If you often find yourself wishing Basecamp offered this or that feature, consider Mike Hargreaves point of view. He recently posted to the Basecamp forum that the constraints of Basecamp have actually made his team better project managers. And he even includes an Einstein quote to make his point.
I (too frequently) find myself wishing Basecamp had some particular feature only to realise that if we’d been working properly or more effectively in the first place then Basecamp’s feature set would be spot on, and I wouldn’t even be thinking about the feature.1) I recently had to enter months and months worth of timekeeping entries, and could have requested a bunch of features, e.g., make the date drop down lists default to the last-used day, not to today’s date. In practice, though, the pain attached to working adding entries retrospectively helps drive the behaviour you’d prefer to see, namely keeping track of your time each day.
2) We’re currently dealing with a lot late milestones in our projects, so I’m tempted to support feature requests asking for planned v. actual milestones. In theory, it sounds like a good idea; in practice though, I’m not sure it helps us get the job done. (Albert Einstein: In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, theory and practice are different.) The better practice has been using the late milestone to spark communication with the client—the earlier the better—then just shift the milestone once we get agreement on the new date...
Failing to take personal responsibility may be a big part of the problem—not getting things done in a timely fashion—and the Basecamp constraint—manually assigning or taking responsibility for a work item—might just help you solve that problem.
It's great to hear one of our customers talking about the benefits that can be found by embracing constraints. In our view, constraints are often advantages in disguise.
