Blackboards still beat web apps.
Sometimes.
Here at Boom we use quite a few web applications to manage our daily flow. Most notably, the crew at 37signals helps keep our little boat afloat. And although they may be brash, we use Basecamp like the milestone-totin’-writeboard-dealin’ freaks that we were born to be. While it has never suited my personal aesthetic preferences (which matters when you use something every day), Basecamp keeps its promise. Namely, to take a complicated task (managing an obscene amount of project-related information) and make it really simple.
In fact, we have come to depend on it so much that I reached a point where I rarely shared anything in written form (ideas, tasks, lists, schedules, etc.) with our staff outside of Basecamp. Why would I? The application keeps everything consolidated and organized beautifully. Boom is based in New York but maintains staff in California, Georgia, Florida and Montana. Email isn’t a reliable means to connect all these people to every project. Do they even have email in Montana? Basecamp keeps everyone in the loop with minimal effort. Our developers love checking those little boxes in their to-do lists, our producers love checking off milestones, and I love hurting productivity by posting links to articles and blogs.
So why would I ever need to disseminate information in any other way? After all, Basecamp is the perfect tool to keep our creative business on track. Right?
Yes and no.
The problem lies in that pesky little word - creative. Our company is built solely on people - their ideas, skills and respective creative talents. These people can chug along pretty impressively day to day, relying on the knowledge they’ve acquired to check off those little boxes and in turn, finish our projects successfully. These are creative people though, so once in awhile they need to feel inspired. They need to think outside of pixel-pushing, html tags, stylesheets and actionscript from time to time. Otherwise, the flower wilts a bit and the work begins to suffer. If this happens to one person once in awhile, you can probably get back in the game pretty easily. If it’s happening to your whole crew for an extended period of time, watch out.
The good news is that very simple things can make a big difference. Case in point, a blackboard.
I actually became aware of this problem not through our employees, but from myself. I frequently found myself stumped while trying to piece together a creative brief, strategy document or proposal on my computer. I learned years ago that I need to write by hand to get over these bumps in my creative flow and have to constantly remind myself of this when I hit a wall. It isn’t a new idea of course - changing the tactile relationships between our body and our work provides different triggers for the brain. Turns out we’re still human after all.
So when I recently realized my extremely capable and intelligent co-workers were repeatedly asking questions about projects, despite the answers being readily available in Basecamp, a light went on. Let’s get a big board. In all honesty, this light went on over a year ago but it took us months to select, order and mount the damn thing. That aside, we now have an awesome blackboard. It’s fairly massive and it’s the real shabang. None of that whiteboard and colored markers stuff for us. Chalk rules.
We’re currently using the board for three simple types of information:
- A project hotlist showing a daily prioritization of active projects.
- A huge thought bubble for brainstorming new ideas, apps, features, copy, etc.
- A ‘resident genius’ box for rewarding the employee with the biggest breakthrough each day (this is highly competitive and totally unfair)
People love this thing. Even when the same information is posted in Basecamp, everyone responds differently to the board. They smile, laugh, grimace, roll their eyes, guffaw, gasp and well, you get the idea. It lights them up. Most importantly, it gets people away from their screens and engages everyone in the daily creative thinking that is driving our work.
Basecamp continues to be a very important part of our workflow but it can’t do everything. The larger point here is that any online content, service or application needs to be supplemented with real human interaction. There’s simply no substitute for people being people.