How to manage tasks effectively enough to win spare time and resources?

How to manage tasks effectively? – this is a complex question which can be answered if we answer two smaller ones – “how to plan tasks” and “how to track tasks”. Managing tasks in an effective manner is a way to increase your personal productivity and to create more value per unit of your time. To know how to manage tasks at work you should adhere to several main rules:

• To focus only on your main goals, not to disperse your powers between multiple objectives.
• To concentrate at right priorities – those which gain the most of value.
• To formulate tasks feasibly and clearly – you need to know exactly what to do and how.
• To manage task lists in a way simple as much as possible – you shouldn’t waste time on methodical or technical issues with operating to-do lists.

How to plan tasks: first of all you should prioritize your tasks to get concentrated only at things which are really important at the moment. For the purpose of tasks prioritization you need to date them in order to map out deadlines, so you can qualify each task as urgent or not urgent. Then you can evaluate each task by its impact to know if it is important or not. In order to plan your tasks you can use traditional paper means, or some special software like MS Outlook or VIP Task Manager. If you want to manage tasks with Outlook, it is important to organize this tool in a proper manner so you can easily see if tasks are relevant, important and urgent, or they can be postponed for a while. If you manage tasks in Outlook or in any another program, then you surely know that there are some standard options helping you to orient within your tasks (for example Priority which can be set up in each task).

How to track tasks: tracking tasks is important as well as planning. To track tasks effectively you need some criteria for success evaluation and progress measurement – for example, you may establish grades of completeness and task statuses which can help you to identify if certain task is already complete or it needs applying more efforts to get completed. No matter if you work alone or in a team as its supervisor or as an average member – anyway you need keeping a picture of your tasks updated and adjusted right to your needs. This refers to question of how to manage tasks in Outlook or any other software in terms of controlling their state – each task there has Status and Percent of completeness, so you can easily see how much of progress is made on the project. 

You can manage tasks with Google – it provides basic Calendar and to-do list for planning and checking off your tasks and appointments. Actually this way refers to a big number of web-based solutions allowing you to manage tasks online – there is a big multitude of free and paid web-sites which can be accessed from any point of the world connected to Internet. If you have Apple computer then you need a solution allowing you to manage tasks on Mac. There are lots of solutions which can be installed on Mac or other products from Apple Corporation (for example to manage tasks on iPhone or iPad). 

VIP Task Manager is a client-server tool which can be used to manage time and tasks in your workgroup in order of winning some spare time and resources that can be redirected to other more relevant activities.