We also tend to execute daily on the concept of "Done is Better than Best." We would certainly look into some kind of self hosted option if/when we need to set up our own wiki. Hackpad was simply faster and "done."
For each area of the business we have two boards: planning and current. The planning board gets pretty messy, and is the place where we capture all the ideas that come to mind, comments and input are added to help prioritize those ideas as a must-get-to-next-week, or someday-this-would-be-nice. And the current board is the chunk of cards we are committing to getting done this week "no matter what". So, the current board stays pretty clean, and people work real hard to get everything cleared out of there each week, because then we can go to the planning board and grab some of the other high-priority things and check them off.
It isn't perfect, but it does keep us making forward progress. And sometimes those things that just don't ever make it to the current board are things that don't really need to get done.
Where I was at we had a planning board and that was fine for incoming work. Tasks that could be done within a couple of days were fine as well; we did have a sort of 'current' board. The difficulty was only really for long running tasks that took more than a week.
From the way you are describing it typically the current board was emptied each week? New tasks were only brought in at the beginning of the week?
Did you break down larger tasks into chunks that could be handled within one week? If so, how did you track progress within multi-month projects if they were broken down into small pieces?
I was trying to decide whether to add, "and you won't believe what happens next!!?!" to the end. But, I decided to keep it simple.
I certainly don't mean to be misleading. But, it definitely feels as extreme as completely banning email. At least for our team, all our past experience with hating email at a company was tied to internal email culture and the inability to actually do work.
I answered something similar generally below to exelius. But, to answer a few of your specific examples:
- 90% of customer conversations occur via Intercom.io our hello@primellop address and all reply-to’s point there. And, generally the other 10% that come directly to me where it makes sense to have the rest of the team available to help, get cc’d into hello@ in my response.
- currently all our recruiting is inbound (mostly through angel.co) and I follow up with people there to schedule a call. Certainly some amount of external email around that.
- on the sales front we are definitely using email. Happy to play in their world and make it easy for them. But, again, most next actions and internal collaboration/communication moves to trello/hackpad/relateIQ
- all the services we use obviously send a bunch of email, that we sometimes need to respond to. But all of that is in a group email that most of us can dig through if we need to.
And, FWIW, I’ve had the opposite experience with email. I can handle the external communication OK… it’s the mess of internal email that has caused the most headaches.
Good point. And we do still use email for external communication. But, even on those messages that then require internal communication and decision making or any next-actions, we shift the communication over to slack/trello/hackpad to get the work done and then reply back externally.
Slack is the main “channel” for all of that type of information. And/but, I would say, 80% of the time, it is a link to a longer post in hackpad with more details, and a request for comment.
