I think it would be good to be able to apply deadlines in to-do lists. I think of milestones as major project accomplishments or deadlines. If I want to schedule a meeting, I can’t put it on the calendar unless it is a milestone. A weekly review meeting doesn’t seem like it deserves to be a milestone, though.

A second to that, though, if I do put a meeting on the milestone page, then I can only apply it to one person and I can’t track the time from the meeting. It would be nice to track time from multiple people in meetings.

Please let me know if I am missing something or if there are any plans in the works to change any of this. Thanks.

Don’t think of milestones as the literal word “milestone.” Think of it as what it essentially is, which is a to-do with a due date.

jstevens, this is a HUGE debate around Basecamp. Some people (like slapshotw) have been abe to make the To Do/Milestone arrangement work for them. My teams, on the other hand, would love due dates for To Do items.

I see it as Milestones = Goals and To Dos = the tasks that allow you to achieve those goals. Tasks can sometimes have due dates.

• Sign up for VeriSign.
• Make list of reoccurring accounts,
• etc.

What would be nice is to be able to create a new milestone at the same time I create a new task list… A simple check box that says “Create a new milestones for this Task List” and a date picker.

It would be great to have due dates for to-do’s. I prefer to think of milestones as milestones, i.e., significant waypoints in a project. The to-do’s are what get you to those waypoints. Plus, due dates for to-do’s would really help us with scheduling & planning new work.

Which makes me wonder about 37Signals internal process: They’re eating their own dogfood, and they don’t see a need for due dates on to-do’s. I guess it doesn’t matter when you don’t have actual delivery deadlines for your projects!

OK, just so we’re clear: I definitely see the benefit of dates on to-dos…I use the highrise to-dos for this reason much more than the basecamp to-dos. My point was more, for now, the best way to deal with the situation may be to just forget the stigma the word “milestone” carries.

Another suggestion for dealing with this until/if there’s some systematized way of doing it is just to come up with your own conventions. If the dates are primarily there for communication (“I need the the team to know that we really would like to have this done by 7/25”), then you can try something like “Finish design review [7/25]”.

Obviously, this won’t allow you to do any ordering on the items according to date or see them in a calendar view, but it might still just be good enough for what you need. Worth a try if you’re mainly desiring these dates for communication.

slapshotw: the stigma the word milestone carries, or the significance? :-)

slapshotw: the stigma the word milestone carries, or the significance? :-)

I guess it depends on how much your like your job, no? :)

I hadn’t visited this forum in a couple of years. It’s nice to see the more things change the more they stay the same :-). “How can i assign a to-do to more than one person” and “how can i assign a due date to a to-do” seem to be two of the more common.

What was I think of. Also, “how can i stop xxx from seeing xxx” ;-)?

Melvin - I like your thought on the “create new milestone from this to do list” and a date picker… that sounds like it would definitely be an interesting addition for those that use the milestones like you were mentioning… I am sure some people will still want the due dates for individual todos, I can see how we’ve been trained to think that way and I sometimes want that too :)

Also using milestones and to-do’s as expected, it wil be useful to see the deadline date in those to-do’s lists associated to milestones. It will help to supervise people work. i have people without milestones assigned but with lots of to-do’s and they have no place to see in 1 screen what is the next to-do to work with.

I’m not asking for a due date associated to the to-do, only showing the current info available in more places will help to save time.

setxi—exactly. I’m less concerned about due dates for specific tasks than scheduling and focusing work activities across all tasks. I can see all my to-do’s, but I have no way of seeing what to do next. I love Highrise’s timeline view for tasks.

This is still a much requested feature for our team. Without the ability to see what is due when or the ability to set priorities, nobody knows what to work on next. Please consider adding a due date and/or todo priority assignments to the basecamp todo lists.

Thanks for listening!

My team has the same opinion. We use Milestones for major accomplishments and todo’s for intermediate tasks. Many todos have dependencies on other todos and this is hard to covey to the team without due dates. I don’t want Basecamp to turn into another Microsoft Project, but this seems like a pretty obvious feature.

Wish I saw this before making a topic about it. Not having the option to add deadlines to To-Dos is ridiculous. ActiveCollab even has this. Why am I paying for an extremely overpriced product that doesn’t even include obvious features that free software has?

C’mon guys.

Why am I paying for an extremely overpriced product that doesn’t even include obvious features that free software has?

Yes, why are you?