Something that’s been bothering some Basecamp users is that it doesn’t support bars in its Milestone calendar. That is, you cannot see a start and end date of an activity, or discover that on a particular day some activity should be happening.

Since ‘doing my own thing’, I’ve realised that Gantt charts are pretty much useless for this information. Why? Well, it doesn’t matter what should be on-going on a particular day. You’re either dealing with an ongoing project – in which case you have discrete Next Actions (if you’re using GTD), or there is something which must happen Today, so you have a milestone for Today, or there is something which can be done today, which you keep on a list someplace else and you deal with it as your time and situation allows.

I’ve often considered posting the above musings to the Basecamp forums to back up the ‘less is more’ philosophy, but decided against it, because, for me it’s so damn obvious. And in any case what’s really important about a bar?

I’ll tell you: it’s where it starts and it’s where it ends. Not what happens in the middle.

My friend and business partner Mark has just used Basecamp to mark his holiday. He’s got two dates as milestones: the first day of the holiday and the last day. Nothing else. Because it doesn’t matter to me or him to know that someplace in the middle he’s still on holiday.