staying organized with basecamp (pt 2)
March 19th, 2008one comment
This is part two of a series on how we use Basecamp (an online collaboration website) to stay organized. Click here to read part one.
One of the essential things that we have to keep organized in order to be productive as a band is our schedules. As I mentioned in the last article, the five of us don’t live in the same state (much less the same town), so we’re rarely physically together unless we’re playing shows or working in the studio. Russ does the majority of our booking, so it’s very important that he knows what days are available when setting up dates and that he has an easy way of keeping us all informed of what shows we have coming up on the calendar. We tried doing all of that organization by email but emails became so hard to keep track of that we needed another solution.
The solution that we came up with (and are using with some level of success) was to set up a shared google calendar that we can all edit with dates that we need off and see dates where we have something scheduled (e.g. shows, studio time, etc). Pretty handy, but that has nothing to do with Basecamp (which is what this post was supposed to be about) so let me get to that.
In order to keep all of our organization stuff in one place we came up with this nifty trick…displaying the google calendar on the basecamp overview page. Under the project settings in basecamp there is a place where you can set an annoucement to display on your overview page.
Google has some good instructions for how to embed your calendar on other pages so it only took a little copy and paste job to get the calendar to show up whenever we log in…wallah!
It’s a good thing that you can stay organized with Basecamp. My team couldn’t, though we tried. Now we are with Wrike - http://www.wrike.com/. Here are a few reasons why. Basecamp’s notifications are pretty tricky. In Wrike every team member is notified of any chenges made in the project at once. Basecamp tasks don’t have due dates. In Wrike we can set these dates and get notified when we forget about something. My guys stoped missing deadlines! That was the best thing.