What is the best way to manage projects and to-do’s in your business? Read more to find out!
Online tools for project management, task management or productivity - there are just so many of them!
I am usually reluctant to recommend just one, because the one that works best for me might be terrible for somebody else.
It's a very personal decision to make as it depends on:
how you personally like to work,
what you need, and
what type of business you have.
Over the years I have very often thought that this is a vital tool that is missing from many of the small business owners I speak to. It's really amazing how many people don't use one, but personally, my business and I couldn’t get through the day without one, especially when working within a team or with multiple clients.
So what I can share is what I've seen as very popular options. And what I've personally found after trying a lot - and I mean, a lot - of different options. Watch the video below, or keep reading, to learn more.
BEFORE YOU CHOOSE
Often, when we don’t have much time, we dive in and choose the most popular option. Now this might work for you, but to save a lot of headache and wasted time, it’s best to ask yourself a few questions first to then make the right choice from the beginning.
IMPORTANT QUESTIONS TO ASK:
How do you like to view information? Are you a visual person or are you more of a list or dot-point person?
Will you be the only one working within the task management system or collaborating with other people in your team or with outside clients?
Do you need something that works for both your own business tasks as well as your client or customer projects and tasks?
How do you like to plan?
Are you so busy that you just add quick notes in a todo list and get to it when you can or fire off emails to your team each time you have a task they need to do?
Or do you like to plan your projects daily/weekly with real thought of the process, how does each task link, what needs to be done in which order, who is in charge of what, who needs to collaborate on certain parts of a bigger project etc.
or maybe a little bit of both?
PROJECT MANAGEMENT OPTIONS
So now you know what you would like your project management tool to do, let’s look at some options. Some project management tools do a lot, some only have basic functions.
For those that are more visual, something like Trello is worth checking out. It’s one of the most popular project management tools for those that like visual representations of projects, tasks and to-do lists. It uses boards and tasks are set up as cards that can be moved around and have images and files attached and checklists within them too. But it’s also worth noting that a lot of other task managers are now adding the option to view your tasks in this format too.
When I was working solo, I used to use an app called ToDoist and that was really good at the time. It's been a couple of years since I've used it now so I can't say for sure that it's still the best one. But it was great back then so hopefully it's only improved since then. So it'd be worth having a look at still.
ToDoist is a great list based task manager with some great features like recurring tasks, colour coding, subtasks and sections. You can keep it super simple or get pretty clever with how you set it up.
My recommendation, and what I use now, as a team of five people and directly with some of my clients, is Asana. It’s very powerful and very free, even for a team.
There are certain features that you do need to be on the paid plan to use, and who knows, maybe we would find it even more useful with those features, but unfortunately that's one of the downsides with Asana. To move up to the paid plan is a bit of a jump. So, we'll be sticking with the free plan for now and it’s working just fine for us.
And just to clarify - when I was still solo in my business, I tried using Asana then, but I spent way too much time trying to make it work properly and in the end it was too much. It was too complicated and complete overkill for what I needed as a solopreneur. That’s when I went back to ToDoist and that was better for just one person.
But for a team, here some of my favourite features of Asana that we couldn't live without:
Comments
A way of communicating about tasks and projects, between different team members is via the comments function.
You can comment on a task or a sub task or a project.
You get notified straight away within Asana in your Inbox.
It keeps a lot of noise out of email.
Organisation - Subtasks and teams
You can have all different levels of breaking projects down. As you should expect, you can have a project that has tasks within it. But then each task can also have subtasks. And then the subtasks can also have sub tasks. I probably wouldn’t break it down too much further, but it gives you that ability if you really want to.
Group projects
You can create teams and group projects within those teams.
Say for example, I've got mine broken down into client work versus internal Positively Sorted work. And in my case, everybody has access to both teams, but if you had say a marketing department and an operations department that didn't need to see each other's projects.
Or, recently one of my clients asked about Asana and has just started using it. I have now given them access to the project so we can view tasks in real time and cut down on emails. It also means they only see their own project and none of our internal projects or other client projects
Colours and tags
You can also give each project a colour, so that with certain views you can see things by colour and that helps to organise things more visually.
Tags help you sort things even further.
As an example: I have tags like “high priority” when it needs to be done asap today or “waiting” for if we're waiting on a response from a client to be able to do a task. I can click on the waiting tag and actually see all the things that were waiting on and then follow up with people all at once. Also, if something's overdue but it has a waiting tag on it we can go okay yep that's why that hasn't been done, lets hold.
Different Views
One more thing, is the ability to view things in different ways. So, if you're a list person, you can view things in a list. If you're a bit more visual person you can set up a project as a card/kanban/Trello like format with cards that you can move around. Or you can also view tasks on a calendar with everything showing on the calendar on the date that it's due.
Birdseye View
This is another really handy feature. I can also click on a team members profile and see all the tasks that have been assigned to them to see how loaded up they are and if I can allocate more work to them or if I should let them keep going with what they've got first and maybe give it to somebody else.
Attachments
You can attach files, images and links; anything you want to add a task that will help get that task done so everything's all in one place.
Asana also integrates really well with Google Drive. We use Google Drive for all of our file storage because it's easy to share and collaborate on things (and that might be another video). But in Asana, you can attach say a Google Doc that might be in a draft. When somebody else opens that document, it takes them straight to the Google Doc as a live document, so that any changes they make are automatic and can be seen by everybody else that uses that file and team members aren’t looking at old or out of date info.
I love Asana and could not run my business without it.
So, if you have been thinking about a way to keep track of all the different work that you need done, have a look at it.
OR GET IN TOUCH AND WE CAN SET IT UP FOR YOU
We actually have quite a few clients that don’t use a project management system, they just send everything to us and we manage it in our own Asana setup. So you could just send your tasks to us ;)
Actually, that's another feature: the fact that you can forward emails from your email inbox to Asana and it will come through to Asana with all the attachments and body of the email in the body of the task so that all that information is there and all you need to do is allocate it to the right person and put a due date on it.
I could go on all day, and yep, we love Asana!
Which program do you use? What do you like or dislike about it? Comment below OR if you want more info on how we can help you choose and setup the right project management program for you, follow the link below to send me a message and we can jump on a call.
