Owning a business requires careful management. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to have reliable task management skills to help you reach your goals without having much trouble. If you are someone looking for ideas on how to manage tasks properly, then you just happen to be in the right place.
What is Task Management?
Task management is simply organizing tasks to finish them before their target schedule. It involves a strategized process of developing each task from the initial creation stage to its completion phase. A practical guide to task management enables a project leader to figure out and monitor each of their team member’s progress from time to time. This includes monitoring timelines, each member’s assignments, to-do lists, project budgeting, and overall project status communications.
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When done right, task management can give businesses an effective workflow strategy to apply to their other projects. Learning how to manage task effectively may not be too easy. Still, companies can ensure a smooth flow of project completion with the correct information and task management tools.
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What Is the Importance of Task Management?
After getting to know what is task management, let’s now take you to the next level: understanding the importance of task management.
1. Identifies Priorities
Working on a project needs reliable prioritization skills. When you learn how to manage tasks, you must understand setting priorities. Being attentive to the project’s demand for attention is a must to avoid failures. Using a good guide to task management and the perfect task management tools can help manage time and identify appropriate task management solutions correctly.
2. Builds Better Team Relationship
Good communication makes any team more successful. Having dependable task management is a holy grail to achieve good communication between team members. Task management helps in giving upfront conversations within a team. Under a firm guide to task management, members can freely talk to their project manager and confirm their roles on the project. They can also make reports about their finished or pending tasks. On the other hand, project managers can then review the works of their subordinates and give their feedback right after.
3. Steady Project Flow
Effective task management gives project managers complete control over a specific project. And when a project manager has control of the project, everything will run smoothly according to their schedule. There are tons of task management tools that let teams schedule everything they need to accomplish. Using this, they can have a firm grasp of what they need to do. Teams can also easily update each other regarding their concerns, like knowing the current project status and other uncompleted tasks vital in securing an uninterrupted project flow.
How Can You Manage Task Effectively?
After learning the importance of task management, let’s now get to the most exciting part—learning hacks on how you can properly manage tasks.
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1. Create Your To-do List
It may not seem like it, to-do lists are one of the most powerful task management tools. Aside from their creation’s simplicity, they are also very effective in organizing project tasks. When creating your task management strategy, consider using smart to-do lists applications. Many companies use these task management tools to secure a smooth project flow. With the help of these task management tools, it would be much easier for you to jot down all your ideas about your project and avoid getting lost in what you need to do next.
2. Set Priorities
Having tons of projects at a single time could be exhausting and confusing. To prevent yourself from having difficulties handling deadlines, always sort out your priorities. Realistically, not all projects you have are needed to be done right away. There would be times wherein specific projects require an immediate response. To deal with this easily, make an established list of your projects specifying which are more critical and need to be done immediately. In this way, you can easily manage task and follow your schedule without getting pressured with your schedule.
3. Make A Schedule
The schedule is another important factor involved in task management. Mastering how to schedule your tasks is one great task management that can save you from deadlines. Having a set schedule of activities and tasks to finish also keeps the whole team focused on what they need to accomplish. When doing your task management strategy, always include making a reliable schedule for the whole project which your team will follow. Include information like time allotment for each task to have an idea and start managing their time. By using schedules for your task management, you can easily spread awareness throughout your team on how you are progressing with your project.
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4. Practice Flexibility
Changes are inevitable even with task management. Business is unpredictable. Sudden changes in the market trends or customer preferences can affect your task management if you don’t know how to handle it well. In this case, you and your whole team must know how to adapt quickly to these changes. Prepare task management backup plans for possible conflicts and loopholes on your project. As they say, prevention is always better than cure.
5. Communicate
If there is one sure way to do task management effectively, it is communication. Working in groups will require you to have clear conversations between your team members. This is not just to properly address what they need to do, but also to hear their own perspectives of the situation. When preparing your task management ideas, always include team open forums or any other activities which can help you and your team to have better communication. By doing this step in your guide to task management, you can just easily finish your task and avoid arguments. More importantly, communication can help you build a stronger relationship and strengthen your bond as a team.
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Best Task Management Tools You Should Try
Aside from the five tips we have given you on how to do task management effectively, there is also another way you can use ace-ing task management. How? Through the use of effective task management tools.
A task management tool or software is simply an object you can use to manage task effectively. There are tons of them lurking around the internet, waiting for you to discover them. To save you from the troubles of looking for them, we’ve already collected the top three task management tools you can use as a professional or even as a beginner.
1. To-Do Lists
To-do lists are the most basic yet very functional task management tools today. Many companies start their task management journey by making a To-Do list. This task management tool will help you a lot in taking notes of important ideas about your project, tracking your task management progress, prioritizing your tasks, and even assigning roles to your task management team.
2. Online Task Lists
An online task list is a digital counterpart of the classic to-do lists. This task management tool helps you manage tasks whenever or wherever you are. As long as you have your device and an internet connection, doing what needs to be done will be just a piece of cake.
3. Online Kanban Boards
Kanban boards are task management tools that provide a visual appeal to managing tasks Your tasks are made using kanban cards, which are properly placed in a set of relevant columns. These columns are usually labeled as “To-do”, “Doing”, or “Done”.
How to Choose the Right Task Management Tool?
Choosing the best task management tools could be tricky, especially if you are new. Here is our guide to a task management tool searching just for you to save you from picking the wrong one
To find the best task management tools for you, consider the following ideas:
- The specific type of projects you usually do
- How often your team collaborates often
- Special features like notifications, analytic features, and time-tracking features can benefit your team.
- A specific number of individuals within your team
- Free task management project templates
- Will the tool integrate into your existing tech stack?
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How To Manage Task Smoothly With Strikingly
Strikingly is among the few website builders who take task management to the next level. With our Team Manager feature, you can now easily send invitations to your friends, team members, and even your own family to edit and manage your own Strikingly website. You can even invite up to ten teammates to each of your Strikingly websites.
To set up your Strikingly Team Manager feature, simply:
1. Go to your site editor, then click “Settings”.
2. Select the "TEAM" feature on the left panel.
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Once you’ve selected the Team Manager feature, you can now start setting up your webpage. You can add and enter your teammates’ names, upload your own profile picture, add your teammates’ email, and even select roles for each team member.
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Some of the roles are Admin, Site Admin, Editor, Store Manager, Blogger, Agent and Public Rights. There is a corresponding level of access to your website for each designated role. After you are done setting up, you can now send the invitation to your team members. They first need to accept the invitation in order to gain access to your website and you're now ready to go for your task management journey.
Understanding how task management works aren’t as complicated as you think they could be. Surely it can tire you from time to time, but as soon as you get comfortable with how things go on it, you’ll be surprised on how things will work out. All you need is a bit of patience and the right set of task management tools, and voila! You are one step away from accomplishing your project.
Have some questions? Feel free to chat with us today.