droptask to trello and similar tools is that you're not just making lists - you're modelling the process you're using to do work too. For me droptask makes it harder to deal with that information overload - not easier - since it seems to be focused on task categorisation - not workflow modelling.

When I'm looking at our company's current-work board I can see - at a glance - what folk are doing right now (the WIP column), what's blocked (the blocked column), what's been done in the last seven days or so (done), and what's coming up in the next week or so (on deck column) and so on.

Once a week we make sure the backlog on that board is topped up with another week's worth of work from a separate general-work board. Takes an hour tops as part of our weekly retrospective. Usually more like ten minutes.

With have a few class-of-service rules that decide whether incoming work goes onto the current-work board or the general work board.

Once a month we spend an afternoon sanity checking the general work board against our company goals and cull / re-prioritise as appropriate.

(It's a little bit more complicated than this - since we have some external public-facing boards we use for client work and some volunteer efforts we're involved with, plus create separate boards for one-off tasks like recruitment and for tracking our consulting sales funnel, etc).

In short I find that prioritised lists are a stupidly effective for visualising our workflow. Droptask seems to only have date-based ordering which is a very blunt - and often counter productive - tool to help prioritise work.

It seems a step backwards to me.

Re: Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with lists is not boredom, it's importance overload. When you have 1000 items (conservative for our business, in Asana we must have at least that many), the problem is that no matter how many categories or hierarchies you make, there's no way to make sense of the information overload. I call it importance overload because that's what it is: when everything looks the same and feels the same, everything bec…

The problem with lists is not boredom, it's importance overload. The product video emphasised "say goodbye to boring lists of tasks" which was why I mentioned it ;-) The point I was trying to make was that boredom wasn't really a pain point for PM software. When you have 1000 items (conservative for our business, in Asana we must have at least that many), the problem is that no matter how many categories or hierarchi…

Hey Adrian,

Can I show you a mockup I have that addresses the prioritizing problem?

Let me know.

Re: Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with lists is not boredom, it's importance overload. The product video emphasised "say goodbye to boring lists of tasks" which was why I mentioned it ;-) The point I was trying to make was that boredom wasn't really a pain point for PM software. When you have 1000 items (conservative for our business, in Asana we must have at least that many), the problem is that no matter how many categories or hierarchi…

Hey Adrian, Can I show you a mockup I have that addresses the prioritizing problem? Let me know.

yeah sure - email address is on my profile page or just ask google ;)

Re: Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams

#70

Will there ever be time tracking? That's one feature I really wish Trello had by default.

> Will there ever be time tracking? That's one feature I really wish Trello had by default.

We are currently considering all feature requests and this is one I've heard a few times. As such, it is definitely something we will consider!

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