I am trying to pick a project management software to recommend for general adoption at MIT FutureTech.
I am biased towards Asana but want to check what other people in the community are using and hear experiences/suggestions before I commit.
Apologies if this question seems self-indulgent and of narrow interest.
I imagine that choosing project management software for research groups/projects is a relatively common challenge for groups in the EA community.
I therefore hope that this discussion may help others in similar situations now and in the future.
You can submit anonymous feedback here if you fear repercussions.[1] I will post any anonymous feedback I get in the comments (if it seems sensible/reasonable etc).
Tagging a few people who I think might have good answers/insights:
@Peter Wildeford @david_reinstein @Davidmanheim @Vael Gates @David_Moss @John G. Halstead @HaydnBelfield
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For anyone wondering why some people might be slow to comment: Asana is widely used in the EA community and Dustin Moskovitz, the founder, is the largest funder of EA projects.
Just published this new writeup in our post sequence: How to Get More Important Things Done with the Eisenhower [Effort] Matrix—Inside the Mind of an Aspiring Charity Entrepreneur [Follow Along] #2 — EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org)
In short, after reading through Charity Entrepreneurship’s handbook, I tried to implement CE’s adapted Eisenhower Matrix on a few of the popular task/project management software.
You can see the Eisenhower Effort Matrix in action in both ClickUp and Notion, as well as my personal usage tips.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to implement the EEM on Asana.
Hope this helps.
(Commenting here in addition to your post)
Thanks for this! I appreciate the write-up. Just wanted to quickly share that tried the EEM but eventually moved to a ‘Must, Should, Could’ system like here. I use this on Google Tasks and other task management systems. Depending on the system I use a number or title to indicate the class of task. So far it has worked well for me. Of course different things will work for different people!
I like Notion quite a lot.
It looks very pretty and is very well-known, does most core “make an org go well” stuff in one place, doesn’t feel bloated or frustrating to work with and integrates pretty well with other software.
If you have a small enough team, I think a combination of google sheets, google docs, and todoist works well.
Asana is quite good, though I found some aspects of it annoying. I found todoist more intuitive on basic task prioritisation
I’m still in the early stages of this. We started with Airtable but wanted something more built for purpose.
We next started with Asana but it seemed to have too much overhead, I didn’t like the default formatting, and it didn’t seem easy to adjust things (like the names of different statuses).
We’re now trying Clickup and so far it’s looking good. Also the price seems good, and it seems to be very useable as an internal knowledge base as well.
I highly recommend Asana. I have used a few different options in my personal life, including Todoist, and like Asana better than them.
If FutureTech is going to be a Notion shop, then I would use Notion for task tracking as well. But if not, then I think your users will find Asana easier to grok.
We use Asana at Rethink Priorities