Remote team rules for Slack, Trello, and Harvest
For years I worked as a part of a great remote team that did a lot of customers’ work. Our team used Slack, Trello, and Harvest every day. First two helped us manage ourselves, second two provided reports to our customers. Below are important rules that I told every new member of a team.
Slack
Use channels, avoid direct messages. There are always more than two members on each project, and we don’t want to be in a situation like “oh, we forget to tell this to everybody else.”
Start a thread to discuss a particular issue. This makes channels so much cleaner and not distracting those who are not participating in the discussion.
Wisely integrate other instruments like Github, Trello, and Sentry, to have discussions anchors.
Though Slack is like our office space, sometimes you need some quality time alone. It’s ok to turn off Slack, but make sure, that everybody knows how to reach you via phone or your personal messenger (btw, never continue conversations there, go to Slack). But never leave Slack when there is an ASAP situation.
Trello
Subscribe to the boards, so you don’t miss important messages and the big picture on your project. It’s ok not to check your email constantly, but with this option turned on you can always look through notifications during your everyday zero inbox routine and make sure that you haven’t missed anything important.
Take tasks from top right, move them further to the right.
Decompose tasks into subtasks: create “Frontend,” “Backend,” “Markup,” “Questions,” “Etc” checklists. You might want to divide big tasks into smaller, which can bring value separately (think of it if you can deploy part of the feature to the production).
Deadlines, if present, are real. If you’re not sure that you can make it, then move a deadline, so everybody can see it and react accordingly. Don’t forget that it will take up to a day or two to test, fix bugs and deploy a feature to the production.
Learn few hotkeys — type shift + ?.
Use color labels to distinct tasks. This helps you to visually evaluate progress and balance a load. You can use my system or invent your own:
- green — backend / business logic
- yellow — frontend
- orange — bug
- red — ASAP (usually never used)
- purple — non-technical tasks
- dark blue — technical debt
- blue — design
- lime —usually reserved for some specific part of the system
- magenta — to discuss
- black — used as a temporary mark
Harvest
Install Harvest Chrome extension and Harvest for Mac. Use opt+cmd+m to pop up Mac app (you might want to reconfigure hotkeys) or pause/play from the tray.
Track everything work related: coding, fixing, refactoring, discussing, thinking, reading, etc.
Track time from Trello cards, so your records will be attached to the tasks (useful for analyzing and reporting).
No card to track? You probably should create a new card (for example: “Update dependencies”), so the task can be visible, testable and trackable. In some cases (like general talk about the project) just track time in the project under your main category (programming/design).
Track honestly. Tea time, side chat? Pause. Forget to stop? Correct later. But never track time post factum, this is strictly forbidden.
This rules helped us to eliminate the necessity for daily project management and provided our customers and us with a clear picture.
p.s. Like, comment, follow. :-) The next three articles will be about other routine aspects of running a digital agency.
