Basecamp presentation

On Thursday, I presented on a panel for the LACONI Technology section on “secrets of being productive”. I think the secret most productive and organized people share is that they usually are anything but productive and organized. But they are really good at creating and following systems. For me, I love tools and the discipline that tools impose on you.

So, I decided to focus on how we’ve been using Basecamp at the library. Rather than focus on my own personal productivity or organization, I focused more of project management, or plain old reguar management. In retrospect, I think that creating “personas” for my team members and using those personas throughout the presentation was really effective.

For instance, I talked about my newly hired web developer who had to orient himself to a complex project and how Basecamp helped that happen. I referred to this several times in the presentation.

Focusing on these use cases made the presentation feel less abstract, and deemphasized the tool, but the people and the relationships that the tool helped managed.

Here’s the presentation if you’re care to view it: