There’s not much point of me telling someone to do something if they have all eternity to complete the task. How do I instill urgency without that little field with two slashes in it.

Basecamp encourages you to use milestones instead. If something’s that urgent; It deserves a milestone. Still, ordering todos is not enough, a little star or a red flag would be nice.
Because, sometimes during the day, you often remain in a position that you have to act quickly. And you email it (because basecamp remains ineffective on saying how urgent it is) and this breaks the whole logic. If there were a most-important-todo flag this problem would be solved.

Doesn’t assigning a to-do to a milestone accomplish this?

Rebecca, you can only assign a To Do list to a Milestone. Individual tasks do not have due dates, which, I continue to wish they did.

Simply saying “do this list of stuff to meet that deadline” seems to get things done on time but I instinctively loathe adding “Call Bob Smith on return from holiday” as a milestone! It’s not a major achievement.

In practice, the absence of Basecamp to-do deadlines and priority means I still use a local to-do list for stuff that needs a deadline and isn’t shared with the team. It’s admin overhead I could do without.

Here’s something we have in the pipeline – a task manager with the following features integrated directly in Basecamp with no additional administrative overhead:

• due dates
• priorities
• dependencies
• estimated durations
• automatic scheduling
• resource optimization
• time logging

Adding a new To-Do item will automatically generate a corresponding message with reciprocal links as illustrated in the screen-shot. You set task attributes and log time by posting comments. Scheduling and resource allocation are handled automatically and the main body of the message is updated whenever attributes or dependencies change. Each To-Do list has a corresponding message category, and every Item has a corresponding message.

The example below shows a task that has just started, triggered by the completion of a prior dependency. 1.5 hours of an estimated 6 hours have been logged and the completion date has been estimated based on other commitments and task priorities.

We’re planning this as a third-party subscription service to be released in the summer.

If you’re interested and would like to make suggestions please post here or drop me a line at neil.caithness@2myproject.com

This looks good to me! Any idea how much $$ you’re looking at for this kind of system? How will it plug in to my Basecamp? Anything we can see/trial yet?

Simon, we’ve not made a decision on pricing yet, but think it will be around 15-20% of the Basecamp subscription rate. How will it work? You won’t see any additional software or web-application that you have to run or use – you’ll just use Basecamp. No demo or trial available yet, we’re planning on release in the summer.

How will your data fit into the BC API? Or, how would we download that data in a structured form to remain in sync with BC data? Also, as we build up our template structure I see that we could easily have 1K or more tasks on any project and we have well over 150 projects in BC. Is capacity an issue?

You won’t have to download any data or do anything extra outside of your BC account. The software runs in the cloud and interacts directly with your account. We’ll be able to ramp up capacity as required.

Would I be able to download my data keeping it in sync with Basecamp data I download? I currently feed local databases with Basecamp to generate a miriad of reports. I will be migrating from the xml download to the API this year. I want to keep as much of the mechanics as I can on the BC site, including what we store in your site, but I still need to get at it.

All relevant data calculated for time-logging, scheduling, etc. will be pushed back into your BC account so you can access it there using your own API programs. We won’t neglect the reporting side of things either and the reports will be conveniently machine readable, something along the lines described here. If you would like to discuss user requirements or provide “use cases” to influence development please drop me an email (address in a previous post in this thread.)

It seems, from a non-developer perspective, that adding Due dates to To-Do’s would be fairly simple if you simply tweak the time entry screen on each To-do. Can a developer elaborate further?

lakin, until a better solution comes along, I enter todo due dates in the description as “[5/16/08] JMW to deliver the April Unit Sales Report to District HQ.” so it stands alone.

Putting the date in that format (& inside the brackets) works with a grease monkey script color the description when it gets close to being due.
Putting who does what to whom by when clears it up on my milestone reports that do not use the assigned to field.

Oh that looks really nice. Any ETA on this add-on?

Still can only say release in “the summer” :-) though things are evolving with each iteration. We’re planning on replacing the table described above in this thread with a simple Gantt chart fragment – this captures the essential information, is visually more intuitive and much more compact.

Each task has its own message showing a fragment of the total chart, just the previous, current, and following tasks (links and pop-ups not shown here). The announcements section of each project will have a complete chart showing tasks from all to-do lists, and a special Summary Project will have a mega-chart summarizing relationships and resources across all projects.

We have in mind turning Basecamp’s native To-Do lists and Messages into a complete task and resource management system.

I too would like to be able to set due dates on individual todo list items. If milestones could be grouped into some kind of sub-project or something, then I would definitely be using them instead of individual items on todo lists.

Neil, your add-on service looks useful, but I’d settle for the simple addition of a date or reminder field on todo items.

Earle – I also have taken to putting the date in the title. I suppose it works well enough for now. I think once our team grows, we’re going to have problems if we don’t get auto-notifications on due dates for todo items, though.

• rwsllc : It’s not auto-notification, but there is a grease monkey script that colors to-dos in alert colors when they near the date and go red when passed. You can find it and others here: UserScripts”:http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=basecamp
  It seems to me that if a script can know when it’s close to due that an expert can make it send a msg.

Yeah actually just a little built in functionality that biulds in what the Greasemonkey script does and perhaps one that changes the color or otherwise indicates when a To-Do item is the “next action” in a given list would be all that I am looking for. The word “Gantt” just gets caught in the back of my throat and hangs there. But your project looks great for those that are looking for a traditional full-featured Gantt system. Good luck with it.

You must mean Neil’s project <g>.

mckinneylaw – thanks, but have you changed your mind? :-)

+1. The lack of any true task management system in Basecamp is a glaring defect.

The word “Gantt” just gets caught in the back of my throat and hangs there.

I know, many people have this reaction – but just like any graph, it depends both on how it’s presented and interpreted. I just think of everything behind “today” as a measurement and everything in front of “today” as an estimate. There may be no estimates, then the chart just ends with “today” and everything is measurement. It’s also a compact way of packaging up a whole lot of information and providing a visually intuitive way of navigating through a project. (It’s quite a good bit of design actually – not as good as Minard’s map of Napoleon’s march into Russia, but good for a general purpose.)

rwsllc – the way I see this working is that it shouldn’t get in the way. Just by entering a To-Do item in a list you’ll automatically get a separate message thread associated with every item. If you then choose to add only a due-date, the chart will show just the date the item was added, it’s due-date and actual completion date. Even if you choose not to specify any dates at all other than entering the task and checking it off when it’s done, just spanning those dates on a calendar along with other tasks is uncannily provocative. If instead of due-dates you want to provide specific task dependencies and time estimates, then a whole different analysis kicks in involving resources and critical chains… however complicated you need to be, the representation is as simple as possible.

No I haven’t really changed my mind and I didn’t mean any offense so please don’t take any. I guess what I am looking for is a task management system and I think of Gantt as covering more than that (tracking resource availability, etc) which is more than I personally need. I have never really used Gantt charts however so perhaps I have misconceived them as adding a level of complexity that is not really there.

Don’t worry, I didn’t think that at all. I was just wondering if you’ve had some experience that has put you off the idea of a more complete management system. I’m no evangelist for Gantt (it’s just a graph after all) or for any particular method (critical path, critical chain… etc.) The trick is to put in place a Basecamp-sympathetic mechanism that works as a full-featured task management system for those that choose it but also scales easily for projects from simple to complex.

Just a quick follow-up. We’ve been adding dates manually to the beginning of the title for our todo items, and it has been working quite well. I still would love to have a real ‘due’ date, but everyone on our team is making a habit of watching for the upcoming items and handling them on time.

Hey Neil, I just read your thread and was wondering how things are going with the project.