- Things 3 2 2 – Elegant Personal Task Management Tools
- Things 3 2 2 – Elegant Personal Task Management Tool Download
- Things 3 2 2 – Elegant Personal Task Management Tool Template
- Things 3 2 2 – Elegant Personal Task Management Tool Set
Regardless of where you stand in the organization hierarchy or personal accomplishments, this blog is for you. Here is a list of handpicked task management tips that you can work with today to accomplish your milestones without them getting the better of you.
Management Task #2: Planning. Planning is one of the management functions and one of the most important everyday tasks of the managers. Managers are persons who plan the future of the company and think about all future activities that organizational members must accomplish. So, planning becomes one of the most important management tasks.
Just because an online task management software doesn’t have the features you want, doesn’t mean it won’t be there tomorrow. The best task management software companies are constantly iterating and releasing new features on a regular basis. Use these tips to help you find the right task management software for your personal projects. Get more work done with Planner. Create Kanban boards using content-rich task cards with files, checklists, labels, and more. Collaborate in Planner and Microsoft Teams and check visual status charts—all in the Microsoft cloud. Empower everyone on your team, no matter their role or expertise, to. Earlier in the week, we asked you for the best personal project management tools to keep track of all of the moving parts in your home renovation, family reunion, birthday party, vacation plan,. TaskQue is an web-based task management software that enables you to manage your team’s workload in a way that ensures easy project management and enhanced productivity. X When you visit our website we use your cookies to provide a delightful and optimized user experience.
Our daily lives revolve around a certain number of tasks that we identify along the way to achieve our ambitions and SMART goals. In the struggle to be at the top of our game and retaining our competitive edge, we often bite more than we can chew.
Although everything seems of high priority, something goes amiss in this race of getting things done and keeping your head. Some of us create a long to-do list to accomplish – before a certain time period or a certain age. Others spend so much time perfecting a single task that by the time it shines, it is obsolete.
Workload balancing and time management skills are not only associated with project managers or bosses. In fact, these skills need to be adopted on each level especially working in a team. If not, it can render dire consequences for a project altogether.
According to a study by Cornerstone, work overload decreases productivity by 68% in employees who feel they do not have enough hours in the day to complete their tasks. So, what are the essential task management tips that we all need to be effective and efficient, simultaneously?
Top 10 Effective Task Management Tips
1. Make To-do Lists
To-do lists are classic, yet powerful and effective more than ever today. Back in the day, people kept handwritten notes for ideas and things to get done. They are like your everyday essentials and add to your effective task management tips.
Now, people have smart to-do list apps that give out notifications and reminders before the task is due. It is easier than ever before to jot down ideas in the form of images, voice notes, text and so much more.
Shivani Siroya is the CEO of Tala, a microloan startup. Siroya states: “I’ve figured out how to make all these digital systems work for me, but I have to admit, at the end of the day, a list on paper still feels the most useful.”
Make it a habit to arrange a list of things to do. Also, make use of the many free and premium to-do list apps that will help you do just that.
2. Prioritize
Understandably, not everything on your to-do list needs to be done right away. Yes, there are some great ideas that can help you take your game a notch up. However, it is important to establish what is important at a specific instance.
Michael Mankins is a Bain & Company partner and co-author of “Time, Talent and Energy”, a CMI Management Book of the Year. According to Mankins, “Liberating time requires eliminating low-value activities altogether, not merely capturing them on a list,” he stresses.
Take help from the BCG matrix, and understand the strengths and weaknesses of your projects as well as the opportunities and threats it is facing. Once clear with what matters at the time, you can define the importance of the tasks better.
Things 3 2 2 – Elegant Personal Task Management Tools
3. Schedule
Scheduling tasks is a great task management skill and keeps the team focused on what is at hand without going off-track worrying about other tasks. However, keeping on track is a major struggle in itself.
Did you know that according to a study, a person wastes about 21.8 hours a week? Professionals are more or less affected by distractions that seem harmless at the moment but result in major setbacks later. These distractions include phone usage and small talk.
According to a study by Udemy, more than a third of millennials and Gen Z (36%) say they spend two hours or more checking their smartphones during the workday.
Next, make a schedule and allot start and due dates. By assigning a due date to a task, we tend to be more aware of the cost it incurs, both monetary and time-wise.
One of the best ways is to go Agile. Create backlogs and assign it to a sprint. This also gives a better perspective on the time required for each task completion.
4. Be Flexible
Holding your stance is a great quality to embody if you want to achieve milestones and deadlines. However, some instances and situations require revisiting already made decisions. Being flexible is #4 on our list of the top task management tips.
This can be due to a sudden change in the market trends, change in customer drive or if a certain task appears to overshadow others.
Any of these factors, if not acknowledged on time, can strip a team off potential chances of success and growth. It is important to be on the lookout for likely loopholes of if another opportunity seems to be passing us by. Be flexible with deadlines when you need to be. Together 2 4 3 ubk download free.
As stated by Osman Khan, CEO, and co-founder of the online auction house, Paddle8, in a Forbes interview,” In the right roles and with the right people, flex does offer tremendous productivity improvement.
It gives people time to process properly, and it gets them out of the office in terms of being bogged down in day-to-day admin. So, there is more thought leadership that comes to the table, and that’s where your creativity and innovation come in.”
See also:
15 Best Productivity Quotes by Productivity Gurus
5. Manage Change
Being open to change is important but mastering the how-to of it is equally important. Most of the times, we are unable to drive the change needed for a certain project or in our strategy.
However, this skill can help increase the chances that your project meets its objectives 6 times more than with poor change management.
With the Scrum methodology, you can be open to and manage change easily through the daily Scrum meetings. The daily scrum gives you an opportunity to not only have an overview on the tasks being done but also the bottlenecks they may face. This way you can alter backlogs to better suit the changing requirements.
6. Delegate
Being over-burdened is a real thing and if not addressed well, it can significantly affect productivity. By the end of the day, we are only humans working with other humans. Each of us hold a unique set of qualities when it comes to patience, resilience, working under pressure or getting a task done in the least amount of time.
According to Eli Broad, philanthropist and founder of 2 Fortune 500 companies, “The inability to delegate is one of the biggest problems I see with managers at all levels.” Hence, it is downright crucial, to not only be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses but those of your team, too.
When you stay vigilant, you can better analyze who can better help out at a certain stage. One of the best task management tips is to know how to delegate tasks, to the right person.
Things 3 2 2 – Elegant Personal Task Management Tool Download
This opens windows for the other person to experiment and grow as well, which leads to growth in your team.
7. Be Involved
After helping the team sort out their priorities and delegating critical tasks, leaving the arena is a complete no-no. Setting up a team and schedule is great for success, but it also needs to be consistently followed upon.
If a project requires a daily scrum meeting, increasing workload or approaching deadlines can lead teams to give it a back seat. This may often lead the management to stay aloof in hopes that the team will suffice by itself. In reality, this is the time to be more involved than ever before.
Did you know that according to a study by the University of Ottawa, 33% of projects fail because of a lack of involvement from senior management?
Instead of micromanaging, be present and reachable if the team needs you. In order to make the most of your plans, prioritization, and scheduling ensure that all steps are followed by everyone in the team. This includes stakeholders and clients.
8. Be Patient
At times things may not go as planned causing us unprecedented setbacks. As per a study by Wellington, only 37% of teams in the U.K. reported completing projects on time more often than not. It is only human to feel overwhelmed and experience a dip in your morale at such times.
By mastering the art of patience, you can get through difficult situations and help your team get back on its feet sooner as well.
As Jack Ma, entrepreneur and founder of Alibaba says, “The very important thing you should have is patience.”
9. Communicate
The importance of communication has been reiterated on numerous channels on a variety of levels throughout the years. However, statistics prove that this is an area where professionals, even managers lack skills in.
The anomaly here is that despite the criticality of this skill, proven time and again, professionals choose to look the other way when it comes to communication. Whether it is your personal task management or project milestones to be achieved in a team, people seldom decide to state their mind. This is where team collaboration software plays a vital role in ensuring smooth communication between the concerned parties.
Fear of seeming incompetent, lack of availability by managers, and playing the blame game are some of the bland reasons why the most important information goes amiss. This can lead to major setbacks, in the long and short run.
According to David Grossman, in “The Cost of Poor Communications”, a survey of 400 companies with 100,000 employees each stated an average loss of $62.4 million per year (per company) due to insufficient communication among employees.
10. Use Task Management Software
Having the right ammunition can win you battlefields. The same goes for battling effective task management and time tracking. Technology has paved the way for many startups to become market giants and has built billionaires.
The right tool at the right time can render wonders for your personal and professional life. Task and project management skills may have a lot to do with on our personal traits and qualities but adopting the right task management tool can raise chances of success exponentially.
Be sure, to research and choose the right task management apps for you and your team.
Some of the free project management tools you can consider today are nTask, Asana, Trello, Wrike and more. However, be practical and adopt tools according to what is feasible, not just what is reining the market, keeping in mind finances, learning curve and team requirements.
You can start with free task management and productivity apps, and upgrade along the way.
Which task management tips have helped you manage your workload? Share your story and lend us some tips in the comments below.
Liked this article? You can help us grow by sharing it with your network:Tags
CollaborationCommunicationtask managementteam managementteamworkOther Related Articles
- Product
Introducing nTask 2.0 – Our most awaited update yet
9 Tips to Time Management for Maximum Productivity
The Top 6 ActiveCollab Alternatives to Use in 2020
Management tools, if they are used appropriately, can be powerful enablers of change and actions in companies. They can, for example, help define and execute the strategy, engage with customers and employees and monitor performance.
I am always interested to see which tools are most popular and how the popularity of the various management tools is shifting and changing. A great insight into this is provided by Bain's Management Tools and Trends Survey. This study conducted by Bain & Company gives us a global picture of the adoption and trends of management tools. It has been produced annually since 1993 and is now covering 12,371 respondents from North America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America.
Jixipix romantic photo 2 3 2. The results of the recently revealed 2013 survey show that the world's top five management tools are:
- Strategic Planning
- Customer Relationship Management
- Employee Engagement Surveys
- Benchmarking
- Balanced Scorecard
To see strategic planning on the list is not really surprising. It has always been important but when the economic climate is tough then making sure all efforts are focused on the most important things is vital. Photobulk: watermark in batch 2 1. In difficult times companies haven't got the luxury of wasting time and money on things that are not really important and don't contribute to their strategy. While the strategic planning is getting better in most companies, the strategy execution isn't. Research finds that only 10% of strategies, even of those that are well formulated, are well executed. I find that the communication of the strategy is often poor and most mission and vision statements exemplify that. (See e.g. What The Heck is Wrong With Mission and Vision Statements?)
If strategy execution is a problem then it is good to see the Balanced Scorecard in the list of top 5 tools. In fact, it ranks as the number one tool in Europe, Middle East and Africa. The Balanced Scorecard can take the output from strategic planning and turn it into something the companies can execute. The Balanced Scorecard helps companies to execute their strategy by (1) creating a simple one-page strategy map that outlines the most important strategic objectives, (2) monitoring the strategy execution with meaningful and relevant Key Performance Indicators, and (3) ensuring the correct action plans are in place to deliver the strategic priorities. You can argue that the Balanced Scorecard follows on from strategic planning to ensure the strategy is turned into practice. And again, in difficult economic climates companies need to ensure and monitor that they are doing the right things. (See my recent post: What The Heck is a.. Balanced Scorecard?)
Benchmarking goes hand-in-hand with the Balanced Scorecard. Key Performance Indicators can only generate meaningful insights if they are compared with targets and benchmarks. Benchmarks can come from within the company by comparing departments and business units or can come from industry research or best practice studies. This is again a reflection of the current economic struggles many companies are facing. Companies need to make sure they stay ahead or close to the competition. Introducing some competitiveness into their systems with benchmarked performance goals and targets for everyone can boost productitivty. (See my recent post: What The Hell is a.. KPI?)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is increasingly being used by companies as they try to drive up customer loyalty and maximise cross-selling opportunities and customer profitability. Most companies know by now that it is cheaper to keep existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. The data and insights that come out of customer relationship management systems can then be used to identify cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. Many of my clients are now using CRM systems to better understand customer life-time values and predictive customer trends. This in turn is useful information that should feed into the customer perspective of the Balanced Scorecard.
Finally, we have Employee Engagement Surveys in the list of top 5 management tools. After all, employees are still our most valuable (and often most expensive) assets. The global war for top talent is still raging and every company wants to hold on to the talent it has acquired or developed. Similarly to customers, it usually costs a lot of money to recruit and train new employees. We also know engaged employee are not only more loyal but also more productive. And every inch of productivity is vital in today's competitive global economy. Similarly to the customer information, the data from employee engagement surveys feeds into the people perspective of the Balanced Scorecard.
Things 3 2 2 – Elegant Personal Task Management Tool Template
In my job I spend a lot of time helping companies improve their performance and for me, these five make an eminently sensible list of tools to use for any organisation today, be it a global blue chip, a small or medium sized company or a government agency. They all need solid strategic plans, a tool to execute their plan and ways to monitor and evaluate progress. At the same time they all need to ensure they manage their customers and engage their employees.
The Bain survey also finds that 4 out of the top 5 tools fall into the top quadrant for user satisfaction levels. The only one that lags a little behind is employee engagement surveys, which again is something I can verify from my own experience. In so many cases it is just a statutory process or a PR activity, rather than a true survey of staff engagement. Having said that, in practice I also see many problems with the other 4 tools, which are often implemented in a 'we should have this' and 'we have to follow this process' way. Instead, they are most effective when they are based on real buy-in and understanding and when they are customised to the specific needs of the company.
As always, please let me know what you think. Do you agree with this list and my interpretation of why they are in the top 5? Have you got any good or bad experiences with any of these? Any comments or lessons to share? Please do so..
Things 3 2 2 – Elegant Personal Task Management Tool Set
------
Bernard Marr is an enterprise performance expert who helps companies with their strategic planning, balanced scorecards, KPIs and benchmarking as well as the development of customer and staff engagement analysis. Click 'Follow' if you would like to hear more from Bernard in the future.
You might also like to read some of his other recent posts: