Ask HN: Freelancers...what PM tool do you use?

I run a small bespoke software development company with 2-3 employees and 3-4 clients. It sounds incredibly small, but nevertheless I was getting overwhelmed.

I evaluated various options and settled on liquidplanner, I don't regret it.

- I can enter that some employees only work a certain number of hrs e.g. Mon/Tue/Wed 3 hrs, Thurs/Fri 8 hrs. If I say a task takes "20 hrs" then it takens the availability into account in the planning.

- Range estimates for tasks, i.e. "this task will take between 4 hrs and 2 days".

- I prefer the ability to update a task with "I did X hrs already, I now prodict Y-Z hrs to go", as opposed to saying "50% through the task, which was originally predicted to be X hrs.". As you go through a task, your understanding of it changes. I think updating the past/future hrs more closely fits how you work.

- With many tools you can drag task bars to the left/right in the Gannt to make them earlier/later. I don't know why you'd want to do this? With LP you just specify how long it'll take and who's doing it, and its priority relative to other tasks, and LP tells you when you'll be doing it.

- I often have the problem that employees claim they're "finished" and having nothing to do. I send emails around with bullet points but they still seem to get confused. With LP there is a section they can log into at any time called "my work" which shows them an up-to-date view of all their tasks, extracted from the Gantt, in order of priority.

- My clients sometimes feel they don't know what's going on (if we're programming some back-end stuff, for instance). They get a better feeling when they see their Gantt. They can log in and do that. But I don't want my customers seeing each other, so they only see their Gantt. Nevertheless, the reality is that resources (e.g. me) are shared, so they're not actually independent projects/sheets. LP knows that I do task X before task Y, and task X might appear on one customer's portal and task Y on another's.

- What tasks and employees should I be concerned about, in terms of them delaying the project? I can select any task and selects its critical path. Because resources are shared between projects and clients, it can accurately tell me that in order to get customer Y project done on time, I have to finish tasks for customer X (or re-arrange them.)

This may be a very unpopular opinion, but: I feel like modern technology has made the 'cluttered' inbox and 'managing emails' more of an imagined problem than real one. I use gmail, and I have a few rules for tags, and use tags for things that need a further follow-up, but I rely very heavily on its fabulous search and threading abilities.

I think there is a mindset that a neat inbox is a neat life or something like that, but I've usually treated organizing only as a way to make my tasks and tools easier/faster/more accessible. Mail is a problem that, regardless of volume, isn't overly concerning to me.

With gmail in particular there is also the archive vs inbox, but it's largely the same thing.

I will recommend you http://www.redmine.org/. we are using this amazing tool for our projects (3 of them) our clients, PM, and developers can take advantage of it. It is a powerful communication tool.

Trello

Podio

Your problem's cause is rooted in a a basic economic principle, supply and demand. When you quickly reply to each email, you become a cheap resource for help, undermining the usefulness of the client thinking through problems themselves, or perhaps thinking through their problems a bit longer before sending another email.

The solution? Delay your responses by 1-2 hours. Decreasing the supply on your side will serve to increase the "cost" of each interaction, since they have to wait for reply. You'll find the emails stop sounding as frantic and disorganized/incomplete, and not as many are sent.