Social Signals uses Basecamp and GTD for project management and workflow

Project management and workflow with Basecamp is Alexandra Samuel's extremely detailed look at how Social Signals uses Basecamp for managing its projects. (Social Signals helps sites build communities with active participants.) It's especially worth a look if you're searching for ideas on how use Basecamp as part of GTD.

Some noteworthy bits from the writeup:

• They post a welcome message to Basecamp that explains how to use the site. (Inspired by VentureMarketing's Basecamp Welcome PDF and their Basecamp client jumpstart.)
• They present an overview of Basecamp at an early client meeting.
• When clients e-mail them outside of Basecamp, they redirect them back to the Basecamp site, often by copying-and-pasting their messages into Basecamp.
• They use messages for communications that require an action or response. This includes: communications with clients and client updates, client requests (bug tracking, questions, etc.), and internal discussions of how to handle tasks (marking these discussions private so they aren't visible to client).

Editing our message titles to reflect the status of each message gives us an at-a-glance view of which client issues have been addressed, and which need to be reviewed for action items.



• They use writeboards for communications that are FYI only (though we may use messages to notify each other of a new writeboard).
• They use task lists for items that require a "next action" (in GTD terms). Each list corresponds to a set of related tasks. This reflects the GTD notion of grouping tasks by "contexts" or as "projects" consisting of multiple tasks.

We keep our to-do lists organized alphabetically; when we decide to prioritize a specific set of tasks as the next focus for our work, we move that to-do list to the top of the page and mark it "P1: to-do list name" (as in "priority 1").



• Writeboards are used as their long-term storage area and collaboration space.

Read the whole post for more details and screenshots.

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.