I think it’s safe to say I’m kind of a disorganized person. I don’t make to-do lists frequently, and when I do I rarely stick to them. 

I think I just really hate being stuck to a “schedule” or being told what to do, even by myself.

I have one Google spreadsheet where I’ve listed all my assignments since freshman year of college. That’s the one thing keeping me on track.

So this week I gave a project management program a whirl.

And I’m conflicted.

I tried out Asana. It’s free and super user friendly. I was able to figure out the whole program in like 5 minutes. 

I started out by inputting my assignments for my master’s course. I thought the easiest way to go about it was making the actually submittable assignments my “tasks” and making the parts leading up to it a subtask. So two main assignments: my two blog posts. For blog post 1, I had 6 subtasks, the two chapters I had to read, drafting the post, editing, making a graphic, then publishing it. Easy enough. 

For my next post (the post you’re reading now!) I was able to use that first post as my template and just replace the readings with the 3 videos I had to watch (totally recommend checking out ProjectManager on Youtube!) and putting all my assignments into Asana. The other 4 tasks followed suit.

I wanted to get a little more practice and to see if I’d really prefer this over my tried and true spreadsheet. So, I also put some assignments for other courses. Some prep I had to do for my capstone course where we produce a weekly newscast, discussion board posts for my criminal justice class and my journalism senior seminar. I even ventured into some extracurriculars, I’m anchoring my student media group’s newscast this week so I stuck some stuff for that in as well.

So why am I feeling conflicted?

It was nice to use, I loved the little dopamine hit I got when I checked off each and every little subtask. I just think it’s almost overly complicated for my purposes. Not the software itself, that was plenty easy to use, I just think the subtasks and assigning things to a specific date just isn’t necessary for me. I’ve never really struggled to submit assignments on time, or have missed a part of one, so I think my simple little spreadsheet is just fine for now. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, right?

Also, I can completely understand how something like this can be helpful in a situation where you’re working on a project over an extended period of time with a group of people, but I don’t think I’ll be doing that often in my profession. Most TV reporters turn a new package every day. We usually work with one photographer who you spend literally your entire day with. It’s just such an ingrained process that you don’t really need to check things off as you do it. Get interviews, get b-roll, write a script, voice the script, send that all to your photog to edit, or do it yourself if you’re an MMJ, do your liveshot, and sometimes write an extra VO, VOSOT or web article. When you do that every day of your career, I’m just not really sure a checklist is super necessary. 

I could see these programs being useful for a long-term project, like a documentary or a feature piece you’re working on over time. In fact, I’ll give it a try for my capstone project where I have to make a 5 or so minute news package over the whole semester. But in my day-to-day life, I’m just not sure a project management software is for me.