To understand task management is, first of all, to understand what keeps people safe. Most teams are less productive than they are able to be. However, this problem is not about a natural distress of people to focus on their tasks. It is about CRITERION of leaders to communicate the working posture adopted, and it starts by defining which are the priorities. Each employee reacts in a different way before his/her to-do list. However, no one will be able to be more productive than he/she already is if the company’s infrastructure is the same as always. If the dialogue and the sharing among members are complicated. My advice is: include in the company’s planning a reset of its task management and try to automate it using software. This is the first step to improve the team’s organization, communication and transparency. See how it works:
1. List, prioritize and allocate tasks
Just write down all the tasks that are in your head. Then it’s the time of having criterion. You must do what is important and urgent, as soon as possible: mark these tasks as priorities. The urgent but not important tasks you delegate. Thereby, you quickly prioritize and allocate your tasks. It’s simpler than you thought. You, not your boss, need to watch you: After you have completed the list of your tasks, respect the order of priority given to them. Without it, your productivity will never improve. This is the crux of good organization.
2. Use a management software
With it, you will take your great leap, which, although high, is not anything dangerous. There is a crucial difference between softwares and notebooks to manage your tasks: you don’t waste time neither to calculate how much time you have spent nor to know when your whole to-do list will be finally completed. The best systems estimate it for you. Other good news: after adopting the system within the company or your team, everyone will work with the same rigor of organization you take. Thus, managers will be able to verify if the employees still feel engaged at work and know their failures and successes.
3. Measure investments
Use the software also to generate reports. In any case, to get the best from your resources (which, we know, are finite), you first need to measure the return on investment. If I had to do a cut in expenses this month, would I know where? If I need to hire well-qualified professionals, will the company save money or it’s already grown enough to take this step? Are the wages fair for the duties performed? And the results, are they as expected? These data should be saved in a secure database, where the reports will come from. As I suggested, automating them is an intelligent alternative, since gathering all the numbers in spreadsheets will be quite stressful and everything you don’t want now is to be less productive.
4. Have time to work and time to rest
Being super productive doesn’t mean being always in advance with the tasks list, and it’s not about having had only a few breaks. Try the following: every half hour of work, take a break of five minutes. When you put hands-on again, you will come with a fresher mind and might even notice new corrections to do. Moreover, this is your chance to unwind as you always wanted. Never forget: this is not losing focus! Check out in this post three techniques to manage time that never went out of fashion.
5. Communicate important decisions
Have less emails. Have quicker meetings. Don’t think you are transparent with your team because you spend several emails to clear up a briefing and convene always-important meetings, fighting to understand where to go. A productive company is led by a team that has time to fulfill their work and think about innovation. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, remember? Einstein said it, not me. For now, this is the last tip to reach a new task management, more productive. After tasks have been organized, prioritized and allocated, the project go into the rails. But it will only conclude the trip early with two conditions: if stocked only with the essential and if making a few downtimes.
Do you believe that with these 5 steps will you rethink your current task management to make yourself and your company more productive? If your question was about the task management software, you no longer need to choose which one to use. Meet Runrun.it, the software to manage tasks recommended by 83% of its customers. Try it for free: http://runrun.it
Recommended for you:
- How engaged is your team in the task management?
- Task management software: work with it, not within it
- Task management: 3 old problems now solved
