Beesy - track meetings and actions

I horrified myself the other day by accepting a rather strong hint that I might enjoy being the Team Coordinator for my prospective Sweet Adelines barbershop chorus, Canberra Harmony. There's really not much work involved, she says, it's just making sure that other people are getting things done, she says...

So I got voted in, suspiciously unopposed.

I do have copious free time at the moment, but most of it is taken up by a small 10 month old who ricochets off the walls, and most of my concentration is taken up by wondering what he's eating right now.

For my own project management stuff, like lists of household maintenance that needs to happen at some point or birthday party prep, I use the free website/app Trello, but I figured that in this case I was going to need a bigger boat.

Beesy is a great product which marries incredible usefulness with being wildly awkward until you figure it out (thus giving the user extra enjoyment once they 'get' it). You can sign up for an account for free which gives you limited stuff, but I wasn't quite sure what that stuff was. You can get unlimited stuff (again, blurry) by subscribing. I opted to buy the iPad app which seemed quite adequate to my needs.

Basically, as you take notes in a meeting you also assign tasks to people (whose profiles you've added earlier) and set the topic, urgency and when they are due with a few taps. You can then view the tasks by person (and crossly email them all to that person) or by project. Meeting notes can be created from the iPad calendars, which will grab the date, time and location, and you can create the agenda list by copying previous meetings.

After the meeting, you can instantly generate (slightly weird looking) minutes and email them out to everyone who attended. I send them to myself to fix up instead.

The cool:

• Keeping track of all the tasks that you and your team need to get onto
• Easy to refer back to meetings
• When you create a meeting based on a previous one, it copies any uncompleted action items to the new meeting
• The dashboard shows your iPad calendar and your tasks which are due soon, and you can toggle the screen to see pie charts about the actions, like who has most of them and what topics they relate to
• Straightforward controls, once you've learned them
• Impress people with how pretentious you are.

The uncool:

• It does take time to figure out and set up
• All the help is included on the iPad as really annoying tasks and comments against the Default Project
• Not sure how I'd go using it for work as well as my Chorus stuff. It might overlap awkwardly
• No mobile phone support ATM, though the forum says they were working on getting that last year.

There are extra in-app purchases. Fortunately they aren't terribly appealing: 

Send minutes as PDF

Push your actions to your iPad reminders

Save documents in the app (actually I wouldn't mind that one, but I'm already using so many document management thingies).