To quote Ray Liotta: “if you build it, he will come”. I am not a farmer and I know nothing about baseball; I believe a triple play is something good, desired, and, on average, fairly rare? As people take liberty with their (mis)quote, I will take liberty with people (he) approaching.

Whilst seeing a former colleague (friend) for a coffee the other day, they mentioned to me that they were looking to create a business for themselves. They had plenty of ideas but kept getting lost in the weeds and their attention was taken by the plethora of ideas that were coming to them. My current break from teaching, the idea-planning and organising schedule in ClickUp provided the perfect opportunity to put into practice the research that I had done for this scheduling.

The idea this person had required them to maintain a silo of multiple different headspaces, but encouraged the linkages between these silos. An example of this, within education, located within the Australian Curriculum. Throughout the years of teaching, students (and teachers) are expected to learn various aspects of knowledge*. This curriculum breaks up various fields of study, including English, Mathematics, Science, Humanities & Social Studies (SOSE, for those Gen Ys out there), Technologies, and Health & Physical Education. People tend to study or think about these individual strands of knowledge as that; individual. However, we can create links between these fields, making learning easier and more accessible to students.

*This sentence is loaded with various concepts that have wildly different, yet converging, ideologies around what is knowledge and how it should be learned.

Due to the range of subjects, and grades this person was planning on creating materials for, it was necessary to understand the steps between grades; making logical and understandable links from one concept to another – scaffolding. To best help visualise and plan this type of project, I looked at the following project management tools/software. The constraints were:

• Cheap, if not free,
• Easy to navigate,
• Easy to add sub-/tasks,
• Create timelines, and
• Implement easy-to-use Gantt charts/time-based events (alarms/alerts/burndowns).

I assessed the following software and used valued-judgements about the intended user based on the above constraints:

• Monday.com,
• Atlassian Trello,
• Odoo,
• Atlassian Jira,
• Smartsheet, and
• ClickUp.

Using these value-judgements, I assigned values (1-10) for each constraint, averaged each software, and used the following formula to easily find 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place:

=INDEX($C$2:$H$9,1,MATCH(LARGE($C$9:$H$9,LEFT(E$11,1)),$C$2:$H$9,0))

We’ll see how the next meeting goes.