Managing Your Own Tasks as a Project Manager
Project Managers are great at managing tasks for others, but what about when it comes to keeping themselves organized? Below are a few suggestions that may help.
Start with Your E-Mail Application
A great place to start is with your own tasks. There are meetings to plan, flights to book, agendas to put together, and reports to complete. Demands come at us fast and furious, and other people depend upon us to arrange these things in order for them to move forward. The last thing you want to be on any project or in any organization is a bottleneck.
Learn how to use your e-mail application is to start managing some of your tasks. We’ll be focusing on Microsoft Outlook, but the principles would apply to other e-mail applications as well.
Most people use their e-mail application for its ability to send and receive email as well as set up meetings and sync with other people’s schedules. Many people, however, overlook the Task functionality in Outlook.
Use the Task Feature
There are a couple of ways to make the most of the Task feature in Outlook. If you receive an email that you have to do something with later, drag it over to the Task Pane in Outlook. This starts your list of To-Do’s within the application itself, rather than having to write it a piece of paper or on the whiteboard behind your desk. You may move the email out of your Inbox and file it away after it’s on your Task pane. This keeps your Inbox uncluttered and still keeps the task in your list of things to do.
Categorize, Categorize, Categorize
Next, use the Categorize feature of Outlook. There are six default color-coded categories you can start with. You can rename these and add as many as you like. Six is probably a good number of categories to start with otherwise it can quickly become unmanageable. You may have a different category for each of your projects, or you may categorize things that you can only do while you are at your desk or on the road (like catch up on phone calls). Whatever system you develop to manage tasks in Outlook will depend upon your specific needs, but you will find it a whole lot easier than keeping your to-do list on paper and rewriting it every couple of days.
Plus, you can drag these tasks that need to be complete on your calendar and block off time to get them done. One trick of learning how to manage tasks is to understand that it takes time to complete them. Project managers get so busy. Their calendar books up with meeting after meeting which leaves no time to get other work done. When you plan out your week, be sure to drag these tasks onto your calendar for thirty-minutes to an hour to get them done. You’ll be very pleased at what a difference this makes in checking things off of your list.
