Moo.do is designed to be extremely flexible. Our goal is to allow anyone to organize in a way that makes the most sense for them. While building Moo.do, we’ve been using it to manage its own development: as a planner, project manager, todo list, calendar, and bug tracker. I’ll describe how we use Moo.do as the first of a series of examples of how people and teams are using Moo.do.

We have spent a majority of the development process working remotely and in vastly different time zones, so making sure we know what to work on next without additional communication is especially important.

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Note: These examples all live demos of Moo.do itself, so you can interact with them.

Organization

At the beginning of a milestone, we discuss the main goals we want to accomplish and lay out a basic plan separated into distinct groups.

As we progress through the milestone, we mark tasks complete and add new bugs under Major and Minor Bugs. At the end of a milestone, we drag and drop tasks that did not get completed into the next release, and discuss what features and bugs from Future we want to bring in. Then we mark the current release complete and move onto the next one.

Prioritizing and Starring

We use the three priority levels in Moo.do to describe how soon we should deal with tasks. For us, high priority means that it should be handled immediately, while lower priorities are more important than most things, but can wait. We use starring to highlight things for the other person to look at.

When I look over what to do for the day, I mark what tasks I’m planning to do today as high priority to make them easy to find.

Tagging

We use tags to assign tasks, group related tasks together, or mark for future action.

#G	Assigned to Grant
#J	Assigned to Jay
#test	Done, needs testing
#feedback	Needs feedback
#ready	Ready for merge
#b_foo	Task is completed in branch "foo"
#discuss	To discuss in our next phone call
#punt	Delay until the next milestone
#watch	Bug that's hard to reproduce - keep an eye on it

Searching

This is where Moo.do is incredibly powerful. Between all the features, bugs, ideas, marketing plans, and user feedback, we have thousands of lines of data. Search lets us focus on what’s important right now.

As an example, I have a pane with the following search to show me what I am doing today:

#J	Shows only tasks assigned to me
-#punt	Hides all postponed tasks
	Hides completed tasks
	Shows tasks of at least medium priority

Multiple Panes

It is often quite useful to look at the same data in different ways. A nice way to use search in Moo.do is to have multiple panes open with different searches. Hiding completed and punted tasks shows what’s left.

This is a fully interactive instance of Moo.do. Try your own searches like #Grant or #J.

Focus On You

I like to use Moo.do full-screen with three panes open at once:

Searched for -#punt as shown above. This is where I add, edit, and assign features or bugs. I can add to the current release or scroll down and add them to the next one.
Focused on this release and searched for -#J -#punt to see my tasks.
Focused on this release and searched for -#J -#punt which is my todo list for the day.

This is a fully interactive instance of Moo.do. Try your own searches like #Grant to see Grant's tasks.

Discussion

In some cases we want to add more information to a task, or I want to ask a question on a task Grant added. To add details to a bug or feature, ask questions, add steps to reproduce a bug, or request a code review, we add a sub-item assigned to the other person with a tag, and star it to make it stand out. We often have short conversations as we try to reproduce a bug.

If you would like to see tips for how to organize your particular set of content, or have an interesting organization method that you use, send us an email at contact@moo.do. We’d love to hear about what you do now or how you stay organized with Moo.do.