Our to-do tracking is separated into three lists: monthly, weekly, and daily. At the start of each month we list the items we want to accomplish. Next, at the beginning of each week, we transfer items from our monthly to-do list to our weekly to-do list. Then at the start of each day, we take on tasks from our weekly to-do list and aim to accomplish it by the end of the day. Random tasks will obviously come up so we add it to the appropriate list.

Another advantage to our system is that we're able to see eachothers' lists so everyone is held accountable -- if someone is slacking, we'll tell them. A SMS alert is also sent to the person's phone if their last login is greater than 24 hours.

The only resources we're "pouring" into it is a dedicated server, which we already had available to us. Since we're a smaller company we'd rather focus on scaling our app instead of our to-do list. When the time comes to expand our team, we'll adapt and overcome. I don't see any reason to abandon what works for us just because of the "what if's."

Sure, some may feel our solution is a bit too much but that's okay. We spent a lot of time looking for something comparable and decided to create our own instead. It may not work for you, but it has created measurable results for us.

When you're setting up processes in a company it's important to realize the resentment that you'll be up against if you change them later.

Founder and programmer here. And flat files are really convenient when you know your way around a text editor. But if all TODO systems are so bad we programmers have failed, haven't we? Why can't we have our cake and eat it too?

Edit TODOs quickly as if it's a flat file, and at the same time get time reporting, tags and all the advantages of a structured approach. That's what I want, now I think about it.

I have a simple app called taskit(GPL) that i wrote hoping that it would transition to what you describe, but i didn't really have time for that alone. And it's beginning to show its design deficiencies.

I use punch for time tracking since it fits my workflow better than basecame time tracking. `gem install punch`

Basecamp is awesome but it's not really for startups. No nested Tasks, no multiple people for tasks. Time tracking is too basic. Not the end of the world, really, but DHH and Jason hate feature-creep so I'm not holding my breath.

I didn't like basecamp either until recently. I have met some very productive people who used only a .txt file for project management.

The only downside is it's $9/month if you have more than one developer.. You can always sign up for a free account first to see if you like it though.

They also have a free Student and Startup Edition of FogBugz on Demand for up to 2 users.

What really impresses me about it is how easy it is to make your setup as simple or as complex as your needs are. It's free for <= 5 users and very pricey after that.

It's a jruby on rails app and I'm running it on glassfish on ubuntu.

http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-project-intelligence

Supports to-dos, milestones, time tracking and a notebook (simpler ver of wiki). It also supports Git and SVN.

Quote: DrProject is a web-based project management portal that integrates revision control, issue tracking, mailing lists, a wiki, and other tools that software development teams need to succeed.

DrProject was originally a fork of a popular lightweight open source portal called Trac.

http://www.streamfocus.com/

I second lighthouse and goplan.

http://www.sugarcrm.org

billings is great for time tracking (has an excellent, easy to use (best in my opinion) widget for starting and stopping your timer), but is also single user

lighthouse (lighthouseapp.com) is great for team project manangement