The most popular To-Do List and the Paperless Office
In the past weeks topic digitalization has massively gained traction where thousands of developers in hundreds of project teams are organizing their project plans, milestones and - certainly - tasks. But we were very surprised when we found that the most popular To-Do List used by the most teams is ... "Post-It" (**paper** based) notes!? And, ... guess what! We too!
So, where the initial main goal of digitalization was (and is) to eliminate or (at least) greatly reduce the use of paper in the office - predictive already mentioned in an article in Business Week in 1975 - the use of "Post-It" (**paper** based) notes is not real a supporting way to reach it.
Beside that, the "multi-user" (when used in project teams) "operation" and "management" of that type of "To-Do List" is not really a reliable or effective strategy of organizing things no matter if only one person must get organized or a whole team.
Why the hell— A wondering Project Manager
do we use those
"Post-It" notes for that?
We discussed that in our team for a long time and it seems that there is no simple answer to that question. But the most often given statement was: "It's simple and fast!".
Surprisingly nearly every digital solution for storing, organizing and managing tasks and to-do's is - certainly - faster than those "paper tools", ... but ... !? Well, having those at hand on the desk and writing burgeoning to-do's or don't-forget's on it and put them on a board is faster - if viewing the whole flow - and - much more important - we are used to!
The conclusion is, that we do (yat another time) have to change our habits to avoid this!
For sure this will only work if the new/alternate approach will be as simple as possible and (at least nearly) without an additional cost of time.
Seeing this we changed one big thing in our development strategy: Where we started with only wanting to implement ways to collect tasks and to-do's providing them unified at one single point we now will additionally give the possibility to manage "local" (in KeepOn.Today) tasks and to-do's as well. This will serve as a base for additional tools any ways to fast and simple capture own tasks and to-do's on the fly - like we all do with those "Post-It" notes.
One first tool we be the use of special E-Mail addresses which could be used to send tasks and to-do's to the lists stored on KeepOn.Today out of every E-Mail client available. But we definitely encourage you to tell us your thoughts on how things could be easily put into the right place for you on KeepOn.Today.