I’ve really tried to take to heart the 37s approach to managing our growing team and have hit a bit of a bottleneck. If you ask the 37s team basecamep, and backpack serve entirely different functions. This of course has been debated many times.

The real problem is that there is a ton of overlap in calendars, todo’s, files, etc. This causes problems when things really get rocking and rolling, and is only compounded when more people join the fold.

Where is that file you posted? Which calendar did you put that on? Oh I didnt see that todo you must have put it in “the other system” (backpack)... the list goes on and on.

I find our team less and less productive the more 37s products we try and put in place. Of course you need them all because each has that one little feature you can’t live without (like the calendar in basecamp blows compared to the oe in backpack, etc)

It seems that adding backpack on top of basecamp has really complicated finding anything at all and the interruption of having to dig through multiple systems to get to what you are looking for is not cool. Nor is watching many different “dashboards”.

Will someone who is successfully using multiple 37s products at one time please comment on how they are able to keep things straight, how to know where to find stuff, which dashboard to keep watching, and how they have been able to pass this all on to a growing team, some of which are still just getting the knack of email.

We make use of BC, HR and now a multiuser version of BP, to run a design studio in conjunction with other online apps, TimeFox and Pulse. We don’t have too many issues with the lack of integration, however, we would like to see the contacts in Highrise, accessible from within Basecamp when setting up new users/companies.

• Project related administration/time keeping = TimeFox
• Project related tasks/notes = Basecamp
• People related tasks/notes = Highrise
• Personal tasks/notes = Backpack, and now…
• Studio related information/knowledge base = Backpack [multiuser]

• We spend the majority of our time in Basecamp
• We BCC emails to the Highrise dropbox and only assign “Contact” based tasks within Highrise. [ie: we don’t try to force Highrise into a project management tool]
• We document all our processes and procedures in Backpack and log team issues using the message board. We each have a backpack “Inbox” that we forward relevant emails to.
• We also make use of OpenID to get the OpenBar functionality.

In answer to your question about what dashboard to keep an eye on, I’d have to say “all of them” along with our email inbox. We don’t really find this to be an issue.

Hope that helps.

Thank you for your input (and I thought I had it crazy just using basecamp and backpack together!)

The openbar makes it nice to jump between products. Having people watch multiple dashboards, multiple todo lists, and multiple notes is a major PIA though. It is hard enough trying to get people to watch one calendar in the new system and get away from outlook, gcal, etc…

A lack of consolidation of features and unified search is a glaring problem. I am surprised that as focused on productivity and removing distraction as 37s is, that anything so fragmented would be acceptable.

We use Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack and Campfire without any confusion at all. Our ‘rules’ are pretty simple:

• Any official communication related to a client project goes in Basecamp
• All the other chatter happens in Campfire, whether it’s related to a project, other business, or personal
• Pre-sales communications go in Highrise, along with any other non-project related traffic
• Internal resources go in Backpack

I find the different to-do lists actually help me focus, rather than fragment my attention. Putting everything all in one place can get overwhelming, but chunking to-do’s down into work modes – working on projects, working on sales and marketing, working on internal resources – along with all the other resources I need for those jobs makes sense to me.

I find the different to-do lists actually help me focus, rather than fragment my attention. Putting everything all in one place can get overwhelming, but chunking to-do’s down into work modes – working on projects, working on sales and marketing, working on internal resources – along with all the other resources I need for those jobs makes sense to me.

You’ve explained something that I hadn’t actually realised; each app provides a different context to the tasks at hand.

Very GTD in principle.

I use Basecamp, Backpack, and Highrise as a solo user. The way I divide it up is like so:

• All project related stuff goes into Basecamp. bold Only todo’s related to BC projects go there.
• All miscellaneous stuff goes into Backpack. Any todo’s not related to a specific project go into BP. My GTD inbox and next actions go here as well, though any actions related to a Basecamp project get put into Basecamp.
• Contacts go into Highrise.

I find the division of tasks very intuitive, and it works well for me. That being said, I don’t have other people to manage/monitor. It seems to me, as others have pointed out above, is that ground rules should be clearly articulated about what goes where.

i just use basecamp really…i didn’t realize there were so many other tools too. i got some research to do!

Does anyone have any good solutions to Action Management using Basecamp, regarding the due dates for To Dos. I am finding that we have to make many To dos Milestones so that we can track due dates….do other people have easier ways to do this?