Quire

My team and I work in a high speed environment where keeping track of the latest information via emails, texts, calls and more is extremely hard. Quire has been a great tool for keeping the entire team up to date with all of the latest and greatest information. We don't want anyone to have to refer back to emails to see what is correct, so we make sure that we immediately update the project information in Quire and then everyone is on the same page.

We set up a tagging system, so that our various clients and the various facilities we do work at each have a tag with a particular color. As we open up a new project, we will apply the correct tags, so we know at a quick glance who the important players are. This is especially useful as everyone on the team bounces around from project to project, so knowing who is involved and what job # to bill to is very important. Quire handles this all very well.

Quire also allows you to attach small files, which is one the main features we use, and possibly the most important. We know that the latest spec sheet is in the project on Quire, so we don't have to search around for it. It keeps our artists on track and asking way fewer questions.

Quire's sync is very good and updates very quickly when others make changes / updates. We use the web and iOS versions all day every day.

I feel like the searching functionality could be improved, so when you search for a particular name or client or job name, it only shows you the tasks that match your search. Right now, it only highlights matching tasks in a long list. It makes it too difficult to find a specific old job, so for instance you can copy information from the old job task to a new job task.

I've used many task management applications before for their various strengths and functionality in conjunction such as Trello, Keep, Workflowy, etc. at the same time but Quire is an interesting middle-ground. While it doesn't consist of the strengths of the other tools, it sits comfortably in between them and is pretty consistent with one's desired workflow.

It's simple enough to quickly manage and navigate through, and has enough complex features for someone like me to keep track of larger projects, whether in a team or simply working solo. Its tag-search system is also fantastic! It allows the tool to get out of your way so that you can put more time and energy on your actual work.

Another brilliant idea that Quire has had recently is to have an app-less access to your project via browser shortcut on smartphones. What it does is that it saves a shortcut your phone's desktop so you can access your tasks even if offline just like an app without having to install anything! I love that!

While the desktop navigation is fantastic via short-cuts, Quire seems to be pretty clunky on smartphones. I can still drag around tasks no problem (except for my chubby finger not letting me see where I'm even dropping it), it's really hard to use it to create and manage tasks or plan-out projects on-the-go. This is partly what keeps me from using it on Android, and instead I still rely on Google Keep.

Other things may be considered a "con" for some, even though it wasn't for me, but thought I'd mention either way:

For one, Quire's strength is in its simplicity, so there may not be features that high-end project-management tools are expected to have, such as the Timeline feature. Personally I did not require it, because Quire's Progress Stats is fine enough for me.

Secondly, part of Quire's simplicity aspect goes into how the tasks are managed; when you finish a task, it is removed from sight, therefore out of mind so you can now focus on something else. While it makes you more efficient and productive (provided you've planned things out ahead of time), in certain projects there are times when I'd like to keep track of completed tasks, and it's not really easy to do that quickly in Quire unless you decide before-hand how you intend to use it. But that's just a minor nitpick, so it doesn't bother me that much.

Though I do mind lack of Google Calendar integration.

The thing that Quire does best is exactly what I've struggled with using tools such as Trello. Most of us don't get the luxury of being able to work on only one thing, and keeping track of all the different buckets of stuff without an overarching structure is a cognitive load that can become overwhelming.

Quire let's you create a structure containing multiple buckets, create views (sublists) to work with the parts that are relevant for different teams, play with structures until it all makes sense - everything that makes it easy to manage competing priorities and swap "hats".

Each focus can then be managed on a board view while maintaining sync with the overall list view.
This has become my absolute favourite personal productivity tool and I'm just starting to recruit others so I can prove it in a team context - there is a Trello conversion which worked well for my personal todos but might not be quite as smooth for the mammoth boards we have for dev work.
Oh, and, it's absolutely free!!!

It's still pretty new so people don't know about it. There is an app market but few options as yet - for example, integration with Outlook is only with Todos, not meetings, and only one way (Quire->Outlook). I'd love to be able to add Outlook meetings automatically into my Today, Tomorrow, This Week, Next Week board so I don't overload tasks into a meeting heavy day (that reminds me - ability to do recurring tasks is built in, yay!)