Show HN: Dayboard – Daily task management for teams | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Dayboard – Daily task management for teams

dayboard.co

36 pointsjtcchan26 comments

Hi HN, I'm John, the guy behind this.

I started this while looking for a way to help remote teams run stand up meetings but it turns out what stand ups offered wasn't easy to capture in an app.

Instead, it turns out it was much better to build something that helps people get a day-to-day view of their company and help individuals fight their distraction, be accountable and stay productive -- which is essentially what stand ups aims to do (among other things). To do this, I built a (well received) Chrome extension that helps you stay focused on your priority tasks - which automatically syncs your progress with your team: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dayboard-new-tab-p...

For those interested in the backstory, you can learn more about this from our feature on Lifehacker (http://lifehacker.com/dayboard-uses-chromes-new-tab-page-to-...) and ProductHunt (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/dayboard)

I'll be continuing development on this so expect to see new features and improvements.

Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Also happy to answer any questions!

I really like the sheer simplicity of this.

I started building something slightly similar (http://i.imgur.com/hzEJgvK.png) as I wanted a simple to-do list that I could access from anywhere and was completely idiot proof (drag drop tasks etc) unfortunately I never got past the PoC as I'm simply too busy but I will get back to it, It had promise and was a nice itch to scratch.

Nicely done :)

Thank you! Haha being too busy is a problem we all have ;)

btw, I like where you were going with your timer. I've had similar thoughts and was going to do something for the Chrome extension in the future. Stay tuned for that.

It was intended to be a very simple pomodoro timer with variable times as some tasks are better divided into different increments (it was also an excuse to write a jquery plugin which I'd not done before).

I will keep an eye out :).

Cool -- I personally don't use pomodoros but a lot of my users swear by them. I'll make sure I deliver!

I just looked up Dayboard's name to share with a friend. It's surprisingly nowhere to be seen on the page, which means you're doing your marketing right - from the ground roots.

I really appreciate this app even as a single user. I do not get the benefits of the network effect, but it's amazingly focused. Thank you for making the free portions of it - I'm more than happy to donate as well if you have a link.

Thanks man - really means a lot to hear that :)

Well, I'd like to support my free users without relying on donations. But you're not the first person to say this, so if all fails, it's good to know I have this an option!

I liked this idea a lot, especially the angle that it is made for groups. It looks great too, keep up the good work. A few thoughts:

- Would it be useful to integrate this with existing issue-trackers? Would it help if all members of a group can add tasks in a common pool and then pick tasks out of that pool (like an issue-tracker?)

- Is there a danger of people being afraid to add tasks that are new ideas because everyone would see a half-finished idea? Also, does announcing what you plan to do make it harder to change your mind if you realize what really needs to be done is different than what you announced would get done?

Thanks!

I might change my mind on this but I'm generally erring on the side of staying away from integrations.

At first, it sounds very convenient (everything's right there!) but over time, I believe it's going to do more harm than good.

There's a few reasons for that but the main reasons are:

- an issue / task created on another app might not fit within the scope of a day

- integrating tasks across services ultimately leads to having too many tasks in plain view.

Bottom line is this: seeing all your to dos would encourage you to "organize your todos" or "work on things you didn't intend to" -- which defeats the purpose of this app. There are plenty of other tools that organizes your thoughts / brain dumps / team communications pretty well and this isn't going to be one of them.

I'm not sure what you mean by your second point but remember, this list is really about what "you intend to work on today". Our priorities can and often do change throughout the day - but this might also show us the discrepancy between "what we set out to do" vs "what we actually did". Often times, we get pulled into doing things that are urgent but unimportant which 1) puts us into a fire-fighting mode and 2) may leave us feeling unaccomplished at the end of the day because "we were busy all day, but we feel like we got anything done". It's the same feeling we get when we spend all day in email. We've all been there before.

This is really nice! Going to give it a shot with my tiny (but 1/3-remote) team this week.

A few tiny styling issues: the 3D effect modals have sometimes results in the text being blurred on Chrome OSX (see https://www.dropbox.com/s/qna5gj9cm6zbovm/Screenshot%202014-...), and the input field background is a bit too low contrast (I occasionally was confused where to click in a form).

Thanks for the kind words. Let me know how it works out for you guys. You can always email me at john at dayboard dot co.

Yeah, there are a few other minor visual glitches as well - sorry, still ironing things out :) I'm working on it!

I really like these kind of task driven dashboards. But I would never ever use an external service to host it. What happens in my team stays in my team.

I've tried to find software like this that can be self hosted, but it is either not available or extremely expensive as the self hosted version is targeted at big companies with lots of users.

Is it just me being old fashioned, or are there more potential buyers of self hosted software being ignored as a potential customer?

I agree with you but I don't think the revenue for self-hosting is likely to be all that "awesome".

The main problem with it is if its the developer/sysadmin crowd, most small businesses wouldn't pay for support. So you'd be limited to a few large companies that likely wouldn't use it anyway.

I'd really like to see a SaaS version that was also open source. That way people had both options.

I took a look, it is great. Here are my 2 cents. I do have one similar task management appl built totally from groud up. It grew out of Spread sheet to have a Web GUI. It does the following. You may consider (if not so far).

* Email tasks that are pending at the end of the day. * Change priorities * You can request update, or add items to other's list of TO-DO ( a TODO is a task with same task start and end date). * Pull up the tasks in a calendar. * Search tasks.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll give them some thought first but I can say now that there won't be ways to "change priorities"

I think that's a superfluous feature. Priorities in Dayboard are binary - it's either important (thus it goes on your 5 tasks) or it's not.

You can sort your tasks visually though. So if it helps to have the 5 tasks ordered by importance, you can already do that now!

True. You are right about that. Here is what I wanted to do further, there are tasks that we want to do on a particular day. In other words, something to remember and becomes active on a day. Like my important task on Month beginning would be: "Prepare billing. Finalize last month timesheet". A task template to automate the task generation/creation/assignment. Oh! I am sure, there are lot to do there. It is interesting as always. All the best. ;)

lol thanks.

Yeah, a common request is the "future list" but I'm against it because it encourages people to spend time "organizing and planning" inside Dayboard -- which 1) is what most task management / to do lists already offer (and isn't necessarily doing a bad job at) and 2) isn't the actual work that people should be doing. Having no more room to add more tasks means it forces you to move on to actually do them (a problem, that perhaps you might not have but many others would).

But anyway, I might change my mind so never say never. :) Thanks again for the suggestions!

Hi John!

I absolutely love this! I've just created an account and have sent an invite to my co-founder & designer to sign up!

Hopefully we'll be using this for our day-to-day tasks - it seems like a much nicer solution to finding out what we're working on than checking in with each other throughout the day on Skype...

Keep rocking it!

Thanks for the kind words. That's exactly what I was going for :)

If you ever need help, have questions or for whatever reason, find it's not working for you guys, I'd love to hear from you. You can always reach me at john at dayboard.

I love it. I played around with starting something just like it a few months ago.

Thanks, I'll sign up

Thanks! Hope you enjoy the app. Let me know if you have any questions!

My co-worker said she would like a backlog of items that she can move in and out of the top five.

Hey man, thanks for the suggestion.

I mentioned this in another comment but generally, I'm against it too much "organizing and planning" inside Dayboard -- which 1) is what most task management / to do lists already offer (and isn't necessarily doing a bad job at) and 2) isn't the actual work that people should be doing.

That said: I do personally keep another to do list outside of Dayboard (I use Asana) where I do brain dumps of all the things I'd like/need to do. It might seem counterintuitive to use a separate service but Dayboard acts as a reminder when I get distracted or start doing things that I shouldn't be, and by keeping my "other to dos" in another service, it actually frees my mind from thinking about what else I could be doing. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

Let me know if that makes any sense -- I'd love to hear your thoughts!

I think your approach definitely makes sense. I've been using your app and it works great. Do well!

Nice app. Which stack are you using for backend/frontend?

Thanks man! It's built on Rails and hosted on Heroku. The extension uses AngularJS.

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