My story manager — Design thinking

I’m trying to conceptualize and standardize the way I take notes on paper, in order to digitize the process and design and maybe develop my own task manager app.

So… I’m developing my own way to:

• take notes
• set down a plan
• visualize the scope of my projects
• organize the strategy and the different steps or stages to plan a big plan

And I’m looking for features that other apps like Keep, Trello or Asana are not offering me (at least not in a simple way). Specifically this ones:

• hierarchy capabilities to create “task” groups
• general and detailed visualizations for the “project”

All the other features are quite obvious in a project management or task management app, so I’ll be focus on the previous ones.

Let’s go with the basics

I made some research (benchmarking), I studied in detail what other platforms are offering and I realize then that the only way that I can feel truly organized, is by using my own paper way. So why don’t trying to replicate my “task management model” in an app?

Here is an abstraction of how I take notes and hierarchize a simple tasks list.

And here another example where we can appreciate a road map with different task and sub-tasks.

Any rocket science here. Everybody do this at home, at school and at the office in a more elaborate or basic way. I’m just illustrating and capturing the natural process that occurs in our head when we are having an idea, when we are thinking of what we need to buy in the supermarket or when we are planning some kind of process.

And now… taxonomy

• Trello has boards with cards into column lists
• Google Keep has tags for notes
• Asana has task into projects and who knows what else
• Jira has projects with stories into boards
• And this “story manager” have “stories” into “journeys”

I’m using the word “Journey” to talk about the whole project, and the word “Story” to conceptualize tasks or cards or events. I like the stories concept. It feels nice when I apply it in scrum methodology, so I’m keeping it here. Also, it fit good with this “journey” concept.

In that way, we have stories on each journey and journeys are made by stories. All the stories together have the ability to create nice journeys.

So… what do we need to visualize journeys (in a big and small scope) and prioritize stories?

Two important things:

• visualize stories in different hierarchies
• visualize stories in a timeline

Okay, and what now?

When I start to develop a project or an idea I need to be able to tell the story in a truly simple way, visualize the bare bones and then go deep into each detail.

I think that visualize all the important stories in one look and have the opportunity to go deep to a single group of stories (or one story in particular), is a luxury that nobody is giving to me, so I will be working on this “story visualization” side-project for my own pleasure.

And you are invited to join me if you are bored :)
See you around!