In the post:

01:35 - Some names in management software

05:04 - The considerations behind dapulse

06:42 - How it works with teams

10:52 - When used for task management…

13:22 - dapulse in the coaching field

16:05 - Go simple or complex?

16:55 - Value for e-commerce companies

20:03 - Coming very soon…

21:24 - What should you focus on?

24:29 - The post-travel inbox nightmare

28:50 - How the software came about

32:39 - Common mistakes to avoid

38:33 - Summing things up

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, I'm speaking with Matthew Burns from

http://lnx2.co/2Xe" rel="noopener noreferrer">dapulse.com, and we're talking about project management, and task management, and some of the tools involved in that. So I'd like to welcome to the call Matthew.

Matthew: Thank you so much, James, very happy to be here.

James: Well, it's great to have you here, and it's a topic that is often discussed in our community. Most people listening to this podcast have their own business, or are still running their own business and working for someone else, somewhere in one of those two buckets. And one of the things that happens as they grow their own business is firstly, they find they need to manage themselves better, so that whole self effectiveness is a topic that comes up a lot for us. And the second thing is inevitably, you just get to a certain point where you can't go much further unless you hire a team, and you start having people coordinate with you, with your business.

Some names in project and task management

So they're two of the major areas where I see this tools topic pop up. And we hear a lot of names coming up all the time, and no doubt you'd be familiar with most of them. Then you're with dapulse, which is another tool that's in the mix there. So some examples, in our business over the last 10 years, we would have tried a lot of different systems. We've used everything from Basecamp, which is a pretty popular tool, and Teamwork, Trello, which seems by far and away the most popular one we hear about. And we haven't tried, but we're familiar with Podio, and we've tried Wrike, and of course Google Docs is a mainstay in the back of our system there.

And then as a task management, and these things are sort of slightly separate, project management and task management, I've tried lots of different tools there, from the Reminders app in the Apple, to just notes, to Google Docs, to pieces of paper, Post-it notes, whiteboards. And it really fascinates me how there's so many different tools, but I've never really found many that seem to naturally gel with the way that humans work. Almost all of them tend to be a place where stuff gets dumped, and then we're still doing what we're going to do anyway, and then we go and retrospectively look at the tool to see what we did and then move the blocks around.

And in some cases, one of the most incredible discoveries I made with our team, in the early days, we were using Basecamp, the team would go and update Basecamp, and then simultaneously, they were running a Google document in the background, where they were actually coordinating things. And then I asked them, "Why are you updating Basecamp if you're using Google?" They said, "Oh, that's for you, boss.