Monday, March 30, 2009
Basecamp: Task Lists vs. Due Dates
UPDATE: 37 Signals has now added due dates to Basecamp To Do items.
I’m reposting this from a 37Signals Basecamp forum, where I originally submitted it as a comment. If you use Basecamp you’ll know what I’m talking about; if not, watching the To Do tour video will provide some context. (Because of the Basecamp context, I used “To Do” as an proper noun and avoided hyphenation.)
The question at hand, and the one most often vocalized by users, is why Basecamp does not enable users to assign due dates to tasks. For years 37Signals has stated flatly that they do not plan to add this functionality. Instead, they encourage people to use Milestones (major dates comprising groups of tasks) when they need a due date. Traditional-minded project managers complain that this muddles the definition of milestone.
@robwal This is a shot at defending the absence of due dates on To Do items, and it is in part a continuation of @Don McDonald. It is not directed at anyone in particular, and naturally, this may have nothing to do with 37S’s actual reasons for resisting it.
In short, my theory is that Basecamp uses To Do lists instead of due dates, that these systems are mutually exclusive, that the former promotes (demands?) a more deliberate approach to task management, and that 37Signals would rather develop the app around a single, preferred work flow than support two different worldviews.
An Alternative
I assume people want dates so they can then sort by date and decide what to do next, that this is because people are staring at a mountain of tasks they’ve added over time and trying to decide what is urgent and what isn’t, and that the volume of tasks and daily activities are so large that deciding what to do just by looking at the task list is excessively cumbersome. I’m going to do something radical and suggest that perhaps that’s a problem.
I like the Morning Scrub that Rands advocates:
By taking a deep breath and considering your entire day, I’m attempting to ditch all the bright’n’shininess and gather perspective: “What is going to matter today?” With this rough priority scale in mind, I do a complete scrub of the to-do list. Yeah, the whole thing. If you can’t get through this list in 5 uninterrupted minutes, your list is either too long or you’re bad at scrubbing. Don’t worry about that yet.
The purpose of the Morning Scrub is to land each task into one of three buckets:
- Today. This task must be completed today.
- Later. Not today. Later.
- Never. Yeah, I’m never going to do this task. It’s gone.
Bam. Create three (actually, two) lists, and start reordering. Need more lists? Create more—but remember, keep it simple. Maybe you start each Monday by creating a list for the week and moving things into it. Every day, you drag things into the “Today” list.
Coming at it from a GTD angle, if I discover that certain tasks are not leaving the “Today” list for days, they might need to be broken down into simpler tasks, and maybe even built into a milestone. (Not only that, but they aren’t truly urgent, which is a different matter altogether.) “Finish article” or “Send RFP to Frank” might look like tasks that need due dates, but they might actually be smaller milestones that rely on things like “proof article” or “double-check RFP budget with marketing”. Or, maybe these are correctly defined as tasks, but I am not blocking off time to get things done throughout the normal course of a day. Due dates will solve neither problem.
Incidentally, if you start using the task lists this way, then adding the date to the task description—as some have suggested—suddenly becomes useful. Just drag it into your “Today” list the morning of the due date. Bonus: you are now aware that it’s due today by conscious effort as opposed to being blindly reminded in the morning.
Reminders
One might respond, “OK, but some things are really just reminders, and I should be able to create a reminder and forget about it, not have it stare at me for two weeks.” Fair: put it in your calendar, along with your meetings, time blocks, and holidays. “But then the reminder is no longer tied to a milestone.” Just tag your reminder (e.g., “Check on Bob’s code #softlaunch”). “But that creates unnecessary extra work. I’m still not convinced.”
Well…
37 Signals Philosophy / Experience
Theoretically Basecamp’s task lists and due dates can coexist, but in practice I imagine they are mutually exclusive. Think about it: you are either going to run your day according to
(a) what the system tells you is due via hourly alerts or daily auto-sort, or
(b) what your eyes tell you via consistent review and list management
Choosing user-managed lists over due dates seems to be a fundamental choice on their part and one they are not willing to compromise on easily. Milestones get alerts and calendar entries because they need it; all else is a constant churn of tasks that requires your attention. A group of tasks, broken into lists, requires a different mindset—different from hourly alerts, and different from “This is due now!” reminders popping up out of the sky without conscious thought—but maybe the 37S guys know what they’re doing.
Highrise
I suspect Highrise tasks have due dates instead of lists because there aren’t milestones binding them together; the application has a narrower focus and the task management philosophy reflects this.
