This little post is really about one particular 37Signals product, Backpack, but I figured I’d give it an impressive title as we actually use a few of their products to run core parts of our business. Honestly, I don’t know how’d we’d survive without them.
But Backpack!? We’ve just now started using it and it’s been fan-frickin-tastic.
We’ve got a small team doing lots and lots of work. Things like schedules, internal communication, workload reporing and the like have always been a bit of a problem, mainly with distraction. There is a need, mostly by me, to know what people are working on and what they’re getting done so I can properly resource them. There is also a need for everyone else to stay in touch without constantly badgering.
We’ve tried all sorts of ways to keep us in sync:
- Weekly standup meetings. Too damn time-consuming and often not worth the time and/or effort.
- Obsessively detailed timekeeping. Distracting and hard to remember to do. Also often inaccurate.
- Weekly workload reports. These worked alright, but didn’t usually provide enough detail.
- Campfire chats. Another great 37signals product, but way to “in your face” for our needs.
- Etc.
Enter Backpack’s Journal
Then, about a month ago I read about Backpack’s new Journal feature. It seemed very interesting and after about a week of playing with it, I decided to get the rest of the team to try it out. Now we’ve got an amazing status tool (ala Twitter) AND an ongoing record of what everyone has an is working on. I find this really useful in planning my resources and projects. It’s also got all sorts of side benefits; keeping the team in touch in a low-noise way, reducing distraction by allowing people to announce that they’re busy. “Hey don’t bug me! I’m heads-down!!”
So, the Journal was the gateway, but there are lots of other great features.
The Shared Calendar
We didn’t replace ALL of our calendaring needs with Backpack’s shared calendar, but it greatly simplified scheduling PTO, client meetings and events. That stuff was a MESS before and now it’s all nice, clean and sparkly. That alone would have been worth the price.
The Rest
The team is making great use of the pages and their lists, etc. I’ve taken to recording how I do EVERYTHING around the office there (unless it’s shared info, we use Writeboards in Basecamp for that, but it could do.) An aside, business owners, this is something that’s helped me immensely.
If you find yourself constantly re-learning how to do things (ship a package, new employee paperwork, etc.) record it somewhere, like Backpack, and thank yourself later.
So, yeah, Backpack makes a great back-up brain. Oh, and it’s got reminders. Can I tell you how awesome that is? Nick forgets. Yeah, all the time. It’s so nice to be able to set reminders for him.
Backpack makes a very affordable and powerful intranet-like tool. I’m so happy we started using it. Kudos to the guys over at 37Signals.
Since my only use for Basecamp is project and task scheduling, this post has left me wondering if Backpack is a smarter solution. Do you still use Basecamp for project management?
Interesting, but I wonder how you combat the (as I understand it) 100 entry cap on the Journal? (plus I miss the ability to edit entries or even comment on past entries) I find Backpack very useful, especially the reminders, but I’m often forced to use Google Calendars (which import nicely) for people who are not part of my account, but are still sharing. Additional issues are the Writeboards which are cool, but need per user permissions in my opinion.
All in all, Backpack has been excellent though and keeps getting better and better.
@Kel
The 100 word limit doesn’t get in our way. Normally they’re pretty brief like “did so and so for client”, “researched javascript… what is this language I’ve heard so much about?”, or “fired kenny”.
From an employee’s perspective. It lets me reassess how I spend my time and my day because I can see what I’ve been doing. It’s also great for finding out who is where if you need them.
Geof - we still use Basecamp, and love it, for most project management. Honestly, for us anyway, we couldn’t replace it with Backpack. We use them in vastly different ways. However, what we could do, if it wasn’t a load of work (heh) is move most of our internal stuff over to Backpack.
Right now we’ve kinda got our internal communication and collaboration in both places, but, honestly, it’s not all that confusing as we’ve kind of compartmentalized what we’re doing with each.
Not sure if that’s a helpful answer - I guess it depends on what you are using it for. I’d certainly suggest checking Backpack out!
Hey Keith! So glad to hear you’re finding Backpack — especially the Journal — useful. Keep us in the loop as you use it more and more.
I like the 37 signals apps, but it became tiresome to use backpack for one thing, basecamp for another, and highrise for yet another. I get their whole ‘make simple apps’ thing but I wish they integrated them better for people with the need. Who knows, mayhaps I’m missing something here.