Things 3 6 2 – Elegant Personal Task Management

Developing self-management skills is one of management best practices for those employees who have decided to become more productive at workplace.

Things 3 6 2 – Elegant Personal Task Management Tool
Things 3 6 2 – Elegant Personal Task Management System
Things 3 6 2 – Elegant Personal Task Management Software

While companies tend to invest a lot of money and energy in employee training and improving employee performance, every worker can personally organize self-assessment surveys to define whether he or she has the required skills set.

By listing your tasks in order of importance, you can make sure that you finish all of your most important tasks during the day. Learn a unique technique to Prioritize Right in 10 Minutes and Work 10X Faster. Batch Similar Tasks into a Single Batch. Tasks like blog writing, phone calls, email and errands can be grouped into a single batch. 6 Steps Approach to Effective Project Management. Practical and effective project management has its roots in SIMPLICITY. Keeping a thing simple makes it easier to understand for most stakeholders e.g. Project stakeholders can provide requirements in simple terms - teams unambiguously, they can set clear expectations. It is a simple company management software that focuses on getting things done. It brings all your customer management and project management in one place with a beautiful and neat interface. Top features: Intuitive user interface; Focused communication and real-time updates; Built-in time tracking and billing; Sync tasks with any calendar; 3. Things 3 – for personal task management I’ve never found a task manager app that worked the way I wanted it to. My frustration with Fantastical as is task manager is in order to have a task with a due date you have to have a reminder.

Such an idea is extremely important for workers who aggressively look at career development. Without the personal effort for developing self-organization and self-management skills, it’s hard to imagine a productive employee who succeeds in career promotion and professional advancement.

This article is written to help you answer the question “What are self management skills?” and how to be a productive employee at the workplace.

What Are Self-Management Skills?

Self-management skills are those abilities that allow an employee to feel more productive when doing daily routine tasks regardless of the working environment. Well-developed self-management skills will help you efficiently communicate with co-workers, senior management, and customers, make right decisions, maintain a work-life balance, and keep your body and mind healthy.

To improve self management skills, employers often organize special self-assessment training and development. Usually such training is conducted by the HR department (or external trainers are employed). To develop self-management skills of the personnel, your company can organize self-development training sessions.

Any employer is interested in hiring a productive individual who has well-developed self-management skills because this employee fits the company’s requirements and shows better productivity.

For employees it’s highly important to develop self-management skills and abilities because higher productivity paves the way for career promotion and professional advancement.

In any way, both the employer and the employee will benefit from developing the abilities and skills for self-management.

Essential skills for self organization and engagement

Reduce bias and encourage yourself to self-improve your skills and be open to leadership potential and communication

Here is a list of the key self management skills required for an employee to be more productive at workplace.

If you want to achieve career advancement and improve your stress management, you need to consider this set of personal skills and work on the development of the necessary abilities for self-organization and employee engagement.

1. Stress resistance

The first and foremost skill of self-management refers to a personal ability to resist any stressful situations. When you improve this self management skill, you can avoid many mistakes that people usually make when being stressed out at the workplace.

Because a stressful situation usually blocks our ability to think and make rational decisions, we can’t cope even with the simplest tasks at the workplace, so our productivity goes down and we get frustrated. That’s why you need to develop this ability in order to be a productive employee able to offer resistance to a stressful situation.

2. Problem Solving

The second self-management skill requires you to use your brain as a mechanism for making right decisions. Even the hardest tasks and challenges can be efficiently handled if the mental process in your head is always in progress. Problem solving requires you to operate facts and make right assumptions to analyze the situation, review problems, and find effective solutions. Keeping your mind sober allows you to make right decisions even in the toughest situations.

3. Communication

The way you can communicate information to others will determine your success.

Communication is one of the key self-management skills required for both personal development and career advancement, including virtual public speaking.

Being able to efficiently communicate any information to other people means that you can share information with the minimized possible distortion and in the fastest possible way. Productive employees always can efficiently communicate with their colleagues, project managers, and team leaders because they comprehensively understand the value of clearly and timely delivered information. So be sure you work on developing this skill for self-management.

4. Time Management

Producing expected results in a timely manner determines the success of our effort. Time management is an extremely important self-management skill that makes an employee be more productive. There’s a great variety of time management techniques that show you how to develop this skill for self-management. Just use the web search to find plenty of them.

Things 3 6 2 – elegant personal task management skills

5. Memory

An ability to memorize events, names, facts, etc., allows an employee to remember about everything he/she needs to do daily tasks and duties. Among other self-management skills examples, committing to memory requires your personal effort for developing your mind abilities. There’s a lot of techniques for improving memory, so use the web search to find them.

6. Physical Activity

Keeping your body in good shape is a critical self-management skill example. When you feel healthy and have a robust nervous system, you can do more things and cope with many challenges. Physical activity (like jogging, fitness, different sorts of sports, etc.) allows you to strengthen your body, keep your muscles up, and be more productive.

How to Be a Productive Employee (Checklist)

Find your way to personal development and improve the skills that help you be av ever productive employee

Here’s a simple checklist that will help you develop your self management skills and be more productive at your workplace:

#1. Make a to-do list. You can’t efficiently plan for anything having no to-do list in place. First you need to make a task list and specify the key tasks for developing self management skills examples. Use task management software to create and manage your tasks.

#2. Prioritize tasks. Your to-do list may have a lot of tasks. But which tasks to complete first? To answer this question you need to consider all the tasks in your to-do list and then set the right priorities in your office or remote working. By prioritizing the tasks you can decide what examples of self-management skills you’ll need to develop first (according to your current needs and employment requirements).

#3. Schedule tasks. Scheduling allows you to set deadlines and time-frames for your tasks. Use task management software to develop schedules and set task due dates relating to developing the self-management skills.

#4. Be flexible. Regardless of your intentions and wishes, there will be days (caused by illness, vacation, holidays etc.) when the external world won’t let you develop your project management skills.

That’s why you need to be flexible to get everything done through putting your tasks on hold and then returning back to the prioritized items on your to-do list. You shouldn’t be frustrated and stressed out when you can’t do a task because of some external factor (e.g. illness) – just put everything on hold and get back to your tasks as soon as you get an occasion for developing self management skills.

Summary

The article demonstrated what self-management skills mean, showed the key examples of those skills and described a small checklist for employees. Hopefully it will help you be a productive employee at the workplace – remote or office, regardless of the global pandemic. Please feel free to leave your comments and feedback.

Practical and effective project management has its roots in SIMPLICITY. Keeping a thing simple makes it easier to understand for most stakeholders e.g. project stakeholders can provide requirements in simple terms - teams unambiguously, they can set clear expectations. Project stakeholders can measure project success in terms of benefits it delivers.

These days all of us are expected to be efficient. Always! So, if efficiency is expected from everyone, how can we make the difference? By being EFFECTIVE. Here is a 6 steps approach to do effective project management for your organization and drive better results.

Step 1 : The Groundwork - First Do Your Homework

Before project manager (PM) or portfolio manager can jump on to project planning, you as a PM should be doing certain ground work. As mentioned earlier you should identify

Who are the project stakeholders, who are going to be beneficiaries?
What are the outcome-benefits expected by various stakeholders?
Based on these benefits, how you can garner buy-in from senior management or customers?
High level of deliverable, skill set required to deliver those
Identify metrics: project management KPI to define project success
How project artifacts, progress, issues, deliverable will be communication i.e. communication plan

Let’s look at these six basic steps for effective project management: project planning and project execution that a project manager can follow in almost every project to ensure project is delivered successfully.

2. Clarity of project requirements, project scope

In most cases, unclear project requirement definitely results in project failure. Right at the beginning ensure all relevant stakeholders understand project requirements clearly and the importance of having unambiguous project scope. It is pretty common these days to see that sales team, project managers working with clients and help him articulate client's requirements. Based on very high level project requirement, you can chalk out project charter, project scope.

If you would like to avoid project scope creep, you will have to make stakeholders understand that project scope is sacrosanct. Having said that total inflexibility can also kill project outcome (i.e. project outcome will not be useful or beneficial to customer as expected). You can accommodate change request after reviewing its value to project outcome.

It is crucial for effective project management to be able to have complete and clear project requirement, right at the beginning and avoid project scope creep during project execution. You can use right project management tools to draft, articulate project requirements, review and seek approvals, so that transparency and accountability for project requirement is ensured.

Get Organized & Start Using Project Management Tool

Nobody likes bad surprises, get your projects, teams and communication organised. The best project management tool will help your customer or senior project management from bad surprises.

Here are some of the interesting findings

44 percent of project managers do not use project management software; interestingly though top consulting firm PWC has found out that using PM software increases performance.

High-performing organisations successfully complete 89% of their projects, while low performers complete only 36%

77% of companies use project management software, and 87% of high-performing companies use project management software

Even today most people rely on emails for day to day communication. But if you are sending emails to stakeholders by yourself, then you are certainly not doing it in the best way, you are spending time on things which are best handled and automated by project management tool. A project management software is indispensable to automate project communication. Any change in project schedule, issue assignment, new risk in register, comments to tasks, issues, risks, project meetings, task due date reminder, project status change notification, etc. will be automatically communicated by a project management system and thereby leaving no manual error for communication gap or manual error in informing project team members, project sponsors or senior management or even customer.

3. Planning schedule, risks, resources

Team Selection

Once a project charter and project scope is defined and articulated, you will have to identify project manager and project planners. Having project manager, project planner and team members who are subject matter expert for a project in consideration wins half-battle. As project manager & project planners define work-breakdown-structure (wbs) and identify high level deliverable, identifying right skillset to work on those deliverable is equally important. So based on these identified skillset, project manager has to select resources who will be allocated to project and will be assigned work.

Project Schedule

The planning phase of project requires well defined project charter and project scope. Based on this project manager can work on project schedule identifying important deliverable, WBS, milestones. As he gets better understanding of project scope, available resources, he can create detailed project schedule identifying minute level details of project schedule : i.e. tasks, milestones, subtasks, allocating and assigning resources to each of these tasks. As we know, detailing leads to questions, questions brings clarity, and clarity drives predictability.

This phase marks a clear assignment, responsibility for project team members. Again it is important to have detailed project schedule for effective project management. And equally important it is, to be able track project tasks seamlessly

Planning for Project Risks

Managing project risks is integral part of project management. If your projects are not trivial, whether you like it or not -risk will be inevitable part of your projects. If it is not done as an academic exercise of managing project risks, project risk management saves you greatly from surprises. It is important for effective project management to plan for project risks right at the beginning. You need to make team members aware of project risks also provide a platform like online risk register where team members and other stakeholders can quickly record & highlight project risks.

4. Communication Plan - Clarity & Frequency

At every phase and step of managing project, project manager has to communicate. Communication strategy and plan is crucial for greater project visibility and ultimately for project success. Project communication is required for

Informing stakeholder about project plan, scope; review and approvals thereof
Keeping team members informed about change in project schedule
Being able to highlight issues and risks in project
Being able to provide clear & real better visibility to sponsors, portfolio/executive managers with project portfolio KPIs
To get buy-in or support from senior management if anything is going wrong

Kick-off project

Now almost everything looks ready on a paper, it is a time for a project team to jump-in and start working on minute level tasks. As mentioned earlier, every team member, vendor, customer should be informed and made aware of clear expectations from them i.e.

When a specific task is supposed to start,
Who will do it,
When it should be completed
What information should be updated (timesheet, expenses, document, and deliverable)?

It is then become the work to be done on the ground. As team members start working on it, project manager and project leaders can play a role of facilitator, guide/coach so that there is a productive and positive environment for project team.

5. Monitor & Control

As the project is kicked-off and project team has started working on project deliverable, as project manager you need to track project progress, communicate it to senior project managers, customers as appropriate. In order to monitor and control project

You will have to collect progress updates, and check project is not going off-the-track
Adhere to the project schedule, cost and keep watching project baseline
Follow the mantra Get Things done, no matter what are obstacles
Check project deliverable for quality
Involve project sponsors, customers and end-users informed
Take a regular feedback from team, customers and end users
Manage change requests, issues and risks judiciously; as these are inevitable but if not managed well can take project off the track

6. Deliver, close and Review

When you will deliver project artifacts, meet milestone ; you would like your project customers to see the benefits. You would like customer to actually make use of it. Hence you will have to see

Project deliverable are working for customer
Address any issue, gaps
Work with customer to identify trainer or champion
Train the trainer
Run a pilot, make it successful and enable customer to market it inside and outside customer’s organization

To get customer confirm successful project deliverable, you can schedule a pre-planned review meeting to get a formal agreement, seek feedback, identify positives and negatives of the whole exercise of delivering projects - project review. Thereafter, you should also conduct an internal review of the project to identify mistakes made, learning thereof and best way to move forward.

Final thoughts

Successful project delivery is not a rocket science. But it is perceived to be complicated and demanding process and if these perceptions are not clarified, it induces errors, risks and makes project go off-track, overrun cost, deliver sub-standard outcome. Though it can be complicated and demanding processes, it can be achieved. As per industry reports, there is still large percentage of project which are delivered successfully (on time, within budget, of desired quality). Following closing points will help you in successful delivering projects.

Get clear project requirement, have clear understanding of project requirements
Have an eye for detailing : be it requirements, tasks, issues, risks or communications
Ensure team members have enough information to perform tasks, make them accountable
Stick to project schedule, yet things can go wrong with project so deliberately have buffer while creating project schedule
Review project progress, initiate corrective actions quickly: stop project from failing
Keep key stakeholders informed, seek buy-in wherever, whenever necessary
Articulate key learning before closing project and utilize these learning aptly for future projects.

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