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Are there any good tools to manage task follow-ups?

1 points by amangoeliitb ↗ HN
As the team and the business grows, a problem we are facing is that of inter-team communication (especially in the remote world).

Basically, person A needs help from person B with some task. So, they put up an email to B. But, later B forgets the task and also A forgets to follow-up with B. When something goes wrong, suddenly A remembers that they had a task due on B. This leads to a bad situation.

This problem mainly happens across the teams rather than within the same team.

Do you also face this problem? What tools/mechanisms/SOPs do you use for this?

This is my first time posting on Hacker News. Please pardon me for any mistakes :)

5 comments

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smt88
Most people solve this outside of email using project management software.

We use ClickUp and absolutely love it. You can turn any email, Slack message, form submission, Jira event -- anything -- into a task in ClickUp. It includes due dates, comments, file attachments, docs, and more.

The only other company that makes me feel like a fanboy is Jetbrains. ClickUp is really that good (even though it's pretty massive and intimidating to start out with).

amangoeliitb
What if we assigned a task to someone. They agreed for a timeline of 1 week. Then after a week they forgot and I also forgot?

The problem is that it is quite time and energy-consuming to follow-up with people on the tasks. Any suggestions?

smt88
The PM/task software should have reminders (email and/or push). I use ClickUp as my master agenda. I do the task at the top of the list (sorted by due date and priority) and then move to the next one.

> The problem is that it is quite time and energy-consuming to follow-up with people on the tasks. Any suggestions?

I don't know. I think this is just the overhead of working on a team. Our company hates it too, so we have a PM whose only job is to do that part.

Mystique_
I often assign tasks to people on email and then snooze the email for the time when the follow-up is to be done. I haven't seen any effective tool for this, so I use email snooze as of now. It would be interesting to know other possible alternatives as well.
amangoeliitb
Exactly. Currently Slack and Gmail Snooze features are the only 2 things I use. They are very unorganised.