For some years now, I’ve had an itch; keeping track of things that need doing (or may need doing at some point). Along with those things, there are also ideas that I may want turn in to something one day. You know what I’m talking about. Now, I’ve never been one of those todo obsessed people. My approach until now has been to either just-get-on-with-it-and-do-the-thing ™ or, keep a TODO text file in whatever software project folder I’m working on. This second method works, but it’s clunky and it’s only real benefit over not recording the todo item at all, is that it’s saved outside of my head.
But you can’t really do anything with it. You can’t easily mark it as done, move it to “deal with it another time”, “more info needed”, “sorted for the moment, but needs improving”.
So I’ve been aware that I could do with something better. Over the last year or so, I’ve tried Dropbox Paper, Atlassian something, Jira maybe? A couple of command line task / todo programs. But none of them was what I was after. What am I after, you ask?
The Something Tracker
There is something you want to keep track of. It could be a bug, an idea, an improvement, an entire project, even a wish. We’ll just call it an item for now.
The Item Tracker
Ok, so that item needs a name, a category (from above), a priority would be nice, then I can just filter on the highest priority items. I’ll need to be able to mark each item as done, when it’s done (obviously). But, what if an item is done, but I’m not 100% happy with it. What do we call that? Partially done? Done, but revisit one day? Hmmm. We’ll have to come back to that one. Now, I work alone (sigma male before it became popular), so other people are of no interest to me. But, if I was to go to the trouble of designing and writing my item tracker, I might be able to make a few quid off all that work, so I’d make it multi-user. With that decided, I’ll want to assign items to different people. And they should be able to move items around as they see fit.
What was that Basecamp thing?
I remembered that I watched a Youtube vid by Jason Fried, where he was demoing an issue tracker they were working on called Fizzy
Today I thought I’d have a look for it and it turns out it’s open source and you can create a free account. Of course I had to give it a try…
Looking at it from the lens of my requirements, how does it fare?
Can I create tasks / todo’s / somethings?
Fizzy uses, or is inspired by, the Kanban system so the main unit that is tracked is called a card. Fair enough. So I’m happy with that.
Can you give a card a name?
Yes. There’d be little point in having everything called untitled but Fizzy will name your unnamed card that if you can’t be arsed with all the typing.
Let’s create a card and call it:
How very meta of me!
Once you’ve created a card, people can add comments, progress updates etc. Integral to the kanban system is moving a card through different stages until it eventually reaches done (hopefully).
Done, but revisit?
Remember earlier I said that occasionally I have a task which is sorted, but not sorted properly. At some point I’m going to have to completely redo it. How does Fizzy deal with those sorts of issues? Easy, just add a new column:
And then, it appears on your board:
That is pretty nice, eh?
Yes, but what about projects???
This one had me stumped for about 30 seconds. Then I realised: create a new board. Each board is a project. Again, it can’t possibly get much easier than that.
Yes, but what about priorities???
I suppose you just create columns named urgent, high priority etc.
Conclusion
Ever since DHH announced rubyonrails back in the early 2000’s, I’ve periodically checked up on what Basecamp, or 37signals, are up to. I’ve always liked their can-do, just go for it attitude.
It seems they’ve sorted another problem in an elegant, simple to use way (and the help system is excellent). I’ve only messed about for about half an hour, but I’m going to stick with this one for a bit.
