Today, I spent the day setting up a new project management system, complete with the learning curve.

For a while now, I’ve been using Asana to keep track of my projects. At first, I really liked it. But lately, it’s gotten hard for me to see it and to find where everything is. I keep feeling like projects are hiding on me. Today, I went in to update a to-do on a title and found out that there were two of them. I don’t know if I did something that duplicated them, which would be hard to believe because they had different data in them. I don’t like the dark mode. Half the time when I go to log into the app, it makes me go online to log in anyway. Or it has to update.

Well, all that and then finding the two projects set up for one title pushed me over the edge. I needed something different.

So I went out and looked briefly at a couple different systems. I decided to try ClickUp.

Let me start by saying that the import from Asana failed for me. I’m certain for most people, it would have been perfect. It actually looked very good. Just not for me. There are some things I don’t like about ClickUp — and it’s not the most forgiving program even though they claim to be “fully customizable.” Yeah, it’s flexible until you make a mistake and say, “Whoops, let me try that again. What do you mean I can’t?” Several times I had to refresh my screen to get things to appear. Other times I couldn’t get templates to appear. And I certainly couldn’t get the templates to work how I wanted them to, so I gave up and did what I was doing in Asana and just made a project (except in ClickUp the way I’m using it, it’s just a list) that I can duplicate. I also broke it several times. Yeah, I’m a programmer’s worst nightmare I’m sure. Mostly because I don’t use programs how the average person does.

But, I finally came to a working arrangement with ClickUp. I think I’ve got it down and I’ve added several projects. I’m going to try it for a while and see what happens.

I’d really like to have a project management system that holds my notes and doesn’t let me forget things. I don’t think I’m asking for the world. I don’t want to have spreadsheets doing this. I don’t want it to take a lot of time. I would like to be able to use some sort of schedule without it giving me a generic term like, “Cover” on my calendar – that’s why I could never use the calendar in Asana. Yeah, thanks, it’s time for me to design a cover. WHAT BOOK? I really hope ClickUp solves that for me. I haven’t tested that yet.

In reality, I probably just need to clone myself so one of me can be creating while the other can be handling all the business. It’s not like I won’t ever swap with myself. We can take turns. And a clone of me would appreciate that. (grin!)

I still have a few more things to set up and tinker around with. Since I’ve already burned this day with that, I think I’ll finish so I can reset tomorrow. And I had such plans for today and it started out so well.

Maybe someday I’ll learn to duck when the world throws wrenches at me.

Until next time, tinker on!