Producteev | Blog

Producteev Two : The (R)evolution in Task Management.

by Ilan on March 9th, 2010

Hi Guys, Ilan here.

Producteev first Beta was launched in March 2009. Since then, we learned a LOT about Task Management best practices, what users wanted, the competition, what was wrong in our first versions, and where we needed to innovate.

Well, after 6 months of deep R&D, we’re coming up with Producteev Two. Launch Date in May 2010, but early access will be given to users who want to help give feedback by April, just sign up here.

So what’s new you may ask.

* First, we removed 50% of the current product features, we’re now focusing on ONE thing : Help you and/or your team GET THINGS DONE. PERIOD.

* Second, it’s more simple than ever. Not any competitor has this mix between simplicity and User Interface.

* Third, we want it deeply connected to your daily tools. Awesome and Improved integration with your Email, IM and Twitter. Expect an amazing Alerting system. Nothing from your To-Dos will be forgotten again.

* Fourth, third party apps. We will be releasing at the same time a brand new FREE iPhone application. We started over. The previous one is ok, but still a bit slow and heavy. We hired the best developer + the best designer for this new version. Task Management on Mobile Phones is a big market, and we’re going after it with the best offer by far. The most native task management app for individuals and teams you can ever dream of is coming to an iPhone (and iPad) near you. Oh and I almost forgot, our Mac native desktop client will be released at the same time. If you’re kind enough, we’ll have even more product announcements… But sshhh.

* Fifth, Multiple team support. You will be able to manage as many teams as you’d like on Producteev. Simply, and natively. Your work, you side project, your MBA, your home, or whatever else you need to keep track of. Each workspace can have a totally different team.

* Sixth, a very versatile commenting system on tasks, mixing notes, files and activity on tasks.

* Seventh, last but not least, the “Producteev Academy“. We cannot tell you more about it, but you’re gonna love it. Little hint : “Employee of the Month”.

That’s it for now, we’ll try to feed you with some screenshots soon.

If you have any question, please feel free to ask them in the comments section

Talk to you soon!

producteev-2-mainscreen

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Getting Things Done with Producteev

by Martin on February 12th, 2010

Getting Things Done (GTD)*, is a popular productivity methodology based on David Allen’s homononymous book (find it here). GTD has been quite abuzz in many popular web and productivity blogs such as 43 Folders, Lifehacker, Slashdot or Mashable.

I would like to spend a minute today to show you that Producteev is an ideal tool for applying the GTD methodology.

The main ideas behind GTD are, admittedly simplified, more or less the following:

Clear your head from all tasks: Collect all new stuff in some sort of inbox
Come back periodically during the day to purge the inbox: Ask yourself, is this actionable or not? If it is not, it may serve as reference for later. If it is, you have several options: do it if it takes less than 2 minutes, delegate it if someone else can do it, defer an action and either do it as soon as you can or on a specific date, and identify the next steps for those tasks that need some more thinking.
Everything you are not currently working on, is ideally collected in a repository. As you work, come back to the repository and choose the most important task based on the context and the time and resources you have available

Here is how I apply GTD with Producteev:

Most of the random stuff arrives in my email inbox. Besides that, I have phone calls, chats, physical conversations with clients and I often have random thoughts that cross my mind while working or commuting. So I created a Producteev dashboard that reflects the spirit of GTD:

producteev-6-2-11

How I manage email:

- Emptying the inbox: I periodically empty my mailbox, I do so three to four times a day at no fixed times (fixed times can be very helpful, but I realized that I need to be flexible with my schedule).

- Delegating tasks: I delegate everything I can. In my Gmail account, I add a star to each delegated mail for which I expect an answer today. All other delegated mails end up in my “waiting for” list in Producteev. So when I forward the mail to a colleague or service provider, I BCC task@producteev.com and add “#waiting for” somewhere in the email. This will automatically create a task in my “waiting for” list in Producteev and a copy of the mails content (including attachements) will be stored in my producteev account. Read here about more sophisticated options to mail tasks to Producteev.

- Stuff I do not need to break down into more action steps come to my “tasklist” box in Producteev. I forward the mail to task@producteev.com and add “#tasklist” somewhere in the mail and Producteev does the rest.

- The things I need to break down into more action steps I place in my recipient box in producteev - I just forward the mail to task@producteev.com without adding any specific hashtags.

This leaves me with a central list of tasks to work off, a list of tasks that I have delegated and need to watch and an list of tasks that need to be organized. From there, I regularly organize tasks ito projects for which I have several boxes.

How I manage everything else:

So that takes care of email - but what about the stuff from phone calls, my chats on Gtalk or the personal conversations I have during the day?

- I send all these tasks to my producteev recipient box as they come up. As you already know, my recipient box on producteev collects everything I need to think about or organize later.

- I either have my producteev dashoboard open and add tasks directly or I have my instant messenger open and send my tasks to producteev from there. The tasks I send to producteev via instant messenger services all are automatically placed in my inbox for later review. This is my “capture everything extremely fast and easy” method.

- I usually carry a paper and pen around to take notes of conversations I have during the day. Using the instant messenger method, I also put all stuff into my producteev recipient box once I get back to my desk.

*GTD and Getting Things Done are registered trademarks of David Allen & Co.

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Welcoming our new employees!

by Martin on February 9th, 2010

Exciting times here at Producteev! Startup life has many benefits: Working on something you love with awesome people with whom you share your passion is definitely on the top of the list. This week, we had the great pleasure to supercharge our team with three new additions. We are very excited to have them here and you can look forward to seeing even more exciting products and features from the Producteev team in the near future! Enough said, meet our new team members:

thomas1 My full name is Thomas Bonnin. I am a 25 year old guy from France. I have been a freelance iphone developer since January 2009. Here is an example of app that I created: www.omapsiphone.com. I previously worked as a software engineer for Sagem Avionics, an aeronautic company based in Dallas, TX. Over there I designed and developed a couple of data flight management tools. I got a Master degree in management and computer science (MIAGE Toulouse) in 2007. Here is my twitter description that sum up my personality pretty well : I am a learning addict, travel enthusiast, runner and electro music fan. Don’t hesitate to contact me, I am always willing to have a chat with interesting people about one of these topics. You can follow me on Twitter @tbonnin and read more about me on my homepage: www.thomasbonnin.com

mail-1163c39718701 I am Ismael, 23 year-old French man, recently arrived in the City. Freshly graduated from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, my background is Engineer and more especially Information Technology for Engineering. My prior significant experience consisted in an internship in San Francisco as a Research and Development Engineer, at LSTC, a company developping and selling a simulation software for mechanical systems. I also did a lot of side research projects during my studies, in undergrad, in the University of Technology of Troyes, France. Last year, I also worked as a French-English interpreter at ALPLA, a Plastic Packaging company. At Producteev I work in the Product Development department, and I will develop the new Android applications. You can follow me on Twitter @ismaelhenchi if you want to know how exciting working with Producteev is!

jr_profilepic Hi, I am Julien, a 23 year old student and will soon graduate from Marseille Business School in France. After working a year at Adessa, an SAP Consulting company in Belgium, where I gained experience in Business development and project leading, I just joined Producteev. I am working toward fitting the application to your task management expectations, and building the most efficient productivity solution for your everyday issues. By the way, do not hesitate to give me feedback and give me a headache while you’ll be relaxing and letting Producteev manage your stuff for you :-). Please follow me on twitter @evarouss

With our new team members here at the Producteev headquarters we have added some great talent to help boost our speed of innovation. Stay tuned for a ton of exciting news very soon!

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Introducing the “Dynamic” Task Timeline!

by Martin on January 11th, 2010

Timing is everything! We think so, too…

Yes, we listened! Many of you have asked us for better ways to manage your tasks with respect to the time and date. Here we are announcing our new timeline feature! We made it very intuitive for you - just like writing your tasks for the day in your daily planner, we added the possibility for you to directly add tasks in your timeline.

Now, if you hover over the timeline, you will find that you can add tasks either in the day, week or month view. Feel free to rearrange tasks freely on the timeline. Just as you are used to from tasks in the dashboard, a click on the task will reveal the power options such as scheduling reminders, assigning tasks to colleagues, and much more!

Monthly view: add tasks directly in the timeline!

So try it and let us know what you think:

Add tasks directly into the timeline
Rearrange tasks between days, weeks and months
Access task actions directly by clicking on the task

Eager to get everyone’s feedback!

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drag-and-drop producteev task management

Happy Holidays from the Producteev team

by Jeremie on December 21st, 2009

Hi everyone,

The whole Producteev team is joining me to wish you all a happy new year and fantastic holidays with your friends and family.

As you know, 2009 has been a very important year for us : we launched our public version, we grew up in size, we welcomed our first customers and we’ve been working hard every day to take into account and incorporate your feedbacks in order to improve the way you use Producteev to work.

We’re also glad to announce that 2010 will be a very exciting year for us : New partnerships, new services integrated and new people joining the Producteev team .
We’ll keep pushing stronger our vision of Connected Collaboration, stay tuned!

happy-holidays

We’ll keep you posted very soon.

Enjoy your holidays!

The Producteev team.

Comments

hannukah holiday season new services News and Announcements producteev xmas

Introducing you the first Email Task Management System!

by Jeremie on December 2nd, 2009

Hey,

We just improved the mail to task feature ! A LOT.

Our objective at Producteev is to plug our Task Management features into your WorkFlow, and now we just stepped up the Game with a VERY useful and crazy simple feature tied to your email.

If you don’t use it yet, let me remind you what it is.
If you send an email to task@producteev.com, we will automatically create a task on your Producteev dashboard. The title of the task is the subject of your email and the task description is the body.

So what’s new?
In the new mail-to-task version, you’ll be able to assign your tasks directly to a specific to-do list, set a deadline, attach a file to a task, and share it with colleagues by entering their emails as you usually do when you email them. All of these features triggered by one single email!

- #DATE: Adds a due date to your tasks. For example add #12/23/2009 to your email and it will occur in your recipient box on Producteev with a due date for December 23rd.

- #TODOLIST: puts the task into one of your to-do lists. For example, add #Marketing in order to put the task into the to-do list ‘Marketing’.

- FILES: your attachments will automatically be added to the task.

- Colleagues: Put one or several colleagues as recipients of your email to share the task with them on Producteev (if they’re on your Producteev Team).

See, it’s created automatically on your Producteev Dashboard.

Then, we send you an automated mail to confirm that your task has been created in your Producteev account and access to the URL of your task. Four your information, when you set a deadline to a task, we create reminders that you and your colleagues will receive before the task is due.

Comments

Collaboration deadlines files attaching mail to task share tasks with friends

How you could use Producteev for your meetings

by Jeremie on November 30th, 2009

I just stumbled upon a blog post by Fred Wilson where he discusses how discussions have turned out to be a more productive setting than presentations during his firms board meetings.

Indeed, discussions can be extremely productive ways to hold meetings, but if matters are just discussed you will encounter the risk of “just talking” as opposed to creating actionable tasks from what has been discussed.

Producteev is a great tool to capture tasks during such a discussion. In producteev, you can quickly create tasks while you are discussing. So in a meeting you could have one person taking protocol of what actionable tasks have been identified and put them into producteev. In a next step, tasks can be assigned to specific people and deadlines on tasks can be set (and of course, you can also use many more fatures that come natively in producteev to manage these tasks)

Here is what we do here at Producteev:

For each meeting where we have discussions, we use the create tasks field to capture all the action items we identify during our discussion in the recipient box:

After the meeting, we just assign the tasks to the team member who will be in charge…

…set a deadline for the task…

…and there you are!

Producteev is a simple and efficient way to help you keep track of what has been said during your discussion meeting.
To try Producteev for you team, click here and select the plan that best suits you. You can try all features on all plans for free during the first 14 days after signup.

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Producteev’s getting famous in France !

by Producteev on November 24th, 2009

Hey everyone,

As you know, one important market we try to focus on with Producteev is Europe.
This is why, lately, we were featured on several French medias.

Check out the Video tab on our Facebook Page to see our latest videos or click on the images below to watch the videos.

The first one is a review of Producteev by L’atelier Numerique’s Web TV.

The second one is an interview (in French) with the famous french-speaking podcast on iTunes Lepodcasthightech.com

Hope you liked it ! Talk to you soon !

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Producteev.com is getting better !

by Jeremie on November 24th, 2009

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to let you know some of the things we have been working on to improve your user experience on Producteev.

goodnews

- The website optimization is on progress, the loading time should be much better right now !

- Now when you proceed to a payment via Paypal, we guide you through the process. You don’t have to worry if you are not used to paying via Paypal, we made it very simple and understandable.

- Task creation just became a piece of cake

- From now on, you will see a progression bar when you upload documents.

- We fixed many bugs and compatibility issues with Internet Explorer. If you had problems in the past using Producteev on this browser, it should be working without any problem now.

What we are currently working on :
- Improve and add features to the Mail to Task. Soon it’s going to be possible to attach a file on a task directly via email and add tags (deadlines, share it, set a reminder etc…). In case you didn’t know it, you can easily add a task to your dashboard simply by shooting an email to task@producteev.com

- A new version of Producteev for iPhone with a wonderful design, but sshhh…! application-iphone-producteev1