When performing your tasks, some aspects may not occur exactly the way you planned them. Being able to quickly identify various issues and their solutions is an important part of task management. It helps you avoid delays in the task completion process and prevent the issue from recurring.
Task Management Skills: Definition and Examples
Regardless of your background, being able to manage your tasks efficiently is a valuable professional trait. Developing the right skills for improving task management can be important for your career. It can show potential employers that you work efficiently. In this article, we discuss what task management skills are, provide 11 examples of these skills and explain how to improve them and highlight them in your application process.
Task management skills are the abilities that help you work efficiently and take full advantage of your time. They are soft skills—interpersonal traits that are useful in a wide range of professions and professional situations. Time management is typically important for an employee in any field. It allows them to reduce the time spent on non-essential tasks so they can prioritize the important ones.
What are the benefits of task management?
On an individual level, task management makes you more confident in your daily to-dos—and more effective at crossing them off the list. But the benefits of task management extend beyond the individual; better-organized individuals lead to broadly more effective teams and ultimately better visibility for leadership.
Say you are a designer in charge of creating graphics for your team and have just received three separate design requests. Your impulse might be to work on your three new design tasks in the order you received them, or based on their deadline. But if you’ve built a task management framework to help you prioritize, you might ask for key details (like major dependencies) as part of the request. One project might have a nearer deadline, but another requires sign-off from more stakeholders. So you start with that one first.
A clear prioritization framework becomes increasingly important when teams have a high volume of tasks. That’s because a human’s ability to multitask isn’t as great as we might think. One study showed that only 2.5% of people can multitask effectively; the rest of us are simply bouncing back and forth between tasks, an act that’s actually making us less efficient.
Documentation is a big part of strong task management. The point isn’t to prioritize and allocate resources in your head, but to map them out in a clear, easily shareable way. Teams that invest in task management have better visibility into everyone else’s task lists. For project managers and leaders, this means you can quickly diagnose an imbalance in workload when you know what’s on your team’s plates. This minimizes common productivity killers, like bottlenecks caused by a lack of information, or a lack of understanding around why certain tasks are critical.
Efficient teams get work done faster and with fewer resources. Task management naturally leads to more efficient production because it minimizes confusion, surfaces blockers, and tees up tasks at the best time.
What are Features of a Great Task Management Tool?
- Comprehensive Integrations – Does this tool integrate with a variety of apps such as Google Calendar, Slack, Salesforce, Zapier, Bugsnag, etc?
- Tracking Task Progress – Is it easy to see which stage in the project everyone is and how you and your team are arriving at your goals? Can you visualize the project from many different views?
- Responsive Customer Support – Does the task management solution offer quick chat and email response times in case you need help?
- Ease of Use – Can it be used by beginners and expert project managers alike? Can it be adopted by both code and no-code teams and can collaboration exist between departments?
- Intuitive Flexibility – Can it be used for an infinite number of use cases? Can you execute task planning not only for marketing campaigns and software development, but also for personal goals and university projects?
- Frequent Updates and Features – Is the team behind the task management platform dedicated to crushing bugs, shipping new features, and listening to their users’ feedback?
1. ClickUp
A) Templates and Recurring Tasks
B) Priorities
C) Reminders
Our project management software comes with powerful Reminders to help you always keep track of your deliverables. You can customize where and when you receive these reminders for added ease. Whether it’s your email inbox, your desktop, or mobile, ClickUp will inform you of everything at the right time.
D) Notifications
E) Views
F) Assigned Comments
ClickUp lets you instantly convert comments into individual tasks for quick task management. All it takes is a couple of clicks to assign a comment to someone and have it pop up in their Task Tray. Once they finish the task, they can even mark it as resolved!
G) Targets and Goals
H) Dashboards
I) Notepad
J) Integrations
2. Todoist
Like the Swift to-do list app, it has a simple, no-frills interface built around a classic design. This task-tracking software is great for individuals, though they’ve recently expanded into teams and adapted to small business needs.
In Todoist, users get:
Premium
3. Any.do
Unlike other task or project management software, Any.do also has an intuitive calendar to help you see how your events and tasks fit together. This task management solution can also organize tasks and filter your workflow by due date or category.
In Any.do, you get:
Premium:
4. Things
The key differentiator for this task-tracking software is that you can select a core focus for each day. Things lay on a small layer of project management that has sections on comments, tasks, and subtasks.
In Things, you get:
5. HubSpot Task Management
HubSpot took task management and decided to up the game for everyone. The software is included in its customer relationship management (CRM) suite, and it’s aimed at helping you move along the sales funnel.
In HubSpot Task Management, you get:
6. Taskque
In Taskque, you get:
Premium
7. Flow
If you’re a project manager who likes using a Gantt chart, Flow could be the best task tracking software for you. Most of the projects are color-coded to help you quickly navigate between individual tasks and projects in your workflow.
In the Flow task tracking software, you get:
8. Hitask
Your teammates are listed on the right side, and you can automatically drag tasks from the central task area to your team members. Once this is done, each teammate is assigned the task, and it becomes part of their workflow.
In Hitask, you get:
Premium:
9. Trello
Trello is one of the largest Kanban task management tools. It’s no surprise that their Kanban boards are their main calling card. This customizable Kanban interface allows users to set up cards for different projects like they were post-it notes.
In Trello task management, you get:
Premium:
10. ProProfs Project
Create a project schedule and streamline your processes to deliver your projects on time and within budget. Also, you can prioritize tasks and track them using multiple project views such as Gantt charts, Kanban board, and more.
Authorship:
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/task-management-skills
https://blog.airtable.com/what-is-task-management/
https://clickup.com/blog/task-management-software/
Task management
Proggio’s powerful task management features make it possible for you to have complete command over all the tasks of your projects. You no longer need to ask your team members for updates as the software makes it possible to track all the task activity from one single place.
Manage the Tasks app for your organization in Microsoft Teams
The Tasks app brings a cohesive task management experience to Microsoft Teams, integrating individual tasks powered by Microsoft To Do and team tasks powered by Planner in one place. Users can access Tasks as an app on the left side of Teams and as a tab in a channel within individual teams. With My tasks and Shared plans, users can view and manage all their individual and team tasks and prioritize their work. Tasks is available in Teams desktop, web, and mobile clients.
As we roll out the Tasks experience on Teams desktop clients, the app name will initially appear as Planner to users. The name will then temporarily change to Tasks by Planner and To Do, and later on, it will be renamed to Tasks. On Teams mobile clients, users will always see the app name as Tasks. There may be a short delay in the availability of the mobile experience after the desktop experience is available.
For organizations who want to streamline task management for Frontline Workers, Tasks also includes capabilities that enable you to target, publish, and track tasks at scale across your Frontline Workforce. For example, corporate and regional leadership can create and publish task lists targeted to relevant locations, such as specific retail stores, and track progress through real-time reports. Managers can assign tasks to their staff and direct activities within their locations, and Frontline Workers have a prioritized list of their assigned tasks on mobile or desktop. To enable task publishing, first set up a team targeting hierarchy for your organization, which defines how all teams in the hierarchy are related to each other.
What you need to know about Tasks
With Tasks, users get a desktop, web, and mobile experience. If Tasks is installed on the Teams desktop client, users will also see it on their Teams web and mobile clients. The exception is guests. It’s important to know that guests can only access Tasks as an app from the Teams mobile client. Guests will see Tasks tabs on both Teams desktop and web clients.
My tasks shows a user’s individual tasks. Shared plans show tasks that the whole team is working on and includes any task list that’s added as a Tasks tab to a channel. Note the following relationships between tasks in Tasks, To Do, and Planner:
Task lists that a user creates in the Tasks app will also appear in To Do clients for that user. Similarly, task lists that a user creates in To Do will appear in My tasks in Tasks for that user. The same is true for individual tasks.
Any Tasks tab that’s added to a channel will also appear in Planner clients. When a user creates a plan in Planner, the plan won’t show in the Tasks or Planner app unless it’s added as a tab to a channel. When a user adds a new Tasks tab, they can create a new list or plan or choose an existing one.
Best Task management tools for teams
1. ProofHub
Ranked as one of the best, ProofHub is well-capable of meeting the requirements of teams of any size, any industry, any department, and any type (in-house, remote, and cross-functional). For managing project tasks, it is important to have full control over team members to delegate tasks and get progress details in real-time, and ProofHub allows you to exercise this authority too.
From setting the start and due dates of tasks to visualizing tasks moving through different stages of project workflow in Kanban Boards , ProofHub is well-capable of simplifying all your task management responsibilities.
Who Can Use ProofHub?
Any team from any industry can use ProofHub. It’s also meant for cross-functional, remote and in-house teams. ProofHub is developed keeping in mind the everyday work challenges faced by project managers and their teams. The best part about this software is that anyone who wants to manage tasks and projects can make its optimum use without going through any hassles. It has an intuitive interface with visually appealing yet simplified elements that you can interact with effortlessly.
Leading a project means overseeing several tasks all at the same time and creating a workflow that assures smooth execution of all the project activities. With ProofHub, you can create task lists and even divide a task into smaller and manageable subtasks.
Whether you want to assign a single task or the complete task list to one or more team members, you are just a few clicks away from delegating tasks with ease. Additionally, you can add custom labels to each task to prioritize and differentiate them.
Tasks may get delayed when you can’t view how they are dependent on one another. ProofHub kicks out this issue by offering Gantt charts that you can use to set dependencies among tasks and visualize them all in a timeline view.
By using a calendar, it becomes easy to keep a track of the deadlines and schedule tasks along with all the important events like group meetings, brainstorming sessions, etc. ProofHub integrates a project calendar so that you can always stay ahead of your schedules and avoid delays.
Also, you don’t want to waste your time creating tasks that recur periodically, and this is where ProofHub’s calendar comes in handy. You can set recurring tasks and events in the Calendar and save yourself from manually creating them again and again.
It goes without saying that communication is an important aspect of task management and ProofHub excels at this too. It comes with a chat interface, which allows you and your team to communicate with each other via one-on-one or group chats.
You can even create discussion topics to bring together your team and even your clients to talk about different matters and even share ideas. With group chats and discussions , every person on your team can share their thoughts and concerns with you at any time of the day in an interactive manner.
To complete tasks, you and your team may need to share files and collaborate on them. ProofHub has its own cloud storage, which you can use to upload, share, and organize files of different types. You can upload and attach files to different tasks from your computer or a third-party cloud storage service like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.
Additionally, ProofHub allows you to proof files , documents, and designs in real-time. The online proofing and markup tools available within ProofHub lets you review and collaborate on files from a single place without the need to switch to other apps.
See tasks moving through multiple stages in Kanban board and empower teams to self-manage with better understanding of workflows as they get notified of tasks moving from one stage to another. With Kanban Boards, you can create your custom workflow and set the number of stages through which a task has to go through to be completed.
Add timesheets, set time estimates, track time manually or using timers, export timesheets, archive them, create time reports and bring all your time data at one central place using one time management software. Add multiple timesheets to record time data. Use them for payroll, client billing, estimation, tracking, and even time management.
Plan and organize projects in a way that’s best suitable for your team. Assign tasks, filter and view data based on priority, and keep essential details front and center. Table view is one of the easier ways in which a user can view all tasks assigned to him/her as well as check their current status.
Create and add custom roles, assign them, and grant access levels to stay in ultimate control of who gets to access what according to your organizational workflow. Assign custom roles as an administrator to team members or clients allowing them to perform things as per their work and responsibilities.
Conclusion
Managing project tasks as efficiently as possible is a must for businesses to thrive in today’s competitive markets. As a manager, you are responsible to make sure that your team accomplishes every task on time and you will need a task management tool for that. The task management tools featured in this article are the best ones available right now and you just need to choose one that suits your managerial requirements and your organization’s budget.
Vartika Kashyap is the Chief Marketing Officer at ProofHub and has been one of the LinkedIn Top Voices in 2018. Her articles are inspired by office situations and work-related events. She likes to write about productivity, team building, work culture, leadership, entrepreneurship among others and contributing to a better workplace is what makes her click.
Setting up task groups (Optional)
An onboarding, offboarding, or transition process can include many tasks. To make it easier to assign all the required tasks to a checklist, you can create optional task groups to categorize related tasks. For example, the HR, IT, and Payroll departments must each complete specific tasks to hire a new employee. Therefore, you create the following task groups: HR, IT, and Payroll. Then, when you create a task, you can associate one of those task groups with it.
When you want to add a task to a checklist, you can filter the list of tasks by the task group that the desired task is assigned to. For example, when you create a checklist template, you can filter the list so that only the IT tasks that are assigned to to the IT task group are show. Therefore, you can ensure that only the relevant IT tasks are selected.
Using checklists
When a worker is hired, terminated, or transferred, one or more checklists can be selected. Task due dates and worker assignments are created after the hiring, termination, or transition process is completed. For example, when you select the Hire or Hire and add details button, tasks are created for individuals, based on the assignment type.
In the Task management workspace, you can apply a checklist to an employee by selecting the employee on the simple list page or the details page, and then selecting Apply checklist. The value of the Target date field will be used to calculate the due date of the tasks. Typically, the target date should match the employee’s hire, termination, or transition date.
Authorship:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-tasks-app
https://www.proofhub.com/articles/task-management-tools
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/human-resources/hr-task-mgmt
Task management
Not only were they struggling to deliver all of their projects on time, but their communications with clients also suffered. The company’s Director of Operations, Colum Buckley, says the company reached a point where managing projects using email and spreadsheets had become a total nightmare.
The Definitive Guide to Task Management
People like Bill Gates and Elon Musk haven’t been super successful in their lives by accident. They’ve done it by organizing every hour of every day—scheduling their time so they’re productive and reaching their goals.
The way we organize our working days comes down to strategy. Some people will stick to a to-do list, while companies may find it more useful to use task management tools to organize their calendars. In fact, companies that use techniques like task management spend 28x less money than those who try to deliver projects without a real plan or strategy.
Robust task management software
What Is Task Management?
Task management isn’t as complicated as it sounds. It’s just a fancy way of planning how tasks are handled from the moment you put them into a schedule until they’re completed. We’re talking about setting deadlines, collaborating with team members, and creating project schedules that allow you and your team to be as productive as possible.
Create collaboration channels: Task management is about team management. Your team will have a better idea about who is working on what and when you expect them to collaborate on a task to get it completed quicker
What’s baffling is the number of businesses that still don’t have a process in place to organize and complete tasks in their pipeline. PMI’s 2017 Global Project Management survey found that 37% of executive leaders admitted the biggest cause of failed projects was a lack of clearly defined objectives and discipline when implementing strategy.
Why do you need team task management software?
1. Capture, organize and prioritize project activities
Task management software helps you keep a record of the identified tasks. In addition, it helps you organize project tasks according to project milestones, and schedule them based on priority. Depending on task dependencies, you can then plan out a project timeline.
2. Plan work and team schedules
Identifying team members and assigning tasks helps you distribute work. The team schedule visualizes individual tasks and workloads, which allows you to view who is overworked and who can cram in one more task.
3. Create a project information hub
A task management application provides a platform to store all project-related information in one place. While creating new tasks, team members can include additional information (external links, resources) and attach files under each task.
4. Track project progress
5. Meet deadlines
A milestone is achieved when all the pre-agreed tasks are completed by a given deadline. That’s why team members need clear visual cues about upcoming milestones and deadlines. Task management software tools help the team get an overview of the progress made towards a milestone.
Tracking: Grouping tasks into milestones and managing task status from start to finish
You need to be able to know what team members should be working on, the status of every task, and what’s coming up in the future and will need your attention. This means grouping tasks together to see the milestones of your project and then using a task management methodology to track your progress.
How to break tasks down into milestones
Milestones are simply a collection of tasks that represent some piece of your project puzzle being completed. It could be finishing coding a feature or redesigning a landing page—anything that marks an achievement or end of a chunk of work.
Milestones are important because they let you zoom out from task-level view and see the real progress you’re making. If tasks are the smallest possible steps that need to get done, Milestones are like the giant leaps.
To create a new Milestone in Planio simply go to Settings → Milestones. Each Milestone should have a name, short description, and be made public if you want everyone to be able to see it. You can then assign specific tasks, feature requests, and even bugs to that Milestone.
So, let’s say our Milestone is to release a mobile app. In the example below, we’ve created our Milestone and we can see that there were 14 issues and tasks assigned to it. And that they’ve all been completed!
Choose a method for tracking your milestones, task progress, and task status
There are tons of ways to manage your tasks and milestones so that you can unlock more time to pursue other meaningful company objectives like establishing partnerships or generating more leads for your business. And at the end of the day, what works best for you, will come down to the size of your team, the complexity of your project, and how you work best.
We’re going to assume that you’re working with a team of people on a project that needs more visibility than a simple to-do list can provide. Which means there are a few task management methods you should consider:
Kanban
Kanban is a visual task management method where tasks are defined on “Cards” and then moved left to right on a board through each stage. This could be as simple as “To do”, “Doing”, “Done” or broken down into whatever stages you need.
The great part about Kanban is that it gives you a quick big-picture overview of all the tasks you need to complete and what their status is. You’ll have all your tasks, due dates, progress, and task status in front of you. The only downside is that because task details are contained within a card the details can sometimes get lost.
Gantt Charts
Gantt charts are great as they let you quickly visualize the Milestones and related tasks to see how progress is being made and who has too much on their plate. They’re also a powerful way to see dependencies on projects (i.e. “I can’t do X until Jon does Y”).
Adjusting: How to adjust tasks (when your situation changes)
When you have a deep understanding of all the things that need to get done to hit 100% and can visualize them all in one central place, you have a better chance of seeing when problems might arise and adjust accordingly.
Situations change. A team mate might quit or need to take time off. Or some new user research might come in that changes the scope of your project. Heck, your company might even pivot! In all of these cases, you can use your task management system to take stock of the situation, adjust, and get back on track.
- Always have a full view of the project: Whether this is through a Kanban board, Gantt chart, or some other method, it pays to always be able to zoom out and get a full view of the project. Task view is great when you’re in the thick of a project. But too much time spent on the small details (especially as a project manager) can make you miss the forest for the trees. Periodically step back and reassess your task priorities, milestones, and the overall flow of your project and assess how upcoming changes might affect it.
- Be proactive about seeing and adjusting to shifting priorities: The importance of task priority can’t be overstated. When you say something is critical or A1 or whatever task priority system you’re using, you’re setting the path for your team. But that doesn’t always mean that path is the right one. Be proactive about looking for potential priority shifts. Talk to other managers or team leads. Planio also lets you filter tasks by priority and any other criteria. The better you can prioritize, the more productive your team will be.
- Always be able to connect tasks to project and company goals: Just like the last point, connecting your tasks to project and company goals is a compass check to make sure you’re still going the right way. We’ve written about the power of OKRs in the past and this is no different. Make sure tasks align with company goals as much as possible.
- Remove tasks that aren’t being actively worked on from immediate attention: Task management is as much about what’s not there as what is. If a task is no longer relevant due to a change in priority, get rid of it. Too many tasks on a board (or chart) add an unnecessary cognitive load to your team. You want them to see progress and feel motivated. Not bogged down by endless tasks.
Authorship:
https://www.teamwork.com/blog/task-management/
https://toggl.com/blog/task-management-software
https://plan.io/blog/what-is-task-management/