Sep 12, 2017 Things 3.1.5 – Elegant personal task management. September 12, 2017 Things is a task management solution that helps to organize your tasks in an elegant and intuitive way. Ultimately, refusing to embrace task management can cost money, time, and stress. What’s more, with a little foresight and planning you can easily cut down the amount of time spent managing your team’s tasks. Here are some tips for saving time on task management: Tip #1: You have a calendar so use it! Your calendar is an invaluable resource. Here are three task management methods which make up the core of my workflow, and the workflows of millions of other people. Developed in the 1940s by Toyota, Kanban (Japanese for sign or card) is a task management system you’ll definitely recognize if you’ve ever used apps like Trello or Kanbanchi. Personal Strengths List: 30 Examples for Job Interviews 1. Strong Communication Skills. This strength is perhaps the most basic skill that employers look for, but “strong communication skills” is a phrase that is used so often that it is often unclear what it really means.
- Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management Software
- Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management Skills
- Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management Programs
- Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management System
- Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management Tool
- Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management System
- Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management Software
We all need to manage our time and workloads at work, so here are ten tips to help you do so effectively.
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Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management Software
Join For FreeOur daily lives revolve around a certain number of tasks that we identify along the way to achieve our ambitions and SMART goals. In the struggle to be at the top of our game and retaining our competitive edge, we often bite more than we can chew.
Although everything seems of high priority, something goes amiss in this race of getting things done and keeping your head. Some of us create a long to-do list to accomplish – before a certain time period or a certain age. Others spend so much time perfecting a single task that by the time it shines, it is obsolete.
Workload balancing and time management skills are not only associated with project managers or bosses. In fact, these skills need to be adopted on each level especially working in a team. If not, it can cause dire consequences for a project altogether.
According to a study by Cornerstone, work overload decreases productivity by 68% in employees who feel they do not have enough hours in the day to complete their tasks. So, what are the essential task management skills that we all need to be effective and efficient, simultaneously?
Regardless of where you stand in the organization hierarchy or personal accomplishments, this blog is for you. Here is a list of handpicked skills that you can work with today to accomplish your milestones without them getting the better of you.
1. Make To-Do Lists
To-do lists are classic, yet powerful and effective more than ever today. Back in the day, people kept handwritten notes for ideas and things to get done. They are like your everyday essentials and add to your effective task management skills.
Now, people have smart to-do list apps that give out notifications and reminders before the task is due. It is easier than ever before to jot down ideas in the form of images, voice notes, text and so much more.
Shivani Siroya is the CEO of Tala, a microloan startup. Siroya states: “I’ve figured out how to make all these digital systems work for me, but I have to admit, at the end of the day, a list on paper still feels the most useful.”
Make it a habit to arrange a list of things to do. Also, make use of the many free and premium to-do list apps that will help you do just that.
2. Prioritize
Understandably, not everything on your to-do list needs to be done right away. Yes, there are some great ideas that can help you take your game a notch up. However, it is important to establish what is important at a specific instance.
Michael Mankins is a Bain & Company partner and co-author of “Time, Talent and Energy”, a CMI Management Book of the Year. According to Mankins, “Liberating time requires eliminating low-value activities altogether, not merely capturing them on a list,” he stresses.
Take help from the BCG matrix, and understand the strengths and weaknesses of your projects as well as the opportunities and threats it is facing. Once clear with what matters at the time, you can define the importance of the tasks better.
3. Schedule
Scheduling tasks is a great task management skill and keeps the team focused on what is at hand without going off track worrying about other tasks. However, staying on track is a major struggle in itself.
Did you know that according to a study, a person wastes about 21.8 hours a week? Professionals are more or less affected by distractions that seem harmless at the moment but result in major setbacks later. These distractions include phone usage and small talk.
According to a study by Udemy, more than a third of millennials and Gen Z (36%) say they spend two hours or more checking their smartphones during the workday. Human anatomy atlas 7 4 01.
Next, make a schedule and allot start and due dates. By assigning a due date to a task, we tend to be more aware of the cost it incurs, both monetary and time wise.
One of the best ways is to go Agile. Create backlogs and assign it to a sprint. This also gives a better perspective on the time required for each task completion.
4. Be Flexible
Holding your stance is a great quality to embody if you want to achieve milestones and deadlines. However, some instances and situations require revisiting already made decisions. Being flexible is #4 on our list of the top task management skills.
This can be due to a sudden change in the market trends, change in customer drive or if a certain task appears to overshadow others.
Any of these factors, if not acknowledged on time, can strip a team of potential chances of success and growth. It is important to be on the lookout for likely loopholes of if another opportunity seems to be passing us by. Be flexible with deadlines when you need to be.
As stated by Osman Khan, CEO, and co-founder of the online auction house, Paddle8, in a Forbes interview,” In the right roles and with the right people, flex does offer tremendous productivity improvement.
It gives people time to process properly, and it gets them out of the office in terms of being bogged down in day-to-day admin. So, there is more thought leadership that comes to the table, and that’s where your creativity and innovation come in.”
5. Manage Change
Being open to change is important but mastering the how-to of it is equally important. Most of the times, we are unable to drive the change needed for a certain project or in our strategy.
However, this skill can help increase the chances that your project meets its objectives 6 times more than with poor change management.
With the Scrum methodology, you can be open to and manage change easily through the daily Scrum meetings. The daily scrum gives you an opportunity to not only have an overview on the tasks being done but also the bottlenecks they may face. This way you can alter backlogs to better suit the changing requirements.
6. Delegate
Being over-burdened is a real thing and if not addressed well, it can significantly affect productivity. By the end of the day, we are only humans working with other humans. Each of us holds a unique set of qualities when it comes to patience, resilience, working under pressure, or getting a task done in the least amount of time.
According to Eli Broad, philanthropist and founder of 2 Fortune 500 companies, “The inability to delegate is one of the biggest problems I see with managers at all levels.” Hence, it is downright crucial, to not only be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses but those of your team, too.
When you stay vigilant, you can better analyze who can better help out at a certain stage. One of the best task management skills is to know how to delegate tasks, to the right person.
This opens windows for the other person to experiment and grow as well, which leads to growth in your team.
7. Be Involved
After helping the team sort out their priorities and delegating critical tasks, leaving the arena is a complete no-no. Setting up a team and schedule is great for success, but it also needs to be consistently followed up on.
If a project requires a daily scrum meeting, increasing workload or approaching deadlines can lead teams to give it a back seat. This may often lead the management to stay aloof in hopes that the team will suffice by itself. In reality, this is the time to be more involved than ever before.
Did you know that according to a study by the University of Ottawa, 33% of projects fail because of a lack of involvement from senior management?
Instead of micromanaging, be present and reachable if the team needs you. In order to make the most of your plans, prioritization, and scheduling ensure that all steps are followed by everyone in the team. This includes stakeholders and clients.
8. Be Patient
At times things may not go as planned causing us unprecedented setbacks. As per a study by Wellington, only 37% of teams in the U.K. reported completing projects on time more often than not. It is only human to feel overwhelmed and experience a dip in your morale at such times.
By mastering the art of patience, you can get through difficult situations and help your team get back on its feet sooner as well.
Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management Skills
As Jack Ma, entrepreneur and founder of Alibaba says, “The very important thing you should have is patience.”
9. Communicate
The importance of communication has been reiterated on numerous channels on a variety of levels throughout the years. However, statistics prove that this is an area where professionals, even managers, lack skills in.
The anomaly here is that despite the criticality of this skill, proven time and again, professionals choose to look the other way when it comes to communication. Whether it is your personal task management or project milestones to be achieved in a team, people seldom decide to state their mind. This is where team collaboration software plays a vital role in ensuring smooth communication between the concerned parties.
Fear of seeming incompetent, lack of availability by managers, and playing the blame game are some of the bland reasons why the most important information goes amiss. This can lead to major setbacks, in the long and short run.
According to David Grossman, in “The Cost of Poor Communications,” a survey of 400 companies with 100,000 employees each stated an average loss of $62.4 million per year (per company) due to insufficient communication among employees.
10. Be Tech Savvy
Having the right ammunition can win you battlefields. The same goes for battling workload balancing and time tracking. Technology has paved way for many startups to become market giants and has built billionaires.
The right tool at the right time can render wonders for your personal and professional life. Task management skills may have a lot to do with on our personal traits and qualities but adopting the right task management tool can raise chances of success exponentially.
Be sure, to research and choose the right task management apps for you and your team.
Some of the free project management tools you can consider today are nTask, Asana, Trello, Wrike and more. However, be practical and adopt tools according to what is feasible, not just what is reining the market, keeping in mind finances, learning curve and team requirements.
You can start with free task management and productivity apps, and upgrade along the way.
Which task management skills have helped you manage your workload? Share your story and lend us some tips in the comments below.
tips,skills,time management,workload,task management,dev career,agile
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Ever since Things 3 came along, it’s been my todo app of choice. Every now and then I check out the competition, but I always swing back.
Inspired by Stefan Zweifel’s post, here’s how I use Things on a daily basis.
Table of contents
Why Things?
Things is one of the most beautiful Mac apps I own. Being that pretty is a killer feature on its own, but not enough to be my task manager of choice.
Things is best-in-class because it’s pragmatic in every way possible.
Things doesn’t scream at you. Didn’t get to that task you scheduled yesterday? No problem, it’s been rescheduled to today. Things doesn’t care. It won’t shame you with a big OVERDUE badge. Things exists to serve, not control.
Things scales remarkably well. Need to record a quick task for today? Hit the Add Task button from the Today view. No need to waste time and energy triaging the task. Need to outline a big piece of work? You’ve got sections, projects, and headings to your disposal.
![Things 3 6 1 – elegant personal task management tool Things 3 6 1 – elegant personal task management tool](https://is3-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Purple49/v4/f4/26/fb/f426fbce-5e48-7849-7a15-c8e90a2a787e/pr_source.png/942x0w.jpg)
Use any combination of the features Things has to offer, whatever feels right for the job. Things is as effective with broad undertakings as it is with tiny projects.
Before we get started
We need to sit down, and outline what belongs in a task manager. More importantly, we need to determine what doesn’t.
I have two main uses for a task manager:
- To not forget things
- To schedule my time
Remember the milk
Not forgetting things generally applies to small tasks.
Client support comes in right before I check out of the office? I’ll create a task for tomorrow morning next morning. Question from a colleague while I’m in the zone? I’ll create a task so I don’t forget to ping back later.
At home, watering the plants once a week and picking up a package from the post office are typical tasks in this category.
Scheduling my week
Scheduling isn’t about “not forgetting something”. I’m not going to forget to build that new major feature for an active project. I’m not going to forget to finish the blog post I’ve been working on for days. Scheduling is about managing my time as efficient as possible.
I generally schedule my week on Monday. In the morning, I create tasks for whatever I want to get done, and spread them across the week. Sometimes tasks need to be done rather sooner than later, in that case I’ll schedule them on Monday or Tuesday. I also try to keep Thursdays and Fridays calmer than the beginning of the week, since I can always expect the unexpected to push things back. When I schedule a task on a specific day, it’s meant as a guideline, not a rule.
When I decide to do something “some time next week”, I schedule it on the next Monday. Then when I’m scheduling my week on Monday, I’ll scheduled it more specifically.
What doesn’t belong in a task manager
Before looking at how I structure my tasks, it’s important to know what doesn’t belong in my todo workflow.
It boils down to the following rules:
- A task should be actionable
- If a task is also relevant to someone else, it must (also) live somewhere else
An idea isn’t a task
Ideas aren’t actionable, they belong on a notepad.
“Write a post about my Things 3 workflow” started out as an idea, so I added a note to my “blog ideas” pad. Once I committed to writing the post, it can become one or more tasks. If I need schedule time to write and eventually finish the post, I’ll create a task.
Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management Programs
My task manager is personal
If I need to squash a bug in a project I’m working on with others, I should create a GitHub issue. If I want to outline a feature I’m working on, I should probably use my team’s project management solution.
I keep my task manager as lean as possible. For myself: having too many tasks in my personal space stresses me out. For others: if I document work to be done as public as possible, others can follow along and chime in too.
Things is made to schedule tasks, not outline the work at hand.
How to Things
Now that you understand how I approach task management in general, let’s apply this to Things, from top to bottom.
Inbox
I mostly use the inbox on the go, or when I want to jot something down when I don’t have much time.
I don’t only use the inbox for tasks, but also for random thoughts, links I want to remember… Anything goes. When I have a spare moment, I open my Inbox and triage its contents. Some things get assigned to a section, some get scheduled, others might belong in an entirely different app.
Today & upcoming
The Today view is open almost permanently on my desktop.
When you don’t finish a task on its scheduled date, Things simply keeps the task in the Today view. No pesky “overdue” badges to make you feel bad. This fits my workflow because I rarely need to work against hard deadlines.
I might schedule a task on a specific day, but that’s meant as a guideline, not a rule. If something MUST be done on time, I add a deadline. I barely assign deadlines to tasks, which makes them even more powerful when I do.
I often use reminders to get notifications for things I don’t want to forget on a certain day. If I could make one feature request to Things, it would be location-based reminders.
I only recently started using recurring tasks. For work, I use them to remember weekly updates I need to send to clients. Moviesherlock 5 9 0 download free. For personal use, I use them to remember to pay certain bills, or to put the garbage out.
Anytime, someday, logbook, trash
I almost never use these. Very occasionally I tuck something away in someday, but to me that’s often a smell that it probably belongs somewhere else than my task manager.
Sections
Things 3 has sections to organize tasks. I have two sections that exist permanently: Spatie (my employer) and Blog. In Things, you can also create tasks and projects without nesting them in a section.
Personal tasks aren’t sectioned. Sectioning personal task doesn’t provide any benefits to me, and it keeps the sidebar calm.
When I’m working on a big project, I’ll create a section for that too. For example, “BigCorp” is a project I’ll be working on for the next few months/years. This makes it easy to distinguish it from various other tasks at Spatie.
Projects
Microsoft office 2016 16 16 18 x 4. Projects don’t help me getting started, they ensure I get things done.
I use projects sparingly. Projects shouldn’t exist indefinitely, I’m already using sections for that. I use projects when I’m itching to get something done.
Projects aren’t necessarily large, they could be just 5, or even 50 tasks long. Since projects are always visible in the sidebar, they serve as a constant reminder to complete something.
I use project for personal things too, in that case they’re also unsectioned. These range from grocery lists, to things to prepare when cooking for a crowd.
Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management System
Sometimes I use headings for projects that get bigger, but I don’t have any rules in place with I should or shouldn’t.
Tags
Manually tagging tasks is the worst, and Things knows. In Things, you can tag entire sections and projects and forget about it.
Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management Tool
I only have one tag set up: Spatie. By assigning a Spatie tag to the Spatie and BigProj sections, all underlying tasks get tags too. This is useful to filter the Today and Upcoming views. During work hours I often keep my Today view open, with the Spatie tag filter on.
The Blog section also has a Spatie tag. Not because my blog is for work, but because I often write for my blog during work hours.
Closing thoughts
Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management System
Things looks pretty empty in these screenshots. While some sections are a lot more active at times, in general I try to keep it calm.
Things 3 6 1 – Elegant Personal Task Management Software
The primary use of my task manager is scheduling tasks in the short term. If Things looks crowded, I should reconsider my schedule.