One of the unique qualities of Intervals, our web-based project management tool, is that we are far more involved in it than your typical software company. At Pelago, we built Intervals out of a need to utilize better workflow management before realizing it could be useful to other creatives and developers. And we continue to use Intervals to manage client projects and track the development of Intervals itself.
What this all means is that we are one of the heaviest users of Intervals and that is good for our customers. Why? Because we’ve encountered just about every productivity scenario imaginable and have worked out a solution to it. The Intervals tool you are using is not just a software application, it’s a resource of small business expertise, from an agency that has been managing projects for a very long time (9 years, which in Internet years, is something like 36 years).
We’ve chosen to make an example of ourselves
We have so much of our own company’s data in Intervals, we are the worst-case scenario. We know what it’s like to have too many projects going on at once. We now how frustrating it can be to track time when you are getting bounced from project to project. And we know the cruelty of being delegated 100+ tasks at any given moment. We try to make Intervals successful at managing these information overload scenarios, which are more typical than you may think, so that managing the smaller workloads is a no-brainer.
Filters help you see things from different perspectives
One practical solution we’ve come up with to handle managing too many projects is the saved filter. Both the task list and home calendar views can be saved for faster retrieval later. For example, you might save a task list showing all open tasks for a given project, and another that shows all tasks open to you in general. When you want to focus on a particular project you just have to load the saved view and all of your tasks will be listed for you. Saved filters make it really easy to change work modes.
Which brings me to my next point: changing hats
Intervals is flexible enough that customers find themselves using it in two ways: managing projects and getting things done. Our own company is rigged in a similar fashion. It is the inescapable nature of a small business that its employees must manage projects and do the actual work, often doing both at the same time. From the beginning, the Intervals interface has had to address both audiences, and has addressed both successfully.
Whatever season of life you may find your small business in, Intervals has addressed the challenges and peculiarities that may typically stump your workflow. And if you find yourself struggling with something that Intervals doesn’t address, let us know. We’d love to hash it out with you.
