We’ve done things a little differently here at Discourse since we started in 2013. Instead of being co-located in one place, we’re a globally distributed team. For the most part, we’ve removed time zones from the collaboration equation by working asynchronously. This means we communicate primarily through writing via… you guessed it: Discourse. We rarely ever have meetings, save for a weekly team call, because we’ve found writing to be the simplest way to collaborate across time zones.
I have been struggling to implement something similar for a team I manage, and I’d like to ask a question about your To Do category. I assume your team is fairly large and that the To Do category is very full. How do people filter down to see what specific teams and groups within your organization are up to?
My method so far has been to create seperate To Do categories for different teams, but that seems like it will become unweildy very quickly.
We are using tags heavily for this. Each team or project has a tag defined for it, and those teams can add the tag to their sidebar for quick access to the todos they care about.
Then people within those teams assign themselves to individual todos.
We are also working on improvements to features that will help even more like improved topic list filters which will let people and teams further scope topics lists down to links they can add to custom sections in their sidebar.
So is it pretty typical to see organizations have a category and tag named the same thing? Seems that would be common if you have a generic To Do category.
I think it probably depends on the size of the organization and other factors. Having a single todo category works well for us, but it may not be for everyone. I could certainly see orgs wanting to segment things so that each team has their own category, with todo being a tag or duplicated subcategory within those team categories.
The app doesn’t really impose those opinions on you, for better or worse.