Workstreaming in 140 Characters with Backpack
Nowadays, status update boxes are everywhere: LinkedIn, Twitter, Friendfeed, Yammer, AIM, GTalk, Facebook and more. The stream is becoming a de facto way that we communicate with others. However, thinking in 140 characters is also changing how I work. I am now using status updates to workstream.
I have dusted off using Backpack as a tool for managing my life. It's improved a lot since I last used it a few years ago. One of their recent additions is the Backpack Journal, which I love. I can update it throughout the day to capture a running log of what I worked on, when. Right now this is just for my own use but Backpack works great in teams as well. Above is a screenshot from my Journal this am. I also update it from my iPhone using an app called Satchel and on the desktop use text expansion software to enter items more quickly. I use codes and phrases to track my time which I refer to when I enter my time reports.
Several of my colleagues are workstreaming with Yammer. This is something I need to explore more, since it's certainly easy to do. Are any of you workstreaming - and if so, how - in private or public forums?
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Where the microblogging posts are really important, we must not forget the automatic posting of things like check-ins of code, edits, etc. to workstreaming. Feeds of all sorts must come into play, and then your 140 character posts become a method of annotation.
Feeds (from logs), aggregation, filtering, microblogging... they're all essential components.
The way I've been workstreaming (along with the rest of our team at New Marketing Labs) is using Socialcast. It's similar to Yammer and you can import other profiles like FriendFeed, among a ton of other features. Besides that, we just like the look/feel of it.
What we're enjoying from using a tool like this is that it allows us to have some standardize tags like #where, #status, etc that we can provide status updates as we need. But, the real gold comes from wanting to pull the info back out. If I'm out-of-pocket for a couple days I could just pull on one of the tags to get a quick overview of everything that our team has worked on in the past couple days; how a particular client is doing or where everyone is (given travel schedules, working remotely and whatnot).
Similar to what Jose said, I know that Chris Brogan has been experimenting with a Tumblr blog as a status update/workstream for himself.
As a software consultant, I have been using Evernote to track my work and time each day because I use a lot of screenshots and find the evernote client application useful. The team workstream introduced with Yammer, SocialText, Backpack (etc) seems very useful to me though and I would eventually like to incorporate that into my larger projects.