Post: #1

Especially for those of you who freelance, own a business or just have a busy lifestyle. I'm looking for the best way to integrate project management and calendar capacities as all project management tools I've seen aren't very good to manage detailed hour-by-hour tasks, so I end up using Google Calendar on the side.

What software do you use?

Post: #2

Asana is good for project management. Trello is OK too.

Slack for communicating (can also use Asana for that, but it's weak).

Main thing is that you need to use it everyday and keep it up to date, or no app will help you.

Post: #3

We have used a few over the years, including things like MS Project. The issue you are up against is that you have to temper the time, effort and data that you put into it, to the info you get out of it.

The issues we faced were things like MS Project just took much time to input data. For bigger companies I can see it working well as you can devote resources into feeding the software with data. We also tried very simple PM tools and found that it couldn't tell us the data we needed. So catch 22 as we couldn't find the sweet spot. In the end we ended up building our own. The version of this was just Excel with some macros behind it. We could then tailor it to just entering the data we needed but still giving us the results that we needed.

Post: #4

1) Every day before you sleep, make a list of what you want to get done the next day. I have a pad with Monday-Sunday columns I use to fill these in.

2) For project management I just use a .txt file with three headings:

TASKS
SUBTASKS
DONE

I found anything more is overkill.

3) Keep a spreadsheet of all the areas of your life you need to work on, so: work, getting up at the right time, eating good, fitness. At the end of each day give yourself a score in each area and make notes on how you've done, good points, bad points. This way you can see if you are in a slack period and sort yourself out. You'll also spot certain trends in your inefficiency. For example, I realised that my work can be seriously slowed when either starting up a new job or when I have a lot of small jobs, particularly if they are thrown at me out of the blue. Solution is to cue up new jobs are remind myself I have an issue switching, so need to get straight into it; and to organise myself to do small tasks in a big swoop.

Post: #5

(09-13-2018 10:13 AM)gework Wrote:  3) Keep a spreadsheet of all the areas of your life you need to work on, so: work, getting up at the right time, eating good, fitness. At the end of each day give yourself a score in each area and make notes on how you've done, good points, bad points. This way you can see if you are in a slack period and sort yourself out. You'll also spot certain trends in your inefficiency.

I've done something like this before. It's very useful.

Post: #6

Thanks for the feedback. In my case I work alone so communication and task assignment are not important. I'm looking for a method that allows me to integrate both work and lifestyle projects at both macro and granular player. I find I tend to spin my wheels if my projects and to-do listsare all over the place, that's why I need a single access point.

Post: #7

Wunderlist + a GTD based approach. You'll end up playing with it until you find what works for you.

https://hamberg.no/gtd/

Folder for work related items
Folder for personal projects

Lists in each:
Next to do's (if needed, create two or more if you're tracking tons of items)
Recurring items (daily weekly monthly reminders...if it becomes habit, scrub it)
Waiting for - to do's pending on third parties (so I can follow up if needed)
Projects (high level items, always have something in your "next" list for each project)
Some day - a catch all for related stuff that's not time sensitive

Folder for "tickle" folders (ie review monthly for relevance)

Various tools like IFTT let you add these items to Google calendar. I've stopped using calendar to track to do items, only use it for appointments (ie when you must be somewhere at some time).

Post: #8

I am looking into using workflowy to manage all of the tasks that I need to do. Using trello now.