What Does Everyone Use For Task/Project Tracking? 428
JerBear0 writes "I work as the sole IT employee at a company of about 50 people. I handle programming, support, pretty much anything that is IT related, or even that plugs in. As seems to be true with many small companies, the priorities seem to shift quite frequently. As a result, I've always got multiple programming (both new systems and improvements/changes to existing systems), integration, research, maintenance tasks/projects on my To Do list, in varying stages of completion. At any given time, I need to be able to jump back to one of these items and pick up where I left off. I am currently using Outlook Tasks, and then end up referencing my notebook and email for those dates to figure out exactly where I left off. It works, but not well. If it's been a while, I'll end up losing an hour or two just tracking everything down. I looked at using MS Project / OpenProj, but they want an individual file for each project, and I want at least the project/task list all on one screen. Essentially what I'd want would be a Task List on steroids, allowing for hierarchical subtasks, attachments, and prioritization. Ideally it would be a desktop app, but a locally-hostable web app would be okay. In some of these projects I may want to include proprietary information, which I really don't want floating out in the cloud outside of my control. I know I'm not alone in this problem, so what do you guys (gals) use to address this?"
No ideal solution (Score:1, Funny)
Theres no ideal solution out there yet, especially if you want it sharable and free.
You could do worse than a spreadsheet in google docs with the correct column headings, and an embedded gant chart.
Its sharable, allows easy import and export, is hosted, and free.
Re:what we use (Score:5, Funny)
We've upgraded to soft clay tablets and pointy sticks from hand painting on cave walls. There was a great debate on the merits of the permanence of the new technology until Ugh pointed out that the clay tablets harden if you leave them on the fire and that you can also take them with you when moving to the summer caves.
I use an Excel spreadsheet (Score:5, Funny)
But I always wash my hands afterwards.
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, dude. (Score:3, Funny)
Take massive quantities of LSD, combined with strobe light therapy, aka MK Ultra stuff - until you develop Dissociative Identify Disorder [wikipedia.org] aka Sybil Effect [wikipedia.org] and then assign each one of your personalities a non-competing task. Note: you may have to go Memento [wikipedia.org] on this, and write the tasks on your body for the next personality to see.
What you should find is that you cycle personalities often enough to load balance the work properly. Take Thorzine [wikipedia.org] as needed to adjust timing.
I think you will find that.... errerggshdgs... wait, what? Ignore that advice!
Re:what we use (Score:5, Funny)
Re:what we use (Score:3, Funny)
What do you do to stop the octopi from stealing the coconuts to live in?
Re:what we use (Score:5, Funny)
What do you do to stop the octopi from stealing the coconuts to live in?
Kick 'em in the tentacles!
Re:Bugzilla and Wiki (Score:4, Funny)
I simply said that Bugzilla has been written since a long time, it's pretty old and over-bloated, and hard to maintain.
Heh... no, you didn't say that. You said:
It's also a mess to maintain, since it's written in Perl.