I would like to solicit recommendations for what—for lack of a better term—I would call a Personal Project Workspace (PPW).
By PPW I don’t mean a project planning tool with Gantt charts, etc. such as Microsoft’s Project or OmniPlan (I own OmniPlan Pro). I don’t mean a Task list manager such as Things or Todoist or OmniFocus (I own and use OmniFocus). And I don’t think I want something as unstructured as Curio (which I own) or Notion (which is eminently available). Since these are largely personal projects, I don’t need a tool that focuses on collaboration.
What I need is an app that gathers anything and everything relevant to a project into one organized workspace; emails, notes, tasks, appointments, documents, etc. It seems so logical and sensible to have everything in one place I should think there would be a lot of options out there but I am aware of only one; Marketcircle’s Daylite, which is generally classified as a CRM but also organizes projects in addition to “opportunities”, as CRMs often call them. (I suspect that under the hood they are fundamentally the same; the end point of an Opportunity being to close a sale, the end point of a Project being to complete the project.)
Why not use Daylite? Well I do, and have for six or seven years. My annual subscription was renewed only three or four months ago. But Daylite is severely crippled on my Mac running Catalina. Daylite’s Mail Assistant plug-in, which is used to link emails to contacts, projects, opportunities or companies and pull them into Daylite, isn’t recognized or available in Mail on my Mac. Marketcircle’s customer support (which I’ve found over the years to be exemplary) says the problem is a flaw or bug in the operating system on my Mac. Apple says they can do nothing about it and sends me back to Marketcircle. The only suggestion Marketcircle offers that “might” work is a Nuke and Pave.
So I’ve been casting about for options. I need a CRM and have concluded that I may be better served by what is sometimes called an ECRM, or e-commerce CRM, which differs from the traditional sales-focused CRMs (such as Salesforce and Daylite) that focus on the sales process. An ECRM is usually triggered after the sale has been made through an e-commerce platform (eg. Shopify, Bigcommerce) and is used to manage the customer experience and customer support and often can even be integrated with accounting.
That still leaves a hole for all of the other projects I need to keep on top of that are beyond the scope of task managers and where it’s useful (essential?) to have a repository of all of the tasks, email messages, documents, notes, etc. Any suggestions?