Here's a half-baked web app idea I was talking about with Stirman over Thai food a while back. Please take it.
Think of any process that has multiple steps and that you do repeatedly. Say, deploying a new feature on your web app, bringing a new person on to your team, setting up a new server, or anything that you can imagine creating a checklist for. (I'm thinking mostly about those in the work context, but the same idea could apply to baking a cake or getting dressed -- if you have trouble remembering all the steps.)
There are lots of ways you can create a to-do list. But how about a templated to-do list? So, first you define a process and its steps. E.g.:
Think of any process that has multiple steps and that you do repeatedly. Say, deploying a new feature on your web app, bringing a new person on to your team, setting up a new server, or anything that you can imagine creating a checklist for. (I'm thinking mostly about those in the work context, but the same idea could apply to baking a cake or getting dressed -- if you have trouble remembering all the steps.)
There are lots of ways you can create a to-do list. But how about a templated to-do list? So, first you define a process and its steps. E.g.:
- Design signoff
- Brief support
- Run tests
- Etc....
Then you kick off a new instance of the process each time you need to, which gives you a new checklist. For each instance, you can modify the list as needed. Future versions would have assignments, notifications, and dependencies -- which starts to mirror sophisticated enterprise workflow apps (I imagine). But I'm not familiar with anything like this (and, preferably, clean, simple, and 37signally) on the web.
@ev me if I'm missing something.