Whether you are a small business owner or leading a big corporate organization, managing a team is a challenge that you have to deal with consistently. It is easy to get lost in what everyone is doing, and organizations have come up with many tools to help ease this problem.

Before you start managing a team, you have to get yourself together. You need to breakdown your long term goals and strategy into a set of executable and practical mini tasks that can be executed and paced daily. This is where online tools such as Todoists, etc. comes in handy. It helps you keep track of what you are planning to do and what you are able to actually do, on a daily basis. Because you are personally involved, its easy to monitor and reprimand yourself.

When managing a team, I find it helpful to breakdown tasks into three main categories.

1. Daily routine tasks

2. Ad hoc tasks

3. Project tasks (short term goals)

Daily routine tasks

Routine tasks is what you and your team needs to do periodically such as on a daily or a weekly basis. This can be your daily briefing, weekly meeting, daily sales reports, or mothly team lunch. Its not complicated, but having every routine tasks expected of your team members listed in a list is really helpful in keeping track of what everyone in your team has on their plate everyday. It also helps you measure the effectiveness of your team members and monitor their contribution to the organization goals and objective.

Ad hoc / one off tasks

Unfortunately no matter how good you are at anticipating work agendas, it is never possible to predict everything that happens in your life, or in your organization. A report that is supposedly due end of month may be required to be completed by the end of the week and you need a way to assign and effectively monitor its progress. This is an example of ad hoc task that needs to be assigned and diligently monitored on a daily basis. In general, the more unpredictable the work environment you have, the more you will need to rely on ad hoc tasks management.

Project tasks

Increasingly, organizations and businesses has become more project centric and this has become the basis of how organizations are run. There are many project management software out there, including one of the earlierst one’s such as Basecamp, Jira by Atlassian and ProofHub. There are many ways that these software are designed and they range from simple task tracking for teams, Kanban concept, or Gantt chart. All these tools are designed specifically so that teams can operate efficiently and effectively to achieve their short term goals and objectives.

As a business owner or a manager overseeing multi departmental teams, you will find streamlining all tasks into these three main categories will make it easier to keep track of what everyone is doing in your team or your organization. The ability to monitor and track how your team is running in real time gives you the capability to identify and solve potential issues and problems quickly or before it happens. Ultimately, you want to ensure that everything from routine tasks, ad hoc tasks, and project tasks to be aligned with your organizations or teams long term goals and objectives. Learn how OrgEngine can help streamline your teams tasks, free today.

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