Follow me through a brief journey of how I kept track of projects at work over the last year or so. It’s been a doozy.
I’ve used several platforms to track projects at work since the pandemic started and my responsibilities increased. I dove into Notion, and was extremely happy with what I built. However, there were some limitations to how the program functioned and I had one too many sudden outages during the work day.
That prompted me to try out Obsidian. While certainly a very different tool, having something that didn’t rely on the internet, was fast due to its text-based nature, and had simple template automations appealed to me. I learned it was great for writing notes (and blog posts, as it turns out), but didn’t have enough to fully track projects.
My move to sales came along with a move to using Apple products for work, and my computers running Linux for personal projects. So, I figured I’d try some Apple-specific apps. That led me to an opinionated app called Agenda. While it had its benefits, it ended up being an under-featured version of Obsidian for me.
After all the trials and tribulations, I briefly ended up back in the welcoming arms of Notion. No sooner had I transferred project information there did I remember that our company was switching to the enterprise-focused software ClickUp.
While Notion appeals to the self-starter, “life operating system” type of person, ClickUp comes with strong features meant for a corporate environment. In particular, you don’t need to build project management interfaces from scratch; they already exist. It doesn’t treat everything as a document. There are tasks, there are documents, and there lots of other things I haven’t yet explored. But I am satisfied with using it. I already need to keep the app running since our sales team uses it as part of our process, so having internal sales projects living in ClickUp made sense.
It’s been a shift, and while it’s not ideal, nothing about working for a company is. You have to deal with the cobbled-together infrastructure that develops over time, and ClickUp is a far cry from some of the other half-baked, expensive bits of software we use in other parts of the company. It’s modern, actively developed, and has a huge number of features that I’m looking forward to exploring.
The other huge benefit is that I’m not sharing my work organization with my personal projects. Now, when I’m in Obsidian or Notion I know I’m not doing company work, I’m doing something I want to do for me. That’s a powerful reason for the change as well. At this point, I’m fairly committed to making it work. It’s similar to Notion in its power, and will take time to wield it. It does have the same drawback of Notion in being hosted elsewhere, but at least I can rest easy knowing that if my workspace dies because of some server, the rest of the company’s probably will too.