If you do any work with people other than yourself, you probably have at some point looked into task or project management solutions.

I’ve tried a whole bunch of them… HiTask, NozBe, Things, AceProject, BaseCamp, and too many others to count. So far every single solitary one of them has had a minimum of one totally fatal flaw. Even the almighty BaseCamp is, for my purposes, totally useless.

But today I found out about Flow and I have to say…

ME LIKEY!!

The single most serious fatal flaw I’ve found in most other systems is that ALL members of your “company” or “team” can see EVERYTHING ELSE the company is working on.  There are COUNTLESS reasons this is a terrible idea.  Not the least of which is proprietary information that you only want specific team/company members to see… but also just to not clutter up a developer’s list of items with marketing stuff that they have no involvement with, for example.  Flow solves this by allowing you to make as many “lists” as you want, and tasks within that list can be assigned to only specific people and nobody else knows about them (or the list itself).  PERFECT!  Now I can have a “Marketing” list that only myself, my designer, and maybe a marketing partner can see, but also have a “Development” list that only myself and my coders can see.  Loads of flexibility here.

I’m still in the first day of my 14 day trial but so far I’m super duper impressed.  It really feels like an application even in the web-browser version, and its free App integration on my iPhone 4s is phenomenal.  I am actually reporting bugs and defining tasks for my team by VOICE rather than typing!  It’s fantastic.

My only complaint so far is that Flow has no external calendar integration.  So while it DOES have due dates and the like, I can’t sync it to my Google Calendar and have all of my milestones or other important date-related items, in one place with the rest of my life.  If it had that… I think I’d be just about to my personal Holy Grail of Project Management Systems.

UPDATE:

 

I contacted Flow asking about calendar integration, and they had this to say:

Actually, we’re currently working on adding calendar support to Flow, so you can view your tasks in your favorite calendar app. It’s not ready yet, but we should have it very soon. If you need anything else, just let us know. Thanks for using Flow!

 

Once that’s done, I think Flow may just be my ultimate Project Management solution!

The one thing I am still a little unhappy about though is their pricing.  Don’t get me wrong – in the big scheme of things it’s still peanuts.  But compared to most other apps I’ve looked at… they’re quite expensive at $9/month per user.  True you can get discounts for buying an annual membership or adding batches of people at the same time.  But I tend to work with people sometimes on very short-term projects of a few days to a week or two… so having to buy them an account is annoying.

Thankfully anyone can join your team at no cost and receive tasks, comment on them, mark them as completed, etc.  They just can’t CREATE tasks, add contacts to the team, etc.  And that suits me perfectly.

There’s also currently a deal running on Appsumo (current offer shown in the sidebar) where you can get an annual subscription for only $39!  I’m going to play with the trial account for the weekend but I’m pretty sure I’ll be buying on Monday.

So if you deal with teams of people like coders, designers, or any freelance or contract workers at all, I strongly suggest you check out >Flow.  The only person I think it might simply NOT work for would be a hardcore Android user, as there is no Android App currently.

Hoping this helps you get into the Flow of things!  😉

Jonathan