Planning tools

My boss, Andrew, brought in a book last week titled Getting Things Done.  I wrote about the The Dip a little earlier.  Between the two books and with college starting for Kelly and Christian, we have been on a big “getting organized” kick.  The worst part of all this is the realization that I am way over extended.  If I ever hope to have a life AND get some things done, I am going to half to perform and aggressive triage on my planned activities.  The up side is that it made me realize that I am doing a few things right.  Andrew introduced us to a tool called Basecamp.  You can find the free version here.  We use a paid version of Basecamp at my job at Centice that has a lot more functionality.

We use Basecamp extensively at GaugeCam.  Five people work on multiple aspects of the project and it is an absolutely great way to keep track of where we are.  Ease of use is a big part of the usefulness of this tool.  There are other tools that have more and better functionality, but require more knowledge to use.  This has worked well enough that we have decided to see if we can use Basecamp to help manage school work starting this fall.  I am not sure it translates perfectly, but since the kids are learning how to use it, I think it might be a good way to keep track of what and when things need to be completed.  There are a several other tools we use extensively in the GaugeCam project that we can recommend heartily.  I will describe them all in future posts.  They include DropBox, ProjectLocker, and some other tools.