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The problem with lists is not boredom, it's importance overload. The product video emphasised "say goodbye to boring lists of tasks" which was why I mentioned
by adrianhoward 14y ago
The problem with lists is not boredom, it's importance overload.
The product video emphasised "say goodbye to boring lists of tasks" which was why I mentioned it ;-)
The point I was trying to make was that boredom wasn't really a pain point for PM software.
When you have 1000 items (conservative for our business, in Asana we must have at least that many), the problem is that no matter how many categories or hierarchies you make, there's no way to make sense of the information overload. I call it importance overload because that's what it is: when everything looks the same and feels the same, everything becomes the same importance. And when you have 1000 items of the same importance, nothing is important. This is a design paradigm used on information. I think it works well to describe the problem.
You stated the problem very well - if everything looks equally important then nothing is.... so don't do that ;-)
I've easily about 500 items organised on various kanban style boards ATM (not all in trello). That's actually pretty low for us. I've worked with places that successfully do this with many, many more than that.
The thing that the OP missed in comparing droptask to trello and similar tools is that you're not just making lists - you're modelling the process you're using to do work too. For me droptask makes it harder to deal with that information overload - not easier - since it seems to be focused on task categorisation - not workflow modelling.
When I'm looking at our company's current-work board I can see - at a glance - what folk are doing right now (the WIP column), what's blocked (the blocked column), what's been done in the last seven days or so (done), and what's coming up in the next week or so (on deck column) and so on.
Once a week we make sure the backlog on that board is topped up with another week's worth of work from a separate general-work board. Takes an hour tops as part of our weekly retrospective. Usually more like ten minutes.
With have a few class-of-service rules that decide whether incoming work goes onto the current-work board or the general work board.
Once a month we spend an afternoon sanity checking the general work board against our company goals and cull / re-prioritise as appropriate.
(It's a little bit more complicated than this - since we have some external public-facing boards we use for client work and some volunteer efforts we're involved with, plus create separate boards for one-off tasks like recruitment and for tracking our consulting sales funnel, etc).
In short I find that prioritised lists are a stupidly effective for visualising our workflow. Droptask seems to only have date-based ordering which is a very blunt - and often counter productive - tool to help prioritise work.
It seems a step backwards to me.
- davidlin911 14y agoHey Adrian, Can I show you a mockup I have that addresses the prioritizing problem? Let me know.
- adrianhoward 14y agoyeah sure - email address is on my profile page or just ask google ;)