Getting Organized: We Love Ticky Boxes

Everyone knows the best way to stay organized during the holiday season is to make lists. Lots and lots of lists. (OCD? What OCD?) We’ve got lists for home, lists for work…sometimes we’ve even got lists that keep track of our lists. There’s nothing wrong with that. Why, what have you heard?

One of the most satisfying thing about lists, of course, is being able to cross off finished items, and the ultimate evolution of crossing things off is the ticky box. We admit it: we love to tick.

With that in mind, we thought we’d test out some different applications and methods for keeping track of things online – both for the company and for our personal lives (which, lets face it, could use some organization). The three we tested were: a wiki, hosted on our own server; Goplan; and Backpack.

We signed up for a bunch of hosted wikis before installing our own. Some had features we liked, but all had features we didn’t, and eventually we decided it would be a good learning experience to set one up from scratch. We went with MediaWiki, the same back-end that runs Wikipedia. The installation was much easier than we expected; just a little databasing and some configuring and viola.

The learning curve for actually using the wiki was a lot steeper; it uses a sort of proprietary code which limits its functionality, and although we’ve overridden it in places, it’s still kind of a pain to update on the fly. Also: no ticky boxes. We need our ticky boxes! We tried working without them, but it’s just not the same. The lists we put up got updated once and have sat, stagnant, for the past few months.

On the other hand, we found that for things like Christmas lists, (static) link collections and biographies, the wiki is ideal. We’ve added pages for each of us and included picture links for our families, who know our shipping address but are looking for a little inspiration, and have embedded copies of our Google calendar so that anyone who visits can see what we’re up to. We’re in the process of creating link lists to compile all of our various online identities in one place. The wiki is taking off, just in a different direction from what we first envisioned. How much fun is that?

Verdict: great for what it’s great for, but not a to-do list.

We got invited to the Goplan private beta a few months ago. Goplan is a project management service (a la Basecamp) from the folks at Webreakstuff. Although it touts itself as a perfect place to manage everything from party planning to home finances, our first impression was that it would be much more useful for keeping track of business projects than personal projects. We started tracking the behind-the-scenes stuff we needed to do in order to get the business going.

Unlike other project tracking applications, Goplan is relatively bloat-free, which is perfect for a small business like us. We love the smooth interface and the ease of updating; new projects are a snap to create. Also, they’ve just released a developer API, and we’re excited to see what this could offer in the future.

There are some bugs, however, which don’t delight us. These include weird text formatting (it claims to support Textile but doesn’t actually) and an RSS feed which isn’t customizable. The RSS issue is a big one: the feed reports every little change, which makes it functionally useless; after skipping past another “task opened” and “task closed” it’s too easy to miss an actual milestone (as we’ve done several times). These are easy to forgive in a beta. Less easy to forgive? Temperamental ticky boxes. Yes, you heard right. Sometimes the subcategory ticky boxes do not properly tick. Our hearts are still healing from the trauma.

Verdict: Promising, but more business-oriented than personal.

Which brings us to Backpack. (Full disclosure: if you sign up with Backpack using the links in this article, we will get a small amount of account credit. They’re not giving us kickbacks; it’s just an affiliate program. But we will smile like monkeys and possibly do a little dance if credit appears on our account, and isn’t that worth it?) We decided to try it out, since the bottom-tier account is free. Within five days we had upgraded to a paid account so that we could add more pages. And we needed them, since we quickly decided to use Backpack for, you know, everything. We’ve got lists of things we need for the office, lists of ideas for future posts (we actually wrote this post on Backpack’s writeboard), and lists of client-related tasks. But it’s not all business: we used Backpack to keep track of the myriad accessories needed to travel with a toddler when we took our recent vacation.

Backpack’s interface is deceptively simple; the real power is in the application’s flexibility and lack of unnecessary bells and whistles. We can create one list for each page or many; lists and items can be reordered and edited painlessly, and the ticky boxes – oh, the ticky boxes.

In addition to all that, there are writeboards, image collections, notes areas and file uploads, and pages can be shared with individual people or made public with the click of a button.

Everything works exactly as it should. It’s easy to overlook just how much the application is actually doing because it does it so elegantly.

Verdict: We heart Backpack.

Technorati Tags: backpack, basecamp, goplan, mediawiki, wiki, lists, ticky boxes