Collaborative software aims to do three things:

1. Keep you organized
2. Keep your team co-ordinated
3. Help you leverage your work and reuse information

They are great aims, but they are hard to achieve.   A small start-up called itensil has gone a long way to solving all there problems by adding work-flow to a wiki.   Now you can easily combine ”knowledge work” with structured work-flows.

How to Stay Productive with Wikis

Wikis are a great fact sharing tool, but they are also hard to use in an activity centric work environment.   Say, for example, you are using a Wiki to store business information.   Maybe you are running a bank, and you need to document all your lending models, and store information on how you validated those models.   It is a real business problem.   And a Wiki represents a real business solution.   Imagine that it is a pretty successful internal Wiki.   Maybe it has 1,000 pages.   Considering that many large banks have over 500 lending models for all the different kinds of loans out there, 1,000 pages is not a crazy number.

How do you watch all of those pages?

How do you know when to go in and create a new page, or approve the documentation that someone wrote?

Do you email your colleagues?   “Bob, please edit this wiki page”.   Weren’t wikis supposed to get rid of emails?

itensil solves this problem by adding work-flow to wikis.

itensil’s Wikiflow helps Get Things Done

One of the coolest sites on the web is called 43folders.   Run by Merlin Mann, it servers as a useful daily reminder that it is possible to organize your life more efficiently.

Merlin is a huge fan of a book called Getting Things Done, by David Allen.   The subtitle is “The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.”

Merlin Mann summarizes the book this way:

So how does GTD work?

This is a really summarized version, but here it is, PowerPoint-style:

1. identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (close all open loops)
2. get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now
3. create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
4. put your stuff in the right place, consistently
5. do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
6. iterate and refactor mercilessly

So, basically, you make your stuff into real, actionable items or things you can just get rid of. Everything you keep has a clear reason for being in your life at any given moment—both now and well into the future. This gives you an amazing kind of confidence that a) nothing gets lost and b) you always understand what’s on or off your plate.

The system works when you are using your own to-do lists.   So it helps keep you organized.   But it doesn’t necessarily help keep your team co-ordinated, and it doesn’t necessarily help you to reuse work.   Wikis are great for solving that last problem.   However, as as Merlin points out, you can quickly get knocked off course looking through a Wiki.   I was just on his site, researching this article and ended up reading an article called Update: 43f Deals & Discounts, with a weird picture.    I clicked on the picture and ended up reading a Wikipedia article about 19th century miser called Hetty Green.

Merlin Mann even recognizes the potential problems with Wikis as a tool for distraction and time wasting.   Here’s his solution:

Wikis

• Don’t read anything longer than a screen
• Don’t follow the links to other articles
• Just read what you came in for the first place

itensil has a better solution

Step 1 - The itensil To-Do List

itensil starts with a 2 views on the same To-Do list.   Assigned from me.   Assigned to me.

The idea is that you can see what you gave yourself, versus what other gave you.

Each To-Do item is grouped into an Activity, such as a Marketing Campaign, or Develop a Lending Model, or Issue a New Loan.

Step 2 - From To-Do Item to Wiki Page

Click on the To-Do Item and it takes you to the wiki page were you are supposed to do the work.

In the screen below, the user, John, was given the task of writing a Campaign Strategy for a car called the 2007 NuFlow sedan.

When John is finished writing the strategy, he hits the continue button, which sends a To-Do on to the next person in the process.

Step 3 - Alter the Process When Needed

Behind the scenes, a workflow keeps people coordinated.  

When you hit the Continue button, a little dialog comes up.   You can either send it on, modify the workflow, or send it back.

The really powerful thing about itensil is that it builds the process from the way you work, rather than forcing you to fit the way you work to the process.   And once you are finished, you can navigate the content you and your team have created using a regular wiki interface or using the To Do lists.

Watch the Video - Join the Early Access program

You can check out a video demo of the itensil system.

They also have an early access program.   With the combination of workflow and wikis, it looks like itensil will be a great tool to help you:

1. Stay organized
2. Keep your team co-ordinated
3. Leverage your work and reuse information