At a glance
- Who: Pluk Farm, an eight-person community-supported farm co-op in Amsterdam.
- Before: a year of spreadsheets, a busy group chat, and task tools that meant copying everything in by hand.
- Now: around twenty shared timelines, one per growing zone. Fully up and running in two weeks, with no training. All eight still active every day.
Eight people, one piece of land, and the same question every group like it runs into: who is doing what this week, and what did we agree last time. For more than a year Pluk Farm, a community-supported farm co-op in Amsterdam, looked for something to hold the answer, and nothing they tried quite held it.
If you have ever helped run anything with other people, a co-op, a household, a small studio, a community group, you will know the shape of this. The work is real and the people are willing. The hard part is keeping track of it together.
The year before jotsum
Before they found jotsum, Pluk Farm reached for the tools most groups reach for. Here is what each one did, and where it let them down.
Spreadsheets. Crop planning lived across a stack of them. It worked until it did not. Things got messy, entries went missing, and a spreadsheet cannot tell you when something actually happened. It holds the what, not the when.
The group chat. So the day-to-day moved into WhatsApp. The group buzzed from morning to night, the thing you'd asked someone to pick up got buried under everything else, and anything that came round again had no structure to sit in. A chat is good at talking. It is poor at remembering.
Task and project tools. They set a few up as tests, and each one meant entering their work by hand, copying it in item by item. Before they had even finished a single week, the setup was costing more than the coordination it promised. So they kept drifting back to the chat.
What changed
What turned a test into a decision was setup. Instead of copying a week of tasks in by hand, they imported it, and jotsum read each task, dated it, and placed it on the timeline where it belonged. Then they tried it the other way round, exporting their harvest notes into the harvest log sheets they already keep. When they saw how much time that saved, and how cleanly it sat alongside the documents they were not about to give up, they moved across.
jotsum let them build the structure around the farm, rather than the farm around the structure. They made a timeline for each of their growing zones, around twenty of them, with names like Haan and Koe, so the tool mirrors the land they already walk together every Monday morning.
Before, passing something to someone meant chasing them in the WhatsApp group, where it pinged everyone. Now they mention the person on the entry itself, on the right zone's timeline, dated and easy to find. That person picks it up when they next look, and nobody has to nag the whole group. Nothing pings anyone, because jotsum has no push notifications at all, and the team still checks in every day, because they trust that nothing has slipped out of sight.
Nobody had to learn a system, because there was barely a system to learn. If you can send a message, you can keep something in jotsum.
Where they are now
The member who ran the import had the structure in place within a day. From there the team came across together, at the pace a farm allows. People work different days, and the whole team is only in one place for the Monday walk-around, so they reviewed and onboarded over a couple of those. Within two weeks everyone had moved across, with no training, and all eight are still active every day.
We were looking for a tool for our tasks and planning for over a year. It had become quite messy with stuff spread across multiple spreadsheets and things were getting lost. This app is great because we arrange our tasks around our farm zones like Haan and Koe and review our plans on our Monday walk-arounds, and we don't have to check tasks and handoffs by sending each other messages.
— Pluk Farm CSA, Amsterdam, an eight-member co-op, all active daily
What a farm co-op shows the rest of us
What Pluk Farm did is small and quite ordinary, which is rather the point. A group does not need a heavier tool to coordinate well. It needs somewhere light enough that keeping a decision is as easy as mentioning it, and calm enough that nobody has to mute it to get through the day.
When that is in place, "what did we decide?" stops being a question you ask each other. The answer is already on the timeline, dated, where you left it. We did not build jotsum only for farms, or only for groups. But a co-op walking its fields on a Monday morning turns out to be a clear picture of what it is for: keep what matters, find it by roughly when, and let the structure follow the way you already work.