Effective Task Management
Effective Task Management
In this GrowthEngine Daily.
I want to talk about effective task management and how that can help with efficiency how it can motivate your staff and most importantly improve your bottom line.
Getting Started With Effective Task Management
We often get asked,
“What’s the best way to approach this?”
There’s a great reference to Jim Rohn, credit to Jim where he talks about spending major time on major things and minor time on minor things.
And that comes back to the old fashioned discipline.
You’ve got to be disciplined, and you’ve got to have some form of system in place.
Different Types of Approaches For Effective Task Management
Now over the years, I’ve tried
- Post-it notes
- Diaries
- Multiple tabs
- Software
- Apps
Today I work in a CRM system with a task queue.
Personally, I think that that’s a benefit of modern technology.
You’re clear about what your job role is, you’re clear about what needs to get done.
Major and Minors of Effective Task Management
And the first point that I would advise you to do as I said, follow Jim Rohn’s example of splitting tasks into major items and minor items.
Now the human brain can only process so much.
So I would never have any more than three major things on my task list at any point in time.
When I come in to start the working day, whatever time that is, that’s what I’m going to focus on, the Majors.
It’s all too easy. If we’re all being honest, we’ve all had a task list before, and there are some real grizzly, horrible things we’ve got to get done there.
And then there are some really nice quick, easy, insignificant things that we can get done.
So what do we do?
We get diverted, we get distracted and we think,
“Oh, I’ll just do this easy task, and I’ll just get that done because it’s easy. I can tick off my time.”
And by the time you’ve got to lunchtime,
- You’ve ticked off three or four small tasks
- How much progress have you made?
- How does that impact what your ultimate end goal is?
The reality is it probably doesn’t.
So, start with your major tasks, get those done first, then sort of feed in any minor tasks.
The reality, if you’re building a management team and you’ve got assistants or teams or employees working under for you, try and delegate and train your team to take some of those minor tasks away.
And that’s not about hierarchy or ego. It’s to say can you really afford to be doing the lower level tasks?
So get organised and understand what are majors, what are minor tasks?
Then put it into a system.
HubSpot Task Queues For Effective Task Management
As I covered earlier we use Hubspot, we have task queues in there, and we can set task queues up for
- Major Tasks
- Minor Tasks
- Client Tasks
- Personal Tasks
- Internal Tasks
As you can start to work those and you can start to track that time as well.
Project Management versus Productivity Management For Effective Task Management
It wouldn’t be a task or effective management if I didn’t mention a project management system, although personally here’s a bit of an outrageous statement if you want to call it that.
I think project management systems are dead.
And I know there’s a lot of businesses out there that are launching new project management systems or integrating them into their own software or own systems, but I’d like to replace it with what I call productivity systems.
And I think that’s the key.
Example
In our agency, we ran on Teamwork for nearly four years, and teamwork.com is an awesome product for project management.
However, it lacks resource management and directly integrated time tracking.
Yes, Teamwork will say,
“Hey, we track time.”
Yeah, you can, but it’s not true integration, and I can’t allocate tasks to my team and break them down by the hours and the minutes.
So I like the class of more productivity systems, in the early part of 2018 we moved over to ClickUp to run all our agency and executive and venture projects on, which are more productivity based, which is resource management based.
Recap For Effective Task Management
So I think to get your major and minors sorted, get the discipline in there.
Jim Rohn says,
“Discipline is the bridge between ideas and accomplishment.”
So if you’re not disciplined, you can have
- The best time management book
- The best Post-it note
- The best Hubspot task queues.
However, if you’re not disciplined to do it, what’s the point.
It starts with you.
So it’s a bit of a wake-up call to get out there and get that done.
Time Blocking For Effective Task Management
Just set time aside.
Personally for my LinkedIn work, 7:30 in the morning until 8:00 AM is when I do my LinkedIn work religiously, and I work through that and keep that going.
I’ll do my personal development on Sunday afternoon.
So it’s about blocking time out from that side.
And if you can automate these with tools like Hubspot, like ClickUp, then you’re going to be a lot further forward.
So I’d love to get your thoughts on it, how are you dealing with effective test management?
- How are you becoming more proficient, efficient?
- How are you motivating your team?
- How you’re increasing your bottom line.
