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How many times have you been frustrated because you felt you had too much to do and spent the whole day starting all those activities without finishing any of them? Or, because you didn’t know what to prioritize, you started several tasks and finished those that seemed easier, but that actually weren’t so urgent and important?
Despite our to-do lists being different from each other, we all have the same goals: to get as much done as possible. To do this, you need a better way to manage your time and activities. In this article, we will focus on activity management and talk about task organization.
We’ve put together 6 tips to help you stay organized and, of course, complete your activities. Check it out!
1. Know how to prioritize
Prioritization is the first item when it comes to task organization. It’s no good trying to multitask believing that you can do several things at the same time. You can, but in the end, you won’t get anything done right!
When you need to prioritize tasks, a great tip is to separate what is urgent from what is important. Eisenhower’s Decision Matrix is widely used for this purpose. Eisenhower was the 34th president of the United States and the owner of a famous quote: “What is important is rarely urgent and what is urgent is rarely important.
Before we go to the decision matrix, it’s important to understand that urgent means that a task requires immediate attention. That which is considered important, on the other hand, deals with things that contribute to long-term goals, mission, values, and objectives.
Thus, in Eisenhower’s Decision Matrix, there are:
- Urgent and important tasks: in task organization, these are the tasks that require our immediate attention and contribute to the achievement of goals.
- Non-urgent and important tasks: activities that do not have an urgent deadline, but that, nevertheless, help you achieve your goals.
- Urgent and non-important tasks: require our attention now (urgent), but don’t help us achieve our goals or fulfill our mission (unimportant). Most tasks here are interruptions from other people.
- Non-urgent, non-important tasks: these are the so-called distractions.
Investing your time in organizing non-urgent but important tasks can prevent them from becoming urgent AND important in the future. By doing so, you act proactively to avoid great problems.
2. Create a plan
You and your team have worked to prioritize activities. Now you need to develop a plan. In this step, you must identify the responsible parties and deadlines for completing each of the tasks in order to organize them in a way that truly makes sense.
Here, note that it’s important that the whole team has a detailed and clear view of what needs to be done. Each member should be aware of what is expected in each task. This will help each individual to organize their time and prioritize tasks on a daily basis.
To create the plan itself, we recommend the next tip:
3. Use the right tools
There is no right or wrong here. For simplified task management, there are tools like Trello, Evernote, Todoist, and Kanban itself that can help.
However, when it comes to corporate projects, task organization has to go to a higher professional level. This is because just leaving tasks organized is not enough. It’s necessary to monitor them, to know whether they are overdue or not, who is responsible for them, and what their deadlines are.
In other words, tasks need to be on a flowchart. For example, imagine the activity of hiring a new employee. Hiring goes through the process of job advertising, interviews, approval from the direct superior, and the entire procedure of hiring the chosen employee. A failure in the organization of these tasks can cause a step to be forgotten, or to be managed without much attention.
Human Resources processes are just one of the countless examples that could be given of the importance of using the right tools in managing and organizing tasks. We can talk about hiring and service management, campaign approval, problem management, and conducting public consultation, among many others.
4. Track delegated tasks
When working with task organization, you will find that there are tasks that can be delegated. Once you have assigned a task to a team member, it’s definitely worth it to use software that helps you keep track of their progress.
This kind of control will also allow you to analyze where productivity is falling off or where it can be put to better use. For tracking to be done properly, we not only need to use the right tools, but also keep the team’s tasks centralized, which brings us to the next tip:
5. Keep your tasks organized in one place
Having a work environment where the organization of tasks isn’t taken seriously is a sure way to lower team’s productivity.
One method to avoid this and keep tasks organized is to centralize them. There is no point in having a task described on a piece of paper on your desk when its completion depends on the effort of another employee, who in turn needs to know at what stage it’s supposed to be done.
Once again, tools are essential here. By having the tasks accessible in a single place, it will be possible not only to monitor them but also to perform them on time, within the required deadline.
6. Review the tasks
Some people like to do this at the end of each day. But you can set one day a week to analyze what went well, what needs improvement, and which tasks will need adjusting.
The focus of organizing tasks is not to make you run back and forth to do them. The idea is not to keep yourself busy all the time, but to do the tasks that really need to be done in order for you and your team to achieve the expected goals (have you read our post on goal management and strategies?).
Task organization: take the next step
When tasks enter a flow, it is quite common to have bottlenecks. To solve this issue, and to take your company to the next step of task management and organization, a process management platform is fundamental.
With a BPM software, your company has a unique environment that provides teams with total control over activities, such as appointment times, deadline control, and flags, among others.
So, get to know Fusion Platform! Our solution has a BPM module that allows process creation and management in a simple way, with the added benefit of a high level of integration with other management systems. In addition, we have accelerators for task management and organization to meet the varied needs of a company (such as for example, Client Registration Management, Electronic Timetable, PPE Request, and others).
