Managing Tasks Effectively With Project Management SoftwarePosted by Vistisen Horner on May 17th, 2021 Long before I started working with Teambox, when I was at WorkMetro my IT department tried to wean me from Excel spreadsheet and Outlook Tasks for Task Management. website got me an account with what they thought was a super cool new product they found called Basecamp. I was really excited, first and foremost because even though I am a sales and marketing leader, at heart I am one of the biggest techno geeks in the bay area. They nicknamed me 'the borg' at SurfControl because I wore my Jabra bluetooth and GM Netcom phone headset at all times. Granted this was in 2002. When it comes to using new tools especially new software I like to think of myself as an early adopter if not an innovator. So here I am, excited to jump into some new online task management software and get away from a time consuming and isolated system. Then I get into the software. Now Basecamp has its uses, and if I were a software engineer building a complicated project plan, with 50-60 people, and huge task dependencies, I may have fallen in love at first sight. This was not the case, I was a sales director and there was just too much to do to manage the product itself. I was not looking for more work but something to make me more effective. For my day-to-day task management, Basecamp was not the answer. But now that I knew there was a possibility to find a better way, I spent the next couple of years hunting for a functional alternative to outlook and excel. First I migrated to Google docs and built a Steve Coveyesque quadrant spreadsheet. This was aided with a daily task list document and for a long time this worked. check here was more effective than the outlook excel combo and was available online. At this point I was a full-time sales consultant with five startups as clients. My tasks lists were miles long and prioritization was critical. The problem was no matter how I tried it was linear and required a daily update and review to make sure I was clearing out tasks, completing tasks, and keeping my priorities straight. After losing at least an hour a day to this practice I started looking for a better method. The next migration was to Zoho Tasks. The ability to create multiple tasks lists helped, especially as I listed tasks by client, and now I could use drag and drop to prioritize. This improved my processes and made it easier to see what I needed to do next. I still struggled with the products poor user interface and no way to delegate or easily manage changes in plans. If I wanted to rebuild a task list it took hours. I could not create and projects so it was hard to group objectives together. Zoho was the best I had found so far regarding simplicity but it still had no power. After losing my last virtual assistant and having my growing task and project lists spiral out of control, I stumbled upon a great tool. I found was a project collaboration software and I got to use it for up to three projects for free. Now I had a project for my consultancy tasks and could quickly create task lists and tasks. What was amazing at first was how easy it was to set up the system then how simple it was to manage it from the web, email, or my cell phone. Now instead of paying time into a system, it was actually helping me speed up the process of task management. How? By giving me the flexibility to manage tasks, delegate, update or resolve from anyw here , I could update the system and lose no time between tasks. By being able to see what I needed to do in multiple viewing styles I spent less time prioritizing and more time getting the important tasks done. Also, I could update status without effecting tasks so my clients, partners, and other needed business associates could see what I was up to without having to search through email or make a phone call.Like it? Share it! More by this author |