Mark Twain said, "The secret of getting ahead is getting started." I would say getting started is important, but what is even more important is sticking to the plan. This means putting your head down, developing good work habits and getting things done. To get things done, you first need to know what needs to be done by creating a to-do list and sharing it with your team. That's were Wunderlist comes in. But it's much bigger than that. Wunderlist is not only a great tool for creating to-do list. It's one of the sexiest collaboration tools out there. Here are 4 reasons why it is a great tool and how I have been using it as part of collaboration arsenal when monitoring outsourced projects:

 

1. Dispatch  - Was the backbone of my setup. It enabled me to get things organised by reducing the amount of emails sent to and fro between team members. It also included comments and files, which means we could upload files and add comments to improve efficiency. 
2. Evernote was the place where I entered all the steps required to complete the project we were outsourcing. I would strike out each step as soon as the outsourcing service provider finished working on it. I called the file the "issues list" because every time I noticed a problem, I would append a comment at the end of the file to make sure no issue was missed. I then imported this file into Dispatch and shared it with the developers working on our projects.
3. Wunderlist - Back then neither Evernote nor Dispatch had reminders. I also never really liked using Evernote for creating to-do lists. That's where Wunderlist came in, to serve as a task management app and for setting up reminders. However, over the past year or so, Wunderlist has really matured. As I mentioned above, it now features Files, Comments and Task delegation, which makes Dispatch unnecessary in my teamwork setup. I am also still investigating the file size limit for tasks in Wunderlist because the last time I tried to write a long task description, it got truncated. When working on big projects, files tend to get big as well. There are a lot of things to track. That is the only reason why I still need to use Evernote for maintaining my issues list. Otherwise Wunderlist would be the only tool that I need for teamwork. 

So there you have it. These are the reasons why I use Wunderlist and why I believe you should also try it, unless you have a tool that is good enough that you are already using. If those are not sufficient reasons for you to try Wunderlist, maybe you will be interested to know that the developers of Wunderlist, 6Wunderkinder, just announced that they now have 5 000 000 Wunderlist users across the globe. I don't know about you, but I think that's strong enough social proof that it is a great product. Give it a try. 

If you are a Wunderlist user, let me know how you are using it. If you are not, tough luck. :-) Just kidding. How about disclosing your secret weapon of collaboration in the comments below?

Here is a short video that presents the brand new Wunderlist comments feature.