WANTED: Integration between Remember the Milk and Basecamp

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I've been looking into options for improving task management with Basecamp, given my frustration with Basecamp's lack of due dates or task details.

Basecamp is what I need to manage the big picture of projects, keep in touch with clients, and assign tasks to my team, subcontractors, and client staff. I wrote up a pretty detailed picture of how we're doing this in my post about our Basecamp workflow.

But Basecamp is not a good tool for personal task management. That's why I use -- and quite like -- Remember the Milk, a very sophisticated yet intuitive task manager. RTM lets you categorize tasks into categories (lists) of your choice, tag any task, associate tasks with locations, assign priorities and due dates to tasks, share tasks with colleagues -- basically anything you might need to do to manage your tasks effectively. And it has lots of nice add-ons, like an iGoogle widget that you can even use to view RTM tasks in your Firefox sidebar.

As it stands, the combo of Basecamp and RTM is pretty unsatisfying. I have to manually copy my Basecamp to-dos into my RTM lists. And then when I complete a task, i have to mark it complete in both places.

Since many of my tasks are independent of particular client projects, it doesn't make sense to manage all my tasks from within Basecamp (especially considering the limitations of the Basecamp task system). What I really want is to create and manage most of my tasks from within RTM, but still be able to include my Basecamp tasks in the RTM system.

I'm hoping the RTM team will make this possible by building a bridge to the Basecamp API. Ideally RTM would first introduce nested lists, so that each Basecamp project could be an RTM list (tab). A basecamp to-do list could become a nested list on that tab, with tasks listed inside the nested sublist.

It's a little trickier without nested lists, but I'd still settle for a dump of all my tasks in a given project, directly into an RTM tab/list of the same name. I'd lose the in-between layer of to-do list names within Basecamp, but I can live with that -- especially if completing a task in RTM marks it complete in Basecamp.

The RTM team is the obvious gang to take this on, especially since they are looking for value-added options that would induce people to pay for RTM Pro (I'd happily pay more than $25/yr for Basecamp integration, myself -- I could imagine $10/month as a fair pricepoint). 

But the RTM folks are busy, busy, busy. So I'm hoping there are other developers out there -- people who could use the RTM and Basecamp APIs to build this sync function without the official blessing of either service. If this sounds like you, let us know how we could help make this happen. And if this mashup sounds like something you'd want, leave a comment so we can figure out whether there's enough interest to warrant a development bounty.

Comments

Marla says

October 3, 2007 - 3:45am
Basecamp seem to be very busy as well and not very responsive too. They refuse to introduce any new features. It's their "mantra". Well, the only thing we have to do is just to use something else. I use Wrike http://www.wrike.com/ as a personal organization tool and as a collaboration application. It's two in one :) and perfect in both ways. I never miss my dead-lines and plan my group work easily.

Daryl says

October 31, 2007 - 11:05am
I'm wondering why you even need Basecamp. Remember the Milk is a pretty strong project management tool when you think about it, my path has been to avoid Basecamp and all its limitation (oversimplification masked as simplicity) and focus all my energy on RTM. I'm happy with it. I'm not sure how RTM will work for multi-person projects, but I'm about to find out. I'm starting a project that will involve about twenty people, so I'm going to ask them all to sign up for RTM and then assign tasks using that system. I'll do a blog post once I've got it working (or not). Good posting, though. http://connectedsd.blogspot.com

Ruby Sinreich says

December 19, 2007 - 8:07am
Agreed! Now that I don't work with clients, I don't even use Basecamp anymore, but RTM is rocking my world. I love the ability to interact with the list from and to Google calendar, Google homepage, Twitter, mobile phone, etc. The one weakness (so far) is the groupware/sharing aspect of RTM which is where Basecamp rocks out.

Alvin Mites says

February 5, 2010 - 6:57am

I've been considering this one myself and see it coming from the open source community more than RTM or Basecamp HQ directly (though it would be nice) - on your idea about nested lists for RTM you can achieve a similar effect with tags being a GTD guy I found that creating a project and creating a tag for it and then assigning all tasks for that project with the same tag is rather effective - though I'd be happy to hear of a better way I'm amites on twitter - to anyone that would be interested in collaborating on a project like this please shoot me a message

Anonymous says

July 10, 2010 - 7:14pm

For what it's worth, I figured out a way to do it and I'm working on getting it implemented and tested.  Unfortunately it is a tricky process do handle independent of both services and on top of that, if my solution works, I'm going to have to do a ton of scalability prep prior to disclosing it publicly to anybody.  I'll post back here when it's ready for a few beta testers.

Alec Kinnear says

September 6, 2011 - 3:17am

We ran into many of the same issues you have with trying to use Basecamp to manage complex lives with dozens of clients and a large team. Rather than trying to make Basecamp integrate with another service like RTM (great app too), we built the extra functionality we needed into dedicated task management for Basecamp including an InBox and multiple contexts with a single master list. http://ascentlist.com We'd love to have your feedback. PS. For the moment AscentList is free. All early adopters will get lifetime discounts.

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