Any time I read threads like this one I am grateful I found Basecamp years ago. Granted, my company has a really small team (projects with 4 internal people on

Any time I read threads like this one I am grateful I found Basecamp years ago. Granted, my company has a really small team (projects with 4 internal people on it), but largely due to how Basecamp is structured and my own dislike of being interrupted or time-sucking meetings, we suffer very little of the problems OP brings up. I strongly recommend Basecamp or at least checking out the philosophy behind the software.