If you are planning your personal work, as you can easily do with DayTickler by committing and scheduling tasks in your “Today” schedule, you are not challenge by communication. You do not need to sync your brain with someone else to organize your daily schedule. As I explained in a previous post, the main challenge is to sync your brain with your gut.
The context is very different if you have to plan the daily schedules for a workgroup. Whereas personal planning is asynchronous – users scheduled tasks on their time and at their own pace – we expect group planning to be synchronous as it requires all parties to share information.
Meeting is the ultimate solution for synchronous communication. It is perfect for scheduling one on one conversation. Meetings are also perfect if you want to communicate a message from one person (the presenter) to many (the attendees).
However, as we have all experiment, meetings are very inefficient if you expect a many-to-many conversation and decision-making between all parties. Most decision-making is better left for asynchronous communication.
Writing is a proven solution for enabling asynchronous communication. Whereas meetings are synchronous – all parties must be present and engaged for the duration of the event – written communication allows the parties to address requests on their own time. It frees all the parties from the need to be “synced up.”
One of the strengths of DayTickler is that it allows to articulate your daily schedule in writing. In my next post, I will explain how we use this opportunity to add support for workgroups in DayTickler.
Mario Cardinal 