Basecamp 3’s to-do lists keep you in the loop when you’re working closely with other members of your team. You get notified when someone assigns you a to-do and that person gets notified when you check it off.
This works great when it’s clear who needs to be assigned, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes you don’t know who should do the work, other times a to-do isn’t for anyone in particular and just needs to be logged.
Take a bug list, for example. People across your company might log software bugs, carefully documenting what’s broken and how to recreate it. In the moment, they might not be sure who to assign, so they log the bug and move on. But if you didn’t want those bugs to fall through the cracks, you’d have to monitor the list yourself.
It shouldn’t be on you to reload a to-do list every hour to see what’s changed. Starting today, you won’t have to!
A new notification
If you’d like to receive notifications when to-dos are added to a specific list, just go to that list in Basecamp. Inside the right-hand menu, you’ll see a new option to receive these notifications:
Once you’ve turned on notifications, you’ll see messages in your Hey! menu every time someone adds a new to-do to that list:
Prefer to get email notifications? No problem — we’ll bundle up these notifications so your inbox doesn’t get clobbered every time someone adds a to-do:
Just for you
These notifications are only for you and only for a particular list. Other people will have to opt-in if they’d like to receive notifications, too. Want to stop receiving notifications? Just visit the to-do list, open the menu, and turn off the notification.
Give it a try!
We hope this update makes it easier to keep track of bugs, QA issues, and other unassigned tasks. Let us know what you think!
Thanks again for being a Basecamp customer.
How about letting us prioritize tasks with something more useful than an emoji. Or tag tasks. Or set statuses for tasks. You know, something every other task system on the planet does.
Hi Mike – we started using task groups for this recently – it’s not perfect but it’s quite flexible and user-friendly. I’m not sure I’d want our team to face the complexity of a full-on task management system built into basecamp.
Great new feature.
Is it possible to subscribe someone onto a list so they can get notifications? It’s sort of like you can turn notifications on for someone for a specific post in the subscribe button on the bottom. It’s helpful when I’m a project manager and i have the option to notify my team when new things come up instead of having to assign them the task, individually turn on subscriptions for them, or notify them via campfire/ping.
This an interesting update but I feel there are so many updates all users would rather see, like repeating to-dos, clientside signatures, bulk to-do updates, and better file management. How do you prioritize the product roadmap? Is there any way for users to add their voice?
Thanks Tyler. We hear from customers all the time via our support channels. This particular feature came from a customer request, in fact. It’s come up a number of times.
Keep in mind that every feature takes a different amount of time to develop. Some stuff can take many weeks, some features can take a few days, etc. Some features can be done by one person, others require an entire team. Some can be handled by any developer or designer on the team, while others require specialized knowledge or specific skills. Part of prioritizing is considering resource allocation, who’s available, what other work is in the pipeline, how one thing might affect another thing down the road, etc.
This particular feature a relatively high value addition with low risk and low cost – it was the right fit given everything else that’s going on at the moment.
Even if this one isn’t a perfect fit for you, I hope the background above provides a little insight into the kinds of things we have to consider when deciding what work to take on.
Jason, I really appreciate the insight. Is there a way to know what is being considered on the product roadmap? I think just knowing some features are going to be eventually included would be great.
Thank you! Along the same lines, it would be useful to have an “unassigned” filter in the “my assignments” in the my stuff > my assignments area.
Keep up the great work
I would love to be able to prevent clients from adding their own to-dos at all. We have a very structured approach to our projects, all based on keeping things on a specific schedule and this was developed so we are able to control the costs of completing a project. Some of our clients go wild in the to-dos and not only add other to-dos to existing lists, but add whole other lists. This means that the folks doing the project loose time looking at what was added which results in more hours and higher costs. We need to be able to lock down more features for clients.
thanks for the addition
however not useful for us
recurring tasks is a must have – hopefully the next addition
Imagine the response if Basecamp ever release a recurring To-Dos feature 😂👍
I like it, thanks guys.
What I would really appreciate is a way to let people know or receive notification that someone is out of the office besides having to create an OOF avatar.
What I would like to see is when you assign multiple people to a to-do item and they would be able to individually close the to-do when they complete it so it doesn’t complete the to-do for all assigned
Hi – I had requested this previously but I think is a non-starter at it would probably require a fundamental change to how the To-Dos work.
However, I have requested a ‘Duplicate’ option in the quick menu next to each To-Do so you could quickly created multiple copies of a To-do with a few clicks and then assign each individual duplicate of the To-do.
The lack of tgreaded messaging across all of Basecamp means that we have to use WhatsApp for meaningful discussion. Such a shame would love to be able to keep it all in Basecamp.
Great feature, we was a step away from sending you this idea to implement 🙂
An observation: if a todo is moved (not created) to a list in which I checked to receive notifications, then I do not receive a notification. It would be helpful to do that.
Thank you for the great feature!
Feature Request: the ability to tag people when creating a template.
Hey, you know what would be WAY more helpful? If Basecamp could notify me when a to do I have assigned to someone else is overdue. I actually need that far more than I need notifications that they have completed what I asked them to do.
So something was finally added that probably should have been there all along and this is the entire feature? The pace of improvement is truly glacial. I mean – I’ll use it, I like it. But seems like you could release 5-10 little things like this.
Great new feature – will help where teams are unsure who to assign stuff to. Bug tickets is a great example.
One related feature request that would complement this well, would be a report that shows all unassigned To-Dos. Having to use a third party tool to do this currently.
This would be excellent for documents and messages. I want to know if someone else is editing my document but I don’t want to manually go into the versions of each to check.
Also, it would be extremely helpful in tasks to be alerted if an assigned task has not been completed by the due date.