FINDING THE RIGHT APPS: PRODUCTIVITY FOR A SERVICE PROVIDING BUSINESS
Ok, so this has become an annual cycle for me and the colleagues I work with. We’re yet to stick with one particular system for managing ourselves. After 3 or 4 years it has dawned on me: there is no one system that meets all of our requirements.
I guess there are different aspects of our business and day-to-day lives that require management. Work-wise, we have a series of design projects (Architectural design for extensions, new housing, commercial developments etc). Within these projects are several sequences of tasks that need to take place to progress each project toward its goal - in our case, two major milestones are Statutory Consent and Construction. The projects are primarily catalogued and managed in WorkFlow Max ( https://www.workflowmax.com/ ) which is specifically for service providers as it allows you to log hours against projects and easily create invoices through their accounting package www.xero.com . Workflow Max does have tasks management within, but it isn't great at clearly prioritising like more modern apps do - but we cannot live without Workflow thanks to the endless hours saved in collating timesheets at month end and converting these to an invoice - all this is automated from the initial quote to the final invoice.
So if we have twenty projects on each with 5, 10 maybe 20 tasks at a time - then you can see that this can quickly peak to a potentially unmanageable level! We’re yet to find one app or system that definitively says: THIS IS YOUR NEXT TASK.
We have come close though - but not without two or three subscriptions to two or three apps. One of the longest to survive was Trello - https://trello.com/
Trello is quite visual and works on a system of cards in the ‘Kanban’ style - allowing you to shift a task to a different column when its status changes. It also allows you to add rich content to the cards, and to chat with colleagues or update on the status of a task. The downside is that you need your own system to apply to this - in progress, assigned, waiting on others, complete - for example. This generally worked for us but there came a point whereby more time was required to work on the to-do list itself, or it became out of date. So even before spending time on paid work, we were spending time arranging the to-do list which organised that paid work. I wanted something that told me what was priority.
Enter ‘Motion’. https://www.usemotion.com/
At first, this was the answer to all our problems. The AI robot behind the system would assess the tasks and then read our calendar to work out when we could do that task. Yes! Automated time blocking. I found that time blocking in the calendar was the best manual way to plan tasks as we only have a set number of hours in the day. But to find a system that would do this for me and automatically shift tasks around? Brilliant! For a short while….. The £35 per month fees started to itch and I found that tasks were just being shifted back and back and back as they always were - only this time a robot was shifting them back for me! When the interface became clunky following so-called updates/ improvements, we baled. Only when we had found a replacement first - and this replacement to Motion? NOTION. https://www.notion.so/desktop/mac
I’m writing this within notion but the Teamspace we have set up for our company not only allows us to monitor projects, but tasks within those projects are clear and manageable and easily shared between colleagues - with instant updating across the board. Notion has become our company resource centre, with pages for reference (Architecture relies on pages and pages of reference, product literature, regulations etc).
We will see how it fairs over the next 12 months from the task aspect, but I am pretty certain that Notion will be on our app list for some time and is already the base I return to for documenting and organising work, personal stuff and side hustles - and is rapidly becoming the vital second brain!
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