Keeping up with all the tasks involved in managing a small business can be a huge challenge.
After all, it’s not enough to just sell and deliver products: you also need to manage inventory, provide customer service, think about accounting and even create content for social media.
In many cases, it is difficult to keep up with all the tasks without a defined organizational system for good task management .
It is because of challenges like these that task management systems exist – platforms in which it is possible to list tasks, describe them and divide them into execution phases.
In this reading, you will understand what these systems are, how they work and why it is worth adopting them in your company. Let’s go!
What is task management?
Task management is a way of organizing activities and actions related to a project or a company to achieve objectives and goals. In general, it is necessary to identify, organize, list and prioritize tasks.
A good task management system should bring together in a simple and visual way all the activities necessary to complete a process.
You can even have more than one task management system, bearing in mind different areas of your company, i.e., finance or marketing. The key, however, is not to remember to check up on any of them.
If you don’t have a team, this is an effective way to prioritize tasks; if you have more people on the team, it’s an easy way to delegate each person’s responsibility.
How to manage tasks well?
There are a series of important steps to take to efficiently manage tasks – and this applies to both those who use notebooks or post-its on the wall and those who have already adopted digital management tools.
The first step is to know what the company’s goals and objectives are and turn them into practical actions. In other words, it is important to define the tasks and, in some cases, the subtasks.
After that, you can list the tasks and organize them into different categories. To make management easier, among the categories, we can mention some examples:
- Level of urgency;
- Which division of the business does the work fall under?
- Whether they are individual or team tasks;
If you don’t know how to define the urgency of a task, a good way to evaluate it is using the so-called Eisenhower Matrix , which divides every task into four categories and their corresponding behaviors:
- If the task is urgent and important , it must be done quickly because it has deadlines or consequences;
- If the task is important but not urgent , it should be scheduled to be done within a specific time frame ;
- If the task is urgent but not important , it should be delegated;
- If the task is not urgent or important , it should not be done, as it is a distraction.
Next, the ideal is to organize and distribute the tasks to each team member – or, if you don’t have a team – organize the tasks and fit them into your schedule, so that they all have a space, considering, of course, the priority of each one.
The work, however, does not end there: monitoring the process is an important step to know if everything is being executed or if some new priority needs to be included along the way.
Top 5 Advantages of Task Managers
To help you with the task management process in your business’s day-to-day activities, you can choose to use a task management program or application .
Check out the main advantages of managers below:
1. Organization of activities
Functions determined to list tasks, define priorities, those responsible and even the status of each activity.
2. Project planning
A task manager also allows you to break down projects into small steps, creating a simple step-by-step guide to completing the activity and identifying each person’s missions.
3. Workflow automation
For those who work with online and integrated systems, such as e-commerce platforms, a task management system can be automated, allowing, for example, that every time a purchase is made, you trigger an order to the stock inventory requesting the separation and packaging of that item.
4. Alerts in case of delays
Do you recall that you may add deadlines to the task manager? Well, it also serves to send alerts when the deadline to complete a task is approaching.
5. Measuring the time of each activity
Over time, task managers are also a great way to track how long it takes you or your team to resolve an issue.
This can help you become more knowledgeable about your profession and prioritize the things that will benefit you and your company the most.