Project management with Hojoki: Creating Order from Chaos

Hojoki (Photo credit: takuhitofujita)

Managing a project where your team has to use several different cloud apps to get work done can be extremely confusing. I discovered this great app called Hojoki that binds all these various tools together into one coherent workspace so you can see everything getting done.

It solves the problem of everyone going off to work in their favorite cloud tools and making it hard to know what everyone’s doing. It lets you sign into several common cloud collaboration apps (Basecamp, Google Drive, Trello, Twitter, Evernote, Google calendar, GitHub etc.) and create one coherent timeline from the activity happening in all those different apps. (You can see the email update below for an idea of what the timeline looks like). It really creates order from chaos.

Hojoki in a Project-Based Classroom Setting

I used it when I was collaborating with 10 college students and two other co-teachers on building a mobile app. We were officially using Trello to manage the project but often they didn’t post frequent updates there, so there were gaps in the record of what was getting done. The programmers did all their work in GitHub while the designers were sharing mock ups in Dropbox and the researchers were using Google docs for their work.

Finally, I plugged all those tools into Hojoki and was able to get a “big picture” view of how and where all the work was getting done. Hojoki even lets you comment on activity from your timeline view so your comments appear in the tool they’re working in without you having to actually go there.

If you’re intrigued, check out Hojoki‘s website and start plugging in the apps you use with your team and see how it displays your work.

Update: It appears that the people behind Hojoki are working on a newer iteration of the idea called Catch. It looks much slicker and matches the overall iOS7 design aesthetic nicely, but I haven’t given it a try yet. You may want to check out both, since Hojoki still seems to be available, and it has an Android app while Catch is still for iOS only.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, but I would recommend these tools without them.