Why do you dislike your task / project management apps?

Eddie H.
15 replies
This is a generalization of course. But do a quick Google search on this topic and you'll see a bunch of articles on this topic with a number of reasons why. I'd like to know your personal issues with task management apps. What type of work do you do and where do these apps help vs. get in the way?

Replies

Sumit Datta [dwata] 👋
Switch to Clubhouse and you will surely love it. There are a couple really good apps like that and after using Trello, Asana, JIRA and many other apps professionally and personally, I think Clubhouse is much better.
Marian Lucas
@sumitdatta Curious why you think Clubhouse is better? Also would love to hear your what it is that could be improved with these task or project management apps.
Sumit Datta [dwata] 👋
@produkhelt Hello Marian, I think me stating why I like it will not be beneficial. PM tools are too tightly coupled with your personal processes. So I suggest you to try it out. With that in mind, these are a couple things I can share: - A much faster and better UX - Compelling features in free offering - Hierarchy of Epic, Story, etc. available, which is not in Trello for example - Kanban and Scrum supported - Great overview with Milestones - Easier to get started as they make an effort to tame the beast with nice UI
Arseniy
I work as a project manager. I'm a fan: -I like the ease of assigning responsibility for tasks to individuals, and having this be transparent during a project. -Not a fan of email chains with documents, find it much easier to keep them and comments regarding them in one place. -Depending on the PM tool you choose, I like the customizability of notifications for different task types. I partial to Telegram for messaging, and the PM tool I use, WEEEK (weeek.net), allows me to set some types tasks to have notifications as emails and some as telegram messages. -Again depending on the one you choose you may or may not have this functionality, I like setting up (Kanban) boards, which can be edited by the team, moreover some PM systems allow for automating the executor of a task as it moves along the board. It's nice when you don't have to send emails or have a long slack chat changing the person responsible when, for example, a bit of code get written, then debugged, then made live. To summarise, IMHO: PM tools are useful because they allows one to keep better control over and transparency within projects, simplifying for collaborative work, and enabling a product roadmap to exist in more than one file. They can be bad if they involve too much faff, have a steep learning curve, and aren't fully adopted by the team.
Marian Lucas
Interesting question, even tho you are not the first one to ask. I have seen you are building a product that might or might not solve this issue. Personal issues: I spend more time learning, or managing tasks than actually making progress. Products should be like a helping hand, a super expensive assistant that can actually help you being more structured, spending time on valuable work and discovering challenges before they appear. Usually most products try too much to solve everything, and get cluttered, hard to navigate and unpleasant to use. If the app is not deeply integrated with G-suite in the future big enterprises will not start to use it.
Abe Winter
1. a lot of them are slow to navigate. if UX forces me to click into something to read it, and clicking takes 500ms, my flow is already broken 2. they're bad at 'graph-structured tasks'. So like establishing blockers or order of work. they're also bad at linearizing graphs, i.e. telling me what the next 5 things on my agenda are. 3. they're bad at zooming into complexity. most of these tools only have reasonable UX for flat structures. 4. they integrate badly with specs; and vice versa, unless I know the product spec I won't understand the tickets. should have a subset of domain-specific prototyping tools (figma, for example, or one of those AWS architecture diagramers) to represent the end state. 5. they're bad at estimation and progress tracking. sure I seem to be 50% done, but I've also added a bunch of work recently. some tools try to capture this as velocity but I call bullshit. I get that estimation is high-uncertainty -- fine, show me the uncertainty.
Sumit Datta [dwata] 👋
@abewinter I highly recommend Clubhouse - they sell "speed" as a feature. And I was really surprised they deliver way better than the competition.
Palakondarayudu Uppu
I haven't found any time saver for me in all in one package. Slow and boring UI and often sometimes useless features or overly done ui to confuse ppl. I mean see FB, insta like apps, do we need a training session to use them? And haters say that, they have only few modules, I don't care they are making more profit than all of these apps even they have 2 or 3 modules. Suggest me one best tools with low ui and amazingly fast one which runs on browser.
David Budimir
My issue has always been with task management apps for teams and that they try to do too much. Specifically, the way that tasks are usually rolled up into projects and deadlines with no context for everything else going on. Here are the few things I've noticed that modern project management apps don't do a great job addressing. 1. In reality, things never go according to plan. So, when urgent requests come in out of the blue (as they always do) it’s not clear how other priorities are being affected. 2. People usually have their own way of managing their week. I’ve never seen a collaborative system that’s light-weight enough that an individual doesn't have to completely change their existing methods of staying organized. 3. A manager might know what everyone is working on, but there isn’t enough transparency between teammates. 4. Most team management apps are based around “projects” but people realistically work week-to-week. You never really have a good sense of what’s actually getting done by Friday afternoon. 5. There’s not always a consensus on what the most important tasks are. We built Squad😂 (squad.lol) to address these issues for small teams. Hope to bring it to Product Hunt soon.
Abdel Cadel
I learnt more from the apps
Jason Diller
Asana because: -now, upcoming, later If you know, you know...
Ryan Haber
We use Trello, which is great for some things. An issue I have with it, as a manager, is that while it's good for visualizing work in progress (WIP), it's really bad for laying out longer term timelines and roadmaps. There are plugins, but making it all work with plugins gets more and more fiddly. Also, the boards and cards can get overloaded with information and make it very hard to read at a glance. That said, I really do like a lot of the integrations and use a number of them. One thing that I really do like about Trello is how easy it is to put all relevant information for a particular thing into a particular card, and have user story numbers, UX mockups, google drive links, etc., all at your fingertips. Also, the markdown (or semi-markdown) formatting ftw. I really like Asana for core project management for a team - it seamlessly switches views between individuals' or teams' kanbans and timelines and to-do lists.
Ludmila Borosova
That's a very complex question. I work many freelancing jobs (photography, copywriting, marketing etc.) & I prefer this combination: - I absolutely LOVE "Things 3" that I just discovered recently. I always got demotivated and confused using Todoist and I couldn't see why. With Things 3, I can assign a deadline to my task (e.g. 20.10.2020) but I can put it to my 12.10.2020 to-do list. When a task isn't done on that day, it just moves to another. No red flashing lights about how you didn't manage to do it on time. It also enables me to distinguish between "Today" tasks (which I consider work related) and "Evening" tasks (such as watering my plants). Having these two visually divided is huge for proper productivity. Reminders and clean minimalistic design are big pluses as well. - For storing my necessary information such as work hours, various texts or personal checklists I use Notion. I understand the appeal of it and I like it visually, but the slowness demotivates me to use it sometimes. - For work when I need to discuss graphics & texts (content plan) in a small team I use Trello. It is straightforward (if the content is being done, approved or scheduled), it enables you to assign dates (and therefore see it planned out in the calendar), and you can also preview the visuals right away.
Sanaz Bidad
Although some people dislike project management for small & large businesses,Project management software is among the most useful tools that can help companies in becoming as competitive as possible and set you apart from the rest of the industry.