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There are lots of benefits to outsourcing your business-related tasks. In case you didn’t know, if you have employees, contractors, partners, or relationships with people inside or outside your business, you are (effectively) outsourcing.

Now think about the people you spend 80% of your time with. These folks are doing a lot of work for you, and you should keep their work organized in one place. This is true for in-house folks and out.

Basecamp is a web-based project management tool that you can access from anywhere. This means your team can be kept in the loop anywhere there’s an internet connection. Priceless!

My Company’s Basecamp Dashboard:

Here are some ways I’ve used this radical tool called Basecamp to manage my projects. This helps me keep track of everything (and everyone) I’ve outsourced.

Basecamp Project Manager Use #1: Managing Independent Contractors

My assistant Jessica and I have weekly meetings with an organizational coach to help us set and meet goals & milestones within our business. Although Tracy is not our employee (she is paid as an independent contractor), her services to us require regular weekly communication. We give Tracy access to the Basecamp projects we want to work with her on, and she has full access to all the same tools we do when she logs in.

She can review where we were last week, get updates of where we are now, and start thinking about where we’re gonna go in the future. Tracy can chime in at any time to help guide us through the week. This helps tremendously in the days that follow our in-person meetings because we usually have some file sharing to do. Things like meeting notes, new developments in research, and questions we have for each other are common between sessions.

Example: This week Jessica and I are working on developing a direct mail campaign to generate seller leads.

1. We spent two hours strategizing about the campaign with Tracy in person
2. Tracy gave us goals and tasks to get done before our next meeting
3. She uploaded a review of our session notes into Basecamp for reference
4. We set a milestone in Basecamp (deadline) for the campaign
5. Individual tasks and responsibilities were entered as To-Do’s in Basecamp

Tracy can track her time, upload files, and make comments and suggestions about our project from within Basecamp so it’s all in one spot. For EVERYONE to see! No messy e-mails between 3 people, and everything is stored in Basecamp for later use or review. Awesome.

Basecamp Project Manager Use #2: File Sharing

This one is pretty self-explanatory, but emailing attachments has its limits. If you’ve ever tried to email a large graphic or zip file, you know that after about 6 or 7 MB, Outlook gets picky about what gets delivered. Basecamp allows you to upload some larger files (up to 100 MB, which rocks) but that’s not the coolest part of it.

Information like who uploaded it, when that happened, and in which category makes finding files a snap. Plus you can upload multiple versions of the same file and Basecamp will keep track of all the versions that have been passed around your organization.

To me, this is priceless because knowing which version of a file is the right one to be working from can be tough. Sometimes it’s impossible to know which version you need when that file was touched by more than 2 people. You have no idea which version is the latest and most usable unless you open and read through it. Yuck!

This is much better:

Another scenario where this helps is if you need to revert back to a previous version of a file to get info that has been overwritten by your most current version. Sometimes you need what was in the very first version of a file but it’s long gone due to constant revisions being passed around. Trust me, you WILL come across this scenario in your business and having this feature in place will save you many hours of frustration.

Basecamp Project Manager Use #3: Milestones

Setting milestones to meet business goals might be one of the most overlooked tasks entrepreneurs make. Doing this one thing alone in Basecamp has taken Jess and I from puttering around to being super efficient.

Setting simple, goal-oriented milestones keep the big picture in front of you on a daily basis, creating focus for tasks that might not warrant a sticky note on your computer monitor. Note our next milestone is to pay our LLC taxes next week. I swear we have sexier milestones than that!

Basecamp Project Manager Use #4: To-Do Lists

For me, I need to have this. Basecamp makes to-do lists so easy, and the best part is I can assign tasks to people I’m working with. This allows everyone to be held accountable for what they are responsible for, and there’s no confusion. Once the task is done, the to-do is checked off and that item is moved into an archived area if you ever want to see it again.

There are about 50 million reasons to make lists, but I’d take some caution when list-making. Besides it being addicting, the human brain can only handle so much cognitive load on one page. Use the KISS principle here.

Robb’s To-do List advice:

1. Keep your lists short and precise
2. No more than 6 or 7 items per list
3. Make your lists task-oriented, like “Tasks for Marketing VA to complete this week”
4. Avoid being too general with tasks, like “Get in better shape”
5. Move general goals from to-do lists and turn them into milestones instead

You should be checking off your tasks as you complete them. Basecamp makes it easy to re-order your to-dos, I like to keep my highest priority tasks at the top and work my way down.

Basecamp Project Manager Use #5: Time Tracking

Jess and I haven’t used this yet because we trust everyone we have worked with so far. But as our business grows, we will definitely add time tracking to our to-do tasks as we outsource further. It’s a great little tool if you want to track how much time you’re spending on marketing, or development, or on just about anything else you can think of.

We’re just not there yet. Maybe I’ll re-post something cool on it once we start using it!

Enjoy!!!

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Tags: 37 signals, Basecamp, File Sharing, Project Management, Time Tracking, To-do Lists, Virtual Assistant, Web-Based Application