Q: I like having one system for all of my projects, business and personal. Is there a way to do that in Basecamp?
A; Yes and no.
Most project management advice that I’ve seen strongly recommends keeping your personal tasks/to-do’s out of your business project management system because of privacy. If you have a user in your organization that has access to all of your Basecamp projects — a web developer or a graphic designer, for example – then having your personal info in Basecamp isn’t a great idea. Though with Basecamp you can naturally limit access to projects only to specific people. But if you are in a large organization — especially with a company policy on backups and data control, then I’d recommend against it. Or at least if you want to do it, make a separate Basecamp account just for this purpose.
Now if you are a small shop or a solo developer, with limited access to others on your projects, then I don’t see it as a problem. I’d simply create a new project for yourself “myProject: Personal” for example, and go from there. One of the nice things about this approach is that since your Google Calendar (or other iCal calendar) is presumably synced with your Basecamp projects, you will be able to have your personal items and your business items all on one calendar. Again if you need your personal task to be personal, then this approach won’t work in a shared environment. But if you are a solo shop, you could do it and you would avoid the problem of having to use on PMS for business and one for personal.
So those are just my thoughts. What are you using for personal project management? Do you find it a problem having two different systems, or are you using Basecamp for your personal projects, as well?