5 tips to better use HacknPlan

In order to get the most out of the tool and improve the organization of your project, we recommend you to follow these small tips:

1. Create small work items: Dealing with big tasks or user stories is more complex and overwhelming, so we recommend to take some time to break them down to a reasonable size.
2. Avoid multitasking: Try not to put many tasks in progress at the same time and, if you need to put on several hats inside your team, try to group tasks of the same type together and work in batches. Switching context is costly and affects concentration and productivity, so the less you do it, the better.
3. Iterate: Iterative development is a nice way of perceiving progress, reducing risk and simplifying your scope, which allows you to focus better. We provide boards with deadlines as a generic way to create iterations but we don’t enforce a specific way to define them. However, defining short and time-boxed milestones (like sprints in Scrum) is very recommended, as allows you to be constantly evaluating yourself and that’s very positive.
4. Use a dedicated time for planning: If you plan things as you go or as ideas come to your mind, you may not be looking at the big picture and could make mistakes or overcomplicate your roadmap. We recommend dedicating recurrent sessions to evaluate what’s going on and plan for the future.
5. Keep the tool updated: Sometimes may seem that you or your team are spending too much time on keeping HacknPlan updated. However, despite this could look like a waste of time, it’s very positive for a number of reasons:
   1. It removes uncertainty and aligns your team.
   2. It avoids errors or misunderstandings about what has to be done.
   3. It gives you a perception of progress and achievement.
   4. It allows you to evaluate yourself, and coming back to past tasks and see what you did and how can help you in many ways.