Q: I am working with a client in Basecamp and I am waiting for the client to get back to me about a task. How can I implement some type of reminder for myself that I am waiting for the client to follow-up?
A: As far as I can tell there is no direct way to do this. I have thus come up with two solutions:
1. Change the title of the project. So if the project is client_Website, you can change the project title to Follow: client_Website. Personally I don’t like this solution because I have a feel for the order of my Basecamp projects and I this workaround, while viable, would distract me. So on to suggestion #2.
2. Add a reminder in your “company project”. I’ve gone ahead in Basecamp and created a project for my company. In that company project, I have a handful of to-do lists (which I will talk about in a dedicated post another time), but one of those is “follow-up”:. So If I send a client a task and I’m waiting for their reply, I simply go to my company project and add the “follow-up with Client ABC to my “follow-up”: to-do list. I then assign it to me (or whoever needs to do the follow-up) and add the date that I want to do the follow-up. It is a bit of a workaround but it works. I could have put the follow-up into my CRM, but then I’d be dealing with two systems — which I really don’t want to do. It’s one thing (IMHO) to have a separate project management system and a separate CRM, but I can’t have active to-do’s in both systems. I do have certain To-Do’s in my CRM, but there are only very specific to-do’s that I put in to the CRM (which again I will discuss later on in another post).
So those are my two methods of notating a “client follow-up” in Basecamp,. I’d love to hear what you think of these methods, and what other solutions you have come up with, so please add your comments!