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?"
Omnifocus! (Score:2, Insightful)
Works fantastically well, but for Mac only. So chances are it won't work for you. It does everything you ask for anyway.
Re:what we use (Score:1, Insightful)
Modernised to a small analog note book with one or two pages for each project. It beats the hundreds of hours I've tried and searched for, and started to program solutions that involve computers. Of course, if you want to manage more than simple things, I'd go for a medium note book.
Emacs org-mode (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you an emacs user? If so, then I definitely recommend org-mode: http://orgmode.org/ [orgmode.org]
It's notes mixed with todos on steroids (which themselves are on steroids). There's nothing it can't do. Check it out.
There's a Google tech video about it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM [youtube.com]
Re:Omnifocus! (Score:3, Insightful)
Even better for project management: OmniPlan
The Omni group has some great stuff.
Re:Salvation is in the method (GTD) (Score:3, Insightful)
Once you are familiar with the GTD method, you may start looking for some GTD specific tool
A warning especially for the Slashdot crowd: GTD will make you itch and itch for optimizing your GTD workflow. Resist the temptation, no matter how strong the itch. Too many technical oriented folks keep trying to improve their software GTD tools (lots of scripts, gluing stuff together, writing your own GTD app for scratch, etc), and the end result is they get little done, because they keep either avoiding GTD until they build the optimal solution (almost never), or they waste too much time constructing that solution rather than, you know, getting things done.
Just start with some GTD tool out there, start "getting stuff done", and after you get used to it, slowly work through the process of improving it. I use Tracks [getontracks.org], which runs on Ruby on Rails and your browser + AJAX is the interface. I'm now thinking of switching to an Org mode [orgmode.org] solution. Tracks is even missing stuff that is "important" in GTD (no someday/maybe, no agendas, no way to have "waiting for", etc). But it's good enough to get started.
Lots of software for GTD out there now. Don't try to evaluate all (or even most). My only advice when picking one is that you pick one that makes it easy for you to transfer all your data from that tool to another one you may choose to switch to later on. Although even that may not be a biggie: When switching to Org mode on a test basis, it wasn't too much work just to copy all the stuff manually.
Another reason to do the above is that almost no one's GTD workflow mirrors the one in the book perfectly. You'll find that deviating a bit from it in certain ways will make you work better. You won't know what your ideal workflow is until you've been trying GTD for a while (and begin to notice headaches created by whatever tools you're using). So if you insist on starting off by building your own tool, you'll soon realize that your tool has irritating flaws, and you'll have to recode a lot of things.
Oh, and get that filing cabinet. It's unbelievably handy even if you don't follow GTD. If you want to save money, you may find a good enough one in a garage sale. I got mine from a store run by Habitat for Humanity.
Re:Bugzilla and Wiki (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also a mess to maintain, since it's written in Perl.
Nice troll!
"I hate X because I can't use it properly". "I hate X because other people can't use it properly".
It's a pretty common misconception that a *language* makes things hard to maintain. I've seen horrible C code, I've seen excellent C code. I've seen horrible PHP code, and I've seen excellent PHP code. And of course I've seen some amazing Perl. It's a matter of development experience combined with time and effort of the authors, that makes a project is easy to maintain or not... not the language.
If your bugzilla guy is a Python expert, then maybe his skills are lacking in Perl... which is why it's hard to maintain... just a thought.
Re:redmine (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're using Eclipse for development then combining Redmine (or one of the many other supported bug trackers) with Mylyn (using http://sourceforge.net/projects/redmin-mylyncon/develop [sourceforge.net] ) can be a big win. More so if you have multiple developers but still. Among other things Mylyn stores a context against your bugs (locally by default but it can attach it to the ticket for other users to fetch). The context keeps a track of which files you were working on, including which functions if you're using the Java tools, and restores them when you activate the task/ticket.
Also they have a commercial add-on called Tasktop which extends the integration out to other more desktop oriented stuff like Outlook and Firefox.