Task management is a key part of project management. It involves the planning of work-related activities, progress tracking and results analysis. In other words, it aims to control tasks throughout their life cycle and make sure the objectives they pursue are attained successfully.
Task management, however, is essential not only for project managers. Productivity-oriented individuals, team players and even those seeking to fulfill their personal goals can apply it as a springboard to efficient performance and faster achievements.
Luckily, mastering task management is as easy as pie today since many diverse software products which could help you with that exist. In this article, for example, we will describe how to manage tasks and improve work outcomes with actiTIME — a smart and simple-to-use time tracking tool that includes some valuable functionality for project and task management.
Task Planning
With the Work Scope Management feature in actiTIME, it’s easy to plan new projects, create multiple tasks and coordinate assignments across your team members. You can do so in just three steps:
- Click the + Add New button in the Tasks interface to create a project or task;
- Write down all the relevant information about a newly created project or task in the Description field to remind other users or yourself of important nuances;
- After that, if you work in a team, you can allocate different tasks to relevant employees to let everyone know what they’re expected to focus on.
Besides, when creating new tasks in actiTIME, you can specify time estimates and deadlines for them and clarify which pieces of work are billable and non-billable:
In this way, you will keep all the critical information about the planned tasks in a single place and will have easy access to it at any moment.
Task Tracking
Once new tasks are created and planned through, you may proceed to performance tracking. There are four primary features in actiTIME that will let you stay aware of your current work progress:
- Time tracking — A straightforward timesheet is the tool’s core functionality. It allows users to make manual time entries for each task worked on during a day and review the submitted timesheet data in a weekly format. Besides, actiTIME has a timer for automatic time tracking. It can be accessed through the Chrome extension and used whenever you want to get a highly precise picture of time spent on tasks.
- Notifications — actiTIME users can set up automatic notifications to receive timely alerts on the risk of estimate overruns, which is a perfect preventative measure against task and project delays.
- Comments — It’s possible to leave notes next to each time entry in your actiTIME timesheet. When commenting on a task, users may clarify whether everything goes as planned or if they’re facing some difficulties and risk a delay. This feature is especially handy when you work in a team, have to coordinate efforts among employees and need to make use of that extra thing to hold everyone accountable for their performance.
- Kanban board — With this highly popular feature for workflow visualization, you will always have a clear overview of task statuses and work progress. Before proceeding to utilize the board in actiTIME, you may design a custom Kanban workflow and create as many unique task statuses as you deem appropriate. Then, just open the Tasks interface, select Kanban as a preferred view mode and, whenever the work on tasks advances, commence distributing them by statuses across the board. Thereby, new, in-progress and completed tasks will always be in your plain sight.
Performance Analysis
Without the assessment of work results, the task management cycle wouldn’t be complete, and actiTIME has a great feature to help you analyze your performance in depth — informative Reports.
Firstly, you can create charts in multiple formats to visualize your time use statistics and review the total number of hours spent by projects, users, departments, types of work, etc.
Secondly, you may generate several kinds of reports with a detailed depiction of time tracking data for an easy review of your productivity trends, evaluation of time management behaviors and comparison of actual time spent on tasks against original estimates.
With all these data presented to you in a well-structured and visually appealing manner, you’ll have a better chance to identify how well you perform and adhere to your initial plans. A thorough review of time tracking data is a great way to educate yourself and make wiser task management decisions.
Benefits of Using actiTIME for Task Management
To sum up the above, let’s briefly state the main advantages that actiTIME offers for those in search of an effective task management solution:
- Increased efficiency due to a more streamlined and evidence-based management process and a real-time overview of work in progress.
- Improved adherence to deadlines with estimate tracking and automated notifications on the risk of schedule overrun.
- Better workload management thanks to the project scope planning functionality and an opportunity to review individual and team productivity trends.
- Smarter decision making with comprehensive reports on project performance that allow for a more in-depth analysis of factors leading to failure and success.
- Waste of time is reduced to a minimum since actiTIME is very simple to apply. Plus, automatic time tracking decreases the chance of error during data collection, so there’s no need to spend precious resources on fixing costly mistakes.
Sounds enticing, isn’t it? And the best part is that you can try actiTIME at no cost whatsoever! Sing up for a free 30-day trial today and bring your task management experience to another level.
