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Aug5

Uses of Stacks: “Here Comes the Bride”

For all of my three years at Imulus, I have always known the joy that is Stacks. I’ve seen it as a glimmer in George’s eye to the project management powerhouse it is today. Recently (or not so recently) I have taken on the arduous task of… planning a wedding (cue ominous music and lightning). Knowing my typical knee-jerk reaction to procrastinate and then forgetting what I needed to do in the first place, I opted to use Stacks for personal use.

The Good

Like so many brides-to-be before me, I have been using The Knot to stay on track with my wedding to-dos. The Knot does a fantastic job of divvying out to-do’s based on your time-line. Unfortunately because there have been so many brides-to-be who enjoy the usage of this site, it has become bloated with ads, banners, links, animated gifs, you call it, they have it. Furthermore, sometimes the to-do’s don’t apply to me (i.e. no videographer).

So instead of digging around in the links and ads of The Knot, my “wedding planner” populates Stacks with the to-dos. This is helpful when there are tasks specific to the bride or groom or maid of honor etc. Furthermore, if the to-do has any other information, I can add notes in the details and I can adjust the urgency of each task.

The Bad

Thaaat's embarrassing
I mentioned my procrastination, right? It’s a wonder I completed this blog at all. Anyway, one problem I encountered is that unlike my thorough use of Stacks at work, I have a tendency to ignore tasks in my wedding stack list. Because each task is something I need to complete by the end of the month, I usually ignore it till I get nagged about it. Sort of defeats the purpose of Stacks. However, I chalk that up to user error.

Another problem I encountered is my wedding planner is no project manager. Each month a task dump occurs and each task isn’t carefully scoped out giving it the correct due date, actionable date and details within the task. Stacks isn’t utilized to it’s full potential. It becomes a to-do checklist for whenever I get around to it.

The Conclusion

Being the sexy app that it is, Stacks is an extremely powerful project management tool. I’m glad I have the opportunity to use it for my wedding so I don’t have a random freak out that I am forgetting to do something. However, it is becoming a glorified to-do list. There is nothing wrong with this, I just know what Stacks is really capable of. So thanks, Stacks, for helping remind this procrastinator that she is continuing to procrastinate, but will get around to it eventually.

posted in: Stacks, opinion, project management, review, tools, usability

This post was published on Thursday, August 5, 2010 at 3:59 pm

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Comments

1

George

December 10, 2010 at 5:45 pm

“Because each task is something I need to complete by the end of the month, I usually ignore it till I get nagged about it. Sort of defeats the purpose of Stacks. However, I chalk that up to user error.”

NO! It’s not user error, it’s the way people are – and Stacks should accommodate it.
This is exactly what is needed in today’s work environment: nagging and escalation! I am looking for an app like Stacks that has an “escalation” factor. Tasks should be able to become more important over time.
Let’s say I am being productive on a strategic task and get interrupted by a low-priority request that has to get done within two weeks or it misses product shipment and I look bad. I want to enter it just like Stacks shows, but with low priority for the first week and then higher priorities over the next week. I have about 2 dozen tasks on my white board and it would be great to have the older ones float to the top over time.
Also, if I have 15 minutes and want to use it productively, I need to be able to search for projects that I have flagged as either taking 15 minutes or less, or being able to be done in short chunks.

And while I’m at it, I would really like to be able to see a full screen display of your Stacks with names on each item – kind of like a horizontal bar chart with each bar being the duration of the task. High priority bars at the top of the screen, and lower priorities as you move down. In one glance I could see what’s hot and where I should be devoting my time today.

To summarize, new task properties:
Escalating priority over time
Basic unit of productivity (minutes, hours)
Full screen chart of Stack items

Good stuff!
George

2

Bruce

January 5, 2011 at 1:37 pm

George, great comment here. An escalation of task priority over time is a good idea, the question is how many people would use it?

The current set up would be to make the task actionable on the current day and due in two weeks. You see it on your list of “needs to be completed” every day, if you are ignoring that list because the due date is far away, that’s on you. Perhaps Stacks could accommodate for this by dividing the amount of time left before the task is due and then escalating the urgency of the task. It’ll be something that we’ll have to consider.