Time management has always been a challenge whether it is for a small businesses owner or anyone that has many tasks to manage. Let’s face it, you want to make the most of a day, and being organised is essential. Before modern technology that we have today, this was a seemingly challenging task. However, now we have a wide array of tools available to us to ensure our business is running efficiently. You may not think that you need these tools; however, it can impact the success of your business if you don’t utilise them. This article discusses why you need these tools, some tips for usage and three popular tools you should check out.
Why You Need Time Management Tools
The core reason for project management is making sure many tasks are completed on time and budget. Predecessor tasks that are not completed on time, hold up other tasks and projects can get blown out on both time and budget. Now a Project Manager for a long time has used a Ghant chart to show how all the activities are linked and when the project will be completed. Using this type of project management for a small business, with multiple projects, tasks, activities and employees are challenging, because a Ghant chart lacks flexibility. These days everyone is mobile and want information instantly. Therefore, every user should have online access to tasks, be able to give updates and attach information so that all information is shared instantly. Not only that, the process must be agile enough, so that if changes are needed, tasks can be altered, changed and fed back into the system.
An agile approach
Luckily enough born on the back of software development and the constant changes required when software is being developed, project management took a shift with the development of a more agile approach, even naming a type of project management framework Agile Methodology. A bunch of tools which we discuss below have utilised this methodology. Within these systems, Project Boards, Lists, Tasks and Users can be created, and you can drag and drop tasks around within the software to dynamically adjust and plan out the tasks so that everyone’s time is effectively utilised. If you think about it, its the same requirement as to when you are running a business or someone that has a lot to plan out.
Tools for time and project Management
Now here are some amazing tools that you need to check out and some of the benefits of each:
Asana
The goal of Asana is to help you and your teams manage their tasks as well as their workflows. It has a very easy to use interface, and it is quite flexible to individual needs. Asana incorporates a well-designed web interface and app, which makes it easy to use on whatever device you have. Projects have a task list that can be set up by the project manager, making the project easy to manage. It’s very easy to communicate with other users and conversations are captured and stored. Another good thing here is that most of the tools are free when you first sign up, it’s only when you go over a certain amount of users do you have to pay subscriptions fees. So from day one you get most of the power from an Asana development point of view. There is online support with Asana which is handy.
Trello
Trello is a fully customisable tool that you can adapt to your individual business needs. There are many free openly developed add-ons to Trello that can be enabled on your Firefox or Chrome browser. However the base set is pretty simple, and enabling some of these tools can be tricky. In saying that Trello has close to 68 Integrations, which makes this tool probably the most flexible out there. It can consolidate any projects and communications with the team into a single location for convenience. Users are updated of any changes within tasks, via Apps, Web console and email. The projects are now easy to view allowing you to see all of the workflows in a single look. It turns your project into something that employees can visualise, improving the efficiency of your employees. Each user can add on what makes sense for them in their portal, like calendars, agile scrum functions, CRM, and time tracker software, to name a few.
Trello has just been acquired by Atlassian which already makes very powerful collaboration tools such as Confluence, JIRA, HipChat and BitBucket. With this we will probably see some great integrations coming our way, making Trello an even more powerful tool. One downside of Trello is that customer support seems to be an area when compared to other platforms is not as high priority.
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is an application that can work across many operating platforms, making it accessible to more people. From this application employees can see the tasks assigned to them. It also allows you to track any goals that need to be met and share when you have completed them. There are also spots for comments for the team members and send out reminders to the team. Wunderlist is very customisable to meet your specific needs. The good thing on this is that the free version includes many functionalities. Like the others, the drag and drop type control interface is very smooth and easy to use. It doesn’t have the feel of being as powerful as Asana or Trello. However, if you intend to keep your business relatively small, this may be exactly the simple tool to use for you.
Whether it be for managing your own time, your companies time or your teams time, using one of these tools above you are going to notice a huge improvement in the efficiency of your day.
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