Since college, I have had a lot of collaborative projects that were not always the best. To say the least, they were unorganized. It was not until I started having internships when I was introduced to a lot of the project management tools that were discussed in this week’s reading.

During one of my internships at Chicago Scene, I worked as a Social Media Manager and was responsible for five neighborhood Instagram accounts. Planoly was the main application tool that we used since it helped with marketing and targeting audience algorithms on social media. It was a great tool for scheduling and publishing content. In fact, I still incorporate it into my daily work for both my photography and poetry accounts.

Slack is another basic tool that I currently use with my GTA. Although, I have used it for prior internships as well, I found it incredibly more useful this past summer while I was a contributing writer for a magazine. It was a great tool for communicating and allowing everyone who worked remotely and independently to still collaborate and provide feedback on story ideas. Rather then relying on a messy group chat via text messaging, Slack is a better alternative for communication.

However, over the course of Experience Design, Basecamp was introduced, and I’ve found it to be relevantly easy. The design’s structure is very similar a digital Kanban Board — for me, that sort of organization is a necessity for effective collaboration and ordering of project responsibilities. In the short amount of time that I have used it, it has grown on me enough to know that I will use it for future collaborative projects.

However, of all the project management tools, Planoly must be my favorite application, mainly because of how often I use it. It takes away a lot of my stress when it comes to posting daily content. Being both well organized and time convenient, it works with my schedule and lifestyle. I save myself a lot of time that I would not have if I had to sit down and post periodically throughout the day.