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Hey friends.

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Welcome to the small tech
podcast from Éphémère Creative.

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I'm your host Raph.

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And today we will be talking
about project management tools.

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So the first episode, the intro episode
was kinda I could say stiff, but it

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was a bit more structured than what
we want to bring to you in the future.

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I think it was just first episode
one to write a draft and have

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it properly like organized.

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But it is supposed to feel a bit more.

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Loose.

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A bit more explorative and
more like a discussion that

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you can potentially join in on.

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It would be great to hear people ask
questions or contribute if you want

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to, if you want us to talk about.

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Something then definitely let us know.

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We would love to do that.

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But yeah, this this time.

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We are going to talk about project
management tools, because if

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you're going to build a digital
product, if you're going to build

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technology, you need to do that.

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And.

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There's so many tools out there to help
you manage your work and organize things

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and keep your people talking to each other
and coordinated and understanding who's

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doing what and what was done when and why.

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Even if you're working alone, it's
really useful and important to be able

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to keep track of your own tasks, but
also your information and why you're

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doing the things that you're doing.

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So.

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Let's talk about project management tools.

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We have tried a few over the years.

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And I have tried some
myself , in different contexts.

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Yeah, so I kind of broke them down
into four different categories.

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Thinking of a digital product
development, technology development.

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We have used Asana and
ClickUp at Éphémère Creative.

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I have used JIRA in the past.

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I've also explored two others
called Linear and Height.

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That I guess I say two others, because
I kind of think of them as similar.

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Uh, And two more.

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Uh, Notion and Coda.

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The big project management tool is
a JIRA and very  software focused.

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But you can certainly use it for other
things the way I think about JIRA.

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Is that if you're going to use JIRA, you
need a person whose job it is to manage

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JIRA, not to do project management,
but just to make sure JIRA is properly

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configured for what you want it to do.

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I remember the first time I I jumped into
a JIRA project or into a JIRA install.

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Which was...

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a while ago.

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And it was just so overwhelming.

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There's so many ways to organize
things and do things and they

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have their own query language.

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So you can query your tasks
if they even call them tasks.

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And.

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It's it was it's wildly powerful software.

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It is mind blowing to me.

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It feels like its own sort of
machine that you can program against

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and configure infinitely to do
essentially whatever you want.

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But that is very overwhelming when
you're a tiny team who does not have

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someone with the experience to do
that, or the bandwidth to do that.

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Yeah, that was my impression of JIRA.

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We used it for this
project many years ago.

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But I never really fell in love with it.

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We were using other
Atlassian tools at the time.

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But.

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Even though that
integration was really nice.

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So you can integrate a JIRA with a
BitBucket and a Confluence and presumably

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anything else that Atlassian has put out.

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But it was just, it was a lot,
it was just a lot to deal with.

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So yeah, I personally wouldn't
recommend it for small teams,

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unless you have someone who's very
experienced with setting it up and

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and you know how you want to use it.

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Two next ones are Asana and ClickUp.

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Which in many ways are
actually quite different.

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But they feel like they're
targeting the same...

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kinds of people in terms
of the functionality...

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and the price range...

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and I guess even just the
messaging around these products.

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Though.

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Maybe not completely.

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So Asana is very focused on
it's very much task management.

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And you group things by teams.

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And by projects within teams.

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And you can create templates for
projects and it's yeah it's pretty,

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it comes out of the box with a lot
of the things that you would expect.

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There are some reporting tools.

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Though, I think the reporting
tools, if I remember correctly

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on a higher priced tier.

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So you might not have
that on the lower costs.

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Not even just the free, like
they have a few different tiers.

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If I remember correctly.

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And I think it was free.

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And I'm like pro and then
business, something like that.

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We dropped Asana last year.

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And basically our reason
for dropping them was that.

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They aren't very friendly to tiny
teams from a pricing perspective.

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Essentially.

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We found the other tools
would price per user.

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But Asana prices per like bucket of user.

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So it's 5 users at a time or 10 users
at a time or 20 users or 30 users.

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And so if you're in between 10 and 15,

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Or whatever the tiers are, you're
paying for the higher chunk.

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So if you've just got two people
you're paying for five people.

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But that actually adds up.

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It becomes fairly expensive
and there's ways to get around

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it, but they're awkward.

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They're not ideal.

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Where it's you can invite someone
as a guest, so they're not

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really on the team, but then.

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It becomes weird to handle situations
where someone needs access, but it,

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yeah, it's not great from a pricing
perspective, I didn't love it.

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Though the tool itself is very nice.

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It's very smooth.

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But, like I said, it's very focused
on just like tasks and reporting.

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You don't.

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Put anything else really in ClickUp.

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Sorry.

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Asana it's just tasks and the
information around the tasks.

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That brings us to ClickUp, which kind
of aims to be an everything tool.

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It's all of the project management
information you might need.

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ClickUp has its own documents system,
and it has its own white boarding

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system and you can do tasks and you
can do reports and you can do all

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kinds of different things in they're
all framed around project management.

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So you're probably not going to do like...

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their white boarding tool probably isn't
something that a designer is going to

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use where they might want some additional
design tools, like stuff that you might

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find in Canva's white boarding tool or.

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Even Miro I think has more
sort of design options.

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But if it's just about organizing
a project and brainstorming some

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ideas around how you're going
to perform tasks, X, Y, and Zed,

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Then it's great for that.

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And having that whiteboard in your
project management context is great.

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You also get access to Gantt
charts and other sort of ways

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of displaying your information.

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Which Assana limited per tier.

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I'm sure there are some limitations
in ClickUp as well, but I felt like

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you got a lot more out of the box
and most importantly, for us you

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paid per user, you didn't pay per
block of users or bucket of users.

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So that's why we switched to a, to
ClickUp and it feels like they're

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constantly adding more features.

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That seems to be their philosophy
where it's just like more features.

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But perhaps not as beautifully
delivered as Asana or as fast as Asana.

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Asana is real time stuff is wild.

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Everything you see someone dragging.

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If someone's dragging a
task around in a list.

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Like you see them dragging
the task in real time.

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It's very fast and very smooth.

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Whereas ClickUp.

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There's more lag it's real
time, but it's things...

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take a little, take a
few seconds to update.

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Maybe not when you're typing, but
if you're moving things around

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and in a task list, then it does.

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All right.

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The other two that I find really
interesting and I explored a little bit.

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But I didn't.

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Actually try in much depth
are Linear and Height.

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These are two very beautiful
very focused tools.

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These seem to me...

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they're very focused on
software development.

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And so if the context of what you're
doing is software development, then

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they're probably great choices.

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In our case, there were a
couple of limitations that meant

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that they didn't make sense.

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Mainly I think both of them at the time we
were trying to use both GitHub and GitLab.

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And I think it was that we were
using multiple GitHub organizations

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or multiple GitLab organizations
or something like that.

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And it was that wasn't supported.

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I think it was, you had to
connect to a single organization.

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Which just didn't work for
what we needed at the time.

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So that's why I I went with a ClickUp
side note on that ClickUp does

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integrate with both GitHub and GitLab.

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So if you need to tie your stuff
into your code, your project

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management, into your code.

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You can create merge requests
and see commits tied to a given

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task and that sort of thing.

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So that's neat.

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Linear and height both
seem to do that quite well.

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Integrate with with the git repos.

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So you can make sure that your
code is nicely tied to your tasks.

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But they had that limitation.

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They both seem to have additional tooling,
so you can tie into visual studio code.

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So if you're a developer, that's
probably quite nice where you

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can see the things that you're
working on directly in your editor.

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They both seem to have very simple clean
user interfaces that I quite liked.

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And I heard very good things from a friend
of mine about Height's support team.

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Apparently they're very
responsive, very friendly.

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So yeah, that's another nice thing.

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Sorry, just to say one thing about
Linear, it seems to be the most

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developer focused tool out there.

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So if you're technical and you
want your stuff to work well with a

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development workflow specifically,
that's probably the one year one

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you're going to want to consider.

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Finally, there's these two other tools
that I used to not think of as project

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management tools, but really they are.

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I used to think of them as
more like knowledge management.

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But there's this like weird gray
area between project management

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and knowledge management.

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That is I feel like ClickUp goes into that
as well, where, they have their documents.

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And.

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Documents are the core of
everything these two tools do.

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So it's Notion and Coda, and
both of them basically structured

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the entire workflow around.

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Documents.

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If you want to build, for example a
backlog of tasks to work on for a project.

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You would put that in a document called
backlog, but then in that document

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you would create a table of some sort.

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I forget exactly how Notion and Coda
make this work, but you can create

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like a system of rows of things to
do with statuses that you can assign

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to people like those are things you
can inject into documents and you

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can reference them from other places.

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And that's a thing that is really neat.

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Coda, I think does this especially
well, from my brief test.

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About six months ago.

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Yeah, it was very cool.

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What you could do with that.

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All kinds of like automations.

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It's kinda neat because you can
write around these things or you

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can have multiple tables and one
in one document and build workflows

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that, that feel more visual somehow.

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So yeah, very cool.

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For me.

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I like thinking of project management
as sort of there are atomic units

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of work that needed to be done and
need to be composed and organized.

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And I might want to
reference them in a document.

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But starting with a document as the sort
of top level thing that I interact with.

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Just feels off for my brain.

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But I know a lot of people
who absolutely love it.

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So yeah, those are some some
of the tools that we have come

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across that we have tried.

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ClickUp is currently what we are
using and we're really happy with it.

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It's a very flexible tool with
a lot of features that are not

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quite as polished and clean as
some of the other tools out there.

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But they're adding a lot and they are
polishing them as they come along.

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Yeah, that's that was our choice.

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If we were doing a more
focused, like a single product.

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With a single.

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Yeah, single git repo or organization on
GitHub or GitLab or something like that.

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I really wanted to try Linear.

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It seemed really lovely.

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Very felt like a very
smooth way of working.

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Yeah, I would give that a shot.

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They're all interesting.

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And they're all worth trying out.

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Yeah.

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Give em a shot.

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Let us know what you liked.

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We'd love to hear from you.

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And yeah, we'll see you
in the next episode.

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Don't forget to subscribe.

00:14:40.170 --> 00:14:43.060
If you want to keep up with this
stuff, I've been your host Raph.

00:14:43.080 --> 00:14:46.200
And remember, we all want to
do some good in the world.

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So go build something
good out there, friends