Introduction

Task management is the process of handling the entire life cycle of a task, right from planning to tracking to execution. It helps teams track tasks from the beginning, set deadlines, prioritize tasks, and assign them to the right people. It ensures projects stay on track and get completed on time.

Task management can help individuals achieve goals or groups who collaborate and share knowledge to accomplish collective goals.

Why Task Management?

Task management improves your workflow in many ways.

• Be efficient
  The concepts of task management significantly boost efficiency by ensuring the right tools are used at the right time. This involves assigning tasks to team members based on their skills and interests.
• Be focused
  Whether you work as an individual or for an organization, you do your tasks to accomplish a particular goal. However, we often end up doing things that derail us from the goal. Only a systematic approach to our work will keep us focused on the end goal.
• Be organized
  It is not always possible to focus on only one job at a time. However, working on a bunch of stuff can be chaotic. Organizing your activities to streamline your workflow is necessary to reach your goal.

1. Planning
2. Organizing
3. Executing
4. Closing

Planning

• Tasks - Creating tasks is nothing but creating a checklist of things that must be completed to achieve the goal. You can set due dates, priorities, and statuses for tasks. This will help you to monitor your progress and keeps you on track. You can automate the creation of a task using workflows. For example, as soon as you create a project, you can set up a workflow that automatically creates a task for ‘Finalize the deadline’.
  • Subtasks - You can finely divide a task by creating subtasks. When you create subtasks and categorize them into sections, you get clarity on the list of things to be completed.
  • Parent Tasks - A parent task has many subtasks under it. The dependency is such that the parent task can be closed only after closing all its subtasks. 
  • Previous Task - You can achieve task sequencing by adding a previous task to the current task. You must complete the previous task before you begin the current task.
  • Related Tasks - You can add other tasks as related tasks to the current task. By doing this, you will have an idea about the other tasks running parallel to achieve the goal. 
  • Billable Tasks - If you are working on a billable project, then you can create billable tasks that can be invoiced when you close the project.
• Task Reminders - If you think you might miss a task amongst hundreds of them, you can set task reminders that will notify you about unattended tasks. You can also follow a task to get updates on any activity made on the task.
• Documents - You can add documents like flowcharts, budgets, and fact sheets for your reference. You can also share them with your customers and collaborate with them using the Document Viewer.

Organizing 

• List View - List View is a display of all the tasks you are working on with their details. You can create filters, sort the tasks, and change the status directly from the List View.
• Kanban View - Kanban View will help you organize and prioritize your work based on your tasks’ status. You can change the status of the task with a simple drag-and-drop action.
• Calendar View - Calendar View will help you meet your deadlines without any hassle. If you have set due dates for your tasks, they will show up in the Calendar View. You can also filter the time and work on urgent tasks.

Executing

• Timelogs - With timelogs, you can keep track of the time spent on your tasks and recognize which task takes up most of your time. It will help you distribute your time and reach your deadlines smoothly. If you are working on a billable task, then you can charge for the tracked hours.
• Analytics - If you want to know the number of tasks you have completed, pending tasks, tasks exceeding the budget, etc., you can acquire these details using the Analytics widget. You can customize and add new charts to see the metrics. You can also add different conditions to group the data. During execution, you might need your teammates’ opinions or your customers’ requirements. In that case, you can use these features that will help you collaborate with them.
• Comments - You can discuss your views and ideas with your team using comments. You can also grasp an individual’s or group’s attention using @mentions.
• Sticky Notes - If you have vital information in your comments, highlight them using sticky notes. Sticky notes will help you display unavoidable details at the top of the task.
• Events - Events are an easy way to collaborate with your customers effortlessly. You can schedule online meetings by sending a Google Meet link for better access. You can also plan onsite visits through events.
• Appointment Pages - You can share appointment pages with your customers and schedule meetings. When they pick a date and time, an event is created, and your time is blocked on the calendar.

Reviewing and Closing

• One View - One View of a task will display Contacts, Organizations, Projects, Cases, Invoices, and other related records under the radar.
• Invoices - After you finish a billable task, you can invoice it, including the time log details. You can later send the invoice to your customer for e-signing and charge them for the same.
• Feedback - You can create and send feedback about the teams working on the task. This will help them notice their strengths and weaknesses and improve in their next task.