My Basecamp 2024 Wish List: The Hit List

I recently wrote about 2,000 words on what I’d like to see in Basecamp over the next year but, if you’re looking for the Cliff’s Notes version, here’s the hit list plus a few more.

The Big Ones

• Faster task entry, task sorting & filtering: with natural language processing to quickly assign tasks to the right person, project and due date. And more ways to sort, filter and save custom lists of tasks. And I know Jason has pushed back on this before: but some color coding to indicate priority would be nice.
• Heystack improvements: A more seamless flow for triaging new notifications to automatically navigate back to the Heystack upon viewing or responding to a notification.
• Keyboard shortcuts: CMD-J is a good start, but Basecamp should have more shortcuts for users who prefer them.
• Up Next improvements: add tasks to Up Next upon task creation or from any task list (eg. from My Assignments With Dates).
• Quick Entry button: to add a task or create a new message from anywhere.

The Little Touches

• Basic markdown support in the editor.
• Search Improvements: search for anything from CMD-J (or another keyboard shortcut like CMD-K), and add natural language boolean searching (eg. “In:Project Red, Sub: Client Blue”)
• Rich preview links for cloud files (Google Drive, OneDrive/SharePoint, AirTable, etc.) in messages. Cloud links currently display as long jumbled URLs in messages.
• Personal projects: where the assignee is always me so these tasks show up on My lists.
• “Bubble up” to resurface messages or tasks in the Heystack at a specific date and time.
• Collaborative docs: Every now and then it’s helpful to have multiple people editing a doc at the same time (hello meeting notes).
• Interactive iPhone (and desktop!) widgets for tasks in Up Next
• Multi-day events in the Lineup that aren’t projects: for example for team offsites, conferences and vacations.
• Automated reminders to Move the Needle or Hill Chart
• Better email parsing for Email Forwards.

Like what you’ve read? Follow me on Threads @danielkuney. I also recently wrote about one of Slack’s worst features.