How To Manage Tasks Effectively — Surefire Ways To Succeed As A Manager
Being someone who has been part of the task management industry for as long as I can remember, I have come across this question quite often. Whenever I meet someone from my professional network, more often than not the greetings are followed by this or a similar question. I might express my answer in different words, but the crux of what I explain to them always remains the same.
In this post, I’m trying to cover all the things that I have learned as a manager, as a leader and as a working professional about task management. I hope with this post I will be able to answer all the common questions that are related to task management, for which working professionals and managers are always looking to get an answer.
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But before we get into that I’d like to share some key points that will help you understand what poor task management could cost a business:
In a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, they reviewed more than 10,640 projects from 200 companies in 30 countries. During the review, they found that only 2.5% out of all these companies were able to complete 100% of their projects successfully.
In a similar kind of data provided by LiquidPlanner, it was found out that finishing tasks on time, which is associated directly with task management, is the second biggest challenge faced by managers. The second one is project costs, which is again dependent on completing tasks on time.
From looking at these numbers one can easily conclude that task management is the most important aspect of running a team and a business. If you fail to manage tasks efficiently, you can forget about running your team and your business successfully.
Reasons for poor task management
In order to figure out how to manage projects and tasks effectively, we need to first of all understand the reasons that lead to poor task management. Here, I’ve compiled the list of most common reasons that lead to ineffective management of tasks:
- Unclear roles
It all begins with task allocation, which is one of the most important project management skills for a project manager to possess. However, when allocating tasks you as a manager need to make sure that everyone in the team knows his or her role. You cannot expect a team to perform their tasks well, when no one has a clearly defined role. In fact, chances of chaos are increased drastically in such scenarios.
- Poorly defined scope of tasks
The second major reason behind poor task management from the team could be poor defining of its scope. Since no one has a clear understanding of what they are supposed to do and how these tasks fit in the overall scope of the project, they are eventually going to end wasting time doing things that don’t matter at all.
- Unrealistic deadlines
Even if the roles are clearly defined and the scope of projects and tasks has been clearly shared with the team, it is of no use until the team leader or the project manager sets a realistic deadline for its completion. It becomes important to keep into consideration all the factors when setting deadlines to ensure that things remain clear and on-track for the team.
- Lack of accountability
Team members are bound to become less accountable when they don’t have a clearly defined role and scope of the projects and tasks. This lack of accountability eventually leads to things slipping into the cracks, projects falling behind their schedule and eventually big loss to the organization, all of which could be easily avoided by practicing simple task management tactics.
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- Review and feedback
Another common problem that is generally encountered in task management is the time wasted during review and feedback process. Not many managers pay heed to the fact that review work consumes a big chunk of time. This is the reason that they continue to work the same way, and fail to manage their tasks and teams effectively.
And, that is exactly what we are going to discuss now.
What you can do to manage tasks effectively
There are pretty simple steps that you can take in order to become a pro at effectively managing your tasks. Let us take a look at those steps:
- Plan ahead (Gantt charts)
Planning is the most important aspect of work management in today’s time. As they say, failing to plan is planning to fail. You need to invest serious efforts in planning your projects and tasks.
Your planning should involve:
- Setting clearly defined roles and responsibilities for every team member.
- Keeping track of resource availability and their workload so that they don’t get overburdened or underutilized.
Using a task management tool like ProofHub can prove to be just the perfect idea in this regard. How ProofHub can help you in effective task management — this we are going to discuss in the subsequent sections.
- Better work allocation
When allocating work, be certain to pick the right person for the right job. For instance, you might want to assign a complicated task to someone who has experience, and tag someone with relatively less experience along with that person. This would ensure that the work is not being hampered, while the knowledge transfer being carried out effectively.
- Efficient review process
Another easy way to ensure that task management is carried out in an efficient manner is to streamline the review process. There are tools like ProofHub that come with an in-built online proofing app to make the review process quick, easy and hassle-free.
Invest in the right technology!
The best thing you can do to bring sanity in your task management process is to deploy a tool like ProofHub that can streamline it.
How ProofHub can help
One of the first things that you will notice in ProofHub is the flexibility it offers in task management, which is unlike the other to-do list apps. You can use it to create simple to-do lists that work well to keep your daily tasks organized. At the same time, there are custom workflows and boards for teams that stick to an agile approach in their task management.
“Manage your tasks, teams and projects better. Start using ProofHub.”
To-do lists
ProofHub simplifies task management for teams by offering easy-to-use to-do lists. You can simply create a task list and subscribe your team members to it. In the list you can:
- Add tasks
- Set start and end dates
- Divide them into sub-tasks
- Assign individual tasks
- Add comments to asks for better clarity while assigning them
- Attach files
- Add labels
And a lot more.
Kanban boards
Kanban boards in ProofHub are a great way to break your tasks into easily manageable stages. You can create custom workflows with tasks divided into individual stages that users can move as they progress. Kanban boards work great as a visual tool.
Custom reports
Another wonderful feature in ProofHub that makes task management easy for managers is custom reports. Since it gives you the option to set parameters of your choice in reports, you can eventually plan your projects, resources and everything else in a more efficient manner.
Timer
To become better at task management, you need to employ steps that can help you avoid time wastage and improve your time management skills. With ProofHub, it becomes easier to do so as it has an in-built timer and time tracking feature. You can use it to record the amount of time you have spent working on your task and track your productive hours. The time data is stored in easy-to-understand timesheets, which you can refer to for future work assignment and task management.
Gantt charts
Gantt charts in ProofHub are an excellent way to plan your projects better. You can try them out in the free trial of this project management software. Using them you can create a visual timeline of the projects and even set dependencies between tasks. This can help you find out the bottlenecks and improve your task management endeavors in the longer run.
Conclusion
Efficient task management in today’s time has become more about using the right technology. This is the reason that using productivity tools like ProofHub is looked upon as a blessing for the managers; especially during the current and future landscape of work which is going to revolve entirely around distributed teams and remote working. If you are finding it difficult to manage your tasks, teams or communications effectively, it is time you start using these tools. And, they are surely going to change the way you look at task management!!!
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