[neya]

>“Asana’s mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.“

I worked in many companies previously where Asana was used. I can tell you with sheer confidence, at no point did we feel the "help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly." part. Not once, not ever.

Every time we used it, the project managers would love it for the first two weeks and they would simply revert back to email/slack for reminding teams of deadlines or deliverables.

But you know what REALLY helped out the most? Unsexy Excel sheets combined with regular checkin meetings. We would have ONE meeting every Monday morning where we would review our excel sheet for everyone's progress, updates and deliverables.

Heck, I think even Trello works much better than the god awful interface that Asana has. But, Asana has never worked for any of the teams I've worked with in the past, irrespective of the company size. Maybe that's just me.

[mastazi]

I tried Asana twice, first to coordinate a couple of "weekend projects" with some other devs, then at work with a larger team. In both cases I have found it very underwhelming compared to other products I used (Atlassian Jira, MS Planner). My last experience was that every time I logged in Asana, I would be redirected to an empty project/team, and there was no way to change that default behaviour (if I remember well it was because my email was on a different domain than the rest of the team, and Asana creates teams based on the email address' domain). I disliked it so much that I ended up asking my manager to change product, to which he agreed.

[lobster_johnson]

Same here. We quickly grew to hate Asana, and eventually switched to Trello, then ClubHouse, but I'm personally pretty fed up with these tools. In the end, they become bottomless buckets of stagnating information. We don't need charts or burn rates or estimates.

For projects (like a big new feature with a clear set of tasks), a Google Docs document or spreadsheet works just as well, and usually it's best to have this stuff in the project manager's hands, and not let people mess with it individually.

That said, there's parts of the process that don't have an obvious place. A typical example is a customer issue that arises and needs input and coordination between multiple people, including devs and salespeople and the customer themselves, perhaps including some files that need to be shared. Email is so terrible at this, since adding new people late to the conversation don't let them easily see the chronology, and no email client has yet to make conversations (which sloppy top quoting and huge corporate signatures) readable. A group direct message on Slack, perhaps? I'm thinking Slack is a little too real-time and chaotic. Maybe a private Discourse install?

Managing one's personal queue of tasks (which don't necessarily map to the project's tasks, they could be things like "refactor X") is where I personally seek a better tool. A Markdown file really isn't sufficient. Apple's Reminders app is terrible. Evernote is not good at it. I've yet to find something good.

[cr__]

Can’t recommend OmniFocus (https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus) enough. Has kept me sane the last couple of years.

[lobster_johnson]

Never liked it. Omni's apps are generally cluttered, over-complicated and full of bad UX. No iCloud support, clunky iOS app, everything feels like it's 2006 again.

I like Things — both Mac and iOS apps have good UX — but it lacks some essential features, the most critical of which is the ability to add files to tasks. It's an absolutely must-have for development tasks. Its limited notational support (just a tiny, cramped text field) also makes it less useful for anything except basic personal reminders.

The lack of file support also makes Things less useful for other things, such as doing research into things to buy (new sofa, that kind of thing) or places to go. I use Evernote for this, but it's also a terrible app.

[clarkdave]

Have you tried Bear - http://www.bear-writer.com - for notes? I've found it far more pleasant than Evernote, although it's Mac + iOS only (no web).

[lobster_johnson]

I have tried Bear, thanks. It's not good enough for me.

For one, it's tied to Markdown, which I find distracting to work with, especially on mobile. (I don't understand the tech community's current obsession with Markdown; it's fine for documentation or Github comments and so on where there's a clear workflow separation between writing and publishing, but for personal tasks? Ugh.)

Bear also makes the same mistake with regards to files that Evernote (and every other note-taking app for that matter) does, which is to only display them inline. If I dump in a bucketload of images into a note, they're all display as huge images that need to be resized. Actually, Bear doesn't support resizing images at all, all you can do is switch between displaying them full, and as thumbnail (just like Apple's Notes), which is even worse. Evernote's image editing/annotation mode is great, Bear doesn't have anything like that.

No folder support. Evernote is also bad here, but it does allow you create "notebooks" and to "stack" notebooks inside each other.

I like Bear's modern UI much more than Evernote's, but a note-taking app would have to be considerably better than Evernote for me to switch everything over, and it's unfortunately not.

Sorry about the rant, talking about note-taking apps fires me up. :-)

[aymeric]

Check https://weekplan.net it shines for individual use.

Disclaimer: I am the founder.

[lobster_johnson]

Completely irrelevant to this discussion, sorry.

[favadi]

Fron my experience, the process is more important than the tool.

[tnolet]

That’s just a slogan from the cookie cutter startup template. Seems like hyperbole is still needed in mission statements.