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Ask HN: how do you manage todo-lists in a team?

6 points by sevilo ↗ HN
2 methods that I usually use

spreadsheet with list of tasks on google docs: probably not what a spreadsheet is intended for, people keep forgetting to fill things in and end up losing track of progress. But pretty quick and easy to setup one.

Trello: very complete set of functionalities, feels formal and engineering process oriented. Often would only use it for larger on-going projects, but feels overkill for a quick todo list during discussions.

what else do you use? anything you'd recommend, or have complains about?

8 comments

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ASquare
We use Trello for everything from managing development progress (big projects) to individual tasks and to dos.

Have never felt for a moment that it's overkill etc for the day to day stuff to be honest. Given how flexible Trello is, we've always felt that it's as easy or complicated to use as you make it (which really is the key to Trello in our experience)

acomjean
We too use Trello for our non-profit website. Its easy and fast, although not always entirely intuitive to everyone. I'm not sure how well it would scale to a larger project though.
sevilo
I was introduced to Trello by a friend during a 48 hour hackathon, it worked well at the time as we had a lot of tasks from design, implementation to project submission. Sounds like you're using Trello under a professional software engineering context? (correct me if I'm wrong)

But from times I have these moments where I'm just discussing a school project with my team, the project is probably due within the next 2 days or so. And we'll say let's write down the list of stuff we need to get done and each person take something. Given that the todo list will be discarded after a day or two, it feels somewhat like hassle to set things up on Trello and ask everyone to sign up/sign in; Especially when the list of tasks isn't big, and the team size is also very small (3-4 people).

GFischer
For small teams, Trello is awesome.

It's not a replacement for other tools in a medium to large size project, though.

So far, all answers point to Trello :)

sevilo
Maybe it's just me that finds Trello's interface complex then :p

do you also use Trello for non-soft/engineering related projects?

GFischer
Yes, I used it once, to organize our team for the MBA business plan.

But I don't use it for everyday life, I should try to find another todo app for that :)

Edit: it seems your projects are in a very tight timeframe (2 days), I don't think it's good for that. I've used it in months-long projects.

sevilo
yes, what I'm curious about is how people do todo-lists for team discussions/projects with short time frames that span for a few days to a week.

Sometimes we also just write todos on a shared document, or a short list in a chat, that often results in the list being forgotten or lost. Not sure if anyone runs into the same problem?

personally I really like doodle poll's style of doing things, it's quick to setup, no login required - it's almost assumed that participants are being honest and wouldn't edit other people's responses, and it takes less than a couple of minutes to give a response. But a major difference between a poll and a todo-list lies in that, a poll is expected to be ignored by participants once they gave their responses; but a todo-list expects participants to constantly keep and eye on the team's progress.