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“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing” (Walt Disney)

After a brief attempt to use Freedcamp, I decided to stick with JIRA – and to pay $10/month for a good product.

Why not Freedcamp

Freedcamp is a good product, it really is. Good looking, polished, its creators really know their Ajax craft. The problem with Freedcamp was that it lacks two important features:

• the ability to assign estimations to tasks; there aren’t even time-based estimations
• the ability to cut the workload into batches of equal duration; be they sprints, iterations or whatever – the name matters less than the fact that we must work in smaller chunks in order to get things done

If we are to add the miriad of other choices and features that JIRA (a very mature product) brings, it turns out that free may be … more expensive that $10/month.

Why Freedcamp

There are situations when Freedcamp may be a better choice than JIRA. One such situation is to stay on top of many tasks that come irregularly and cannot be grouped into a longer-term project. Unexpected or irregular errants (changing the passport, replacing credit cards, buying new shoes to replace the ones broken in school) may be better supported by a tool like Freedcamp, with its GTD-like flavour.

But more importantly …

… is to actually do it (as Disney put it so well). Unfortunately no tool, no matter how suitable or sophisticated might be, will do the work for us.

Wouldn’t that be nice?