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, teams and even those seeking to fulfill their personal goals can apply it as a springboard to more efficient performance and faster achievements.
Luckily, mastering task management is as easy as pie today since many task time trackers can help you with that. In this article, we describe how to manage tasks and improve work outcomes with actiTIME – a smart and simple-to-use task time tracker that provides some valuable functionality for project and work management.
What Is a Task Time Tracker?
A task tracker is a software solution that lets you plan out your tasks and record your daily progress as you’re working on them. It normally includes functionality for resource allocation, task estimation, time tracking, data reporting, etc. In other words, it has everything you need to organize work and control your performance from the very beginning to the end.
Task trackers are often used by project managers and their teams as a means to keep project budgets in check and prevent schedule delays. However, single users – freelancers, solo entrepreneurs and other efficiency-oriented individuals – can also apply task trackers to understand how much time they spend on different types of work. This kind of knowledge is especially valuable if you want to improve time management and take your productivity to the next level.
How to Use a Task Time Tracker?
It takes merely three basic steps to set up a task time tracker and start to work with it. Let’s see what these steps are using actiTIME as an example:
1. Plan out your tasks
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 tasks;
- 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 tasks, you can specify time estimates and deadlines for them and clarify which pieces of work are billable and non-billable. You can also categorize your task using the custom fields functionality, which allows users to log any unique task characteristics that make sense to them but cannot be tracked in actiTIME otherwise.
For example, you may create such a custom field as Priority or Code and then assign different importance levels and digit identifiers to your tasks:
This way, you will keep all the critical information about the planned tasks in a single task tracker, organize it in a more convenient manner and have easy access to it at any moment.
2. Track your tasks
Once new tasks are created and planned through, you may proceed to task tracking. There are four primary features in actiTIME task tracker 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 project managment tool 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.
3. Analyze performance
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.
For example, you can run the Custom Fields Report to see how much working time your team invested in different categories of tasks created with the help of the custom fields feature.
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.
5 Benefits of Task Time Trackers
To sum up the above, let’s briefly state the main advantages that such a solution like actiTIME offers for those in search of effective task management software:
- 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.
