Easy Task Management: Organise & Simplify Tasks & Projects

1. Introduction to Easy Task Management: When everything on your plate feels equally important, it's easy to lose focus and feel overwhelmed. What if you had a system to bring order and clarity to your day? Imagine tackling your task with confidence and knowing exactly where to start and how to move forward. This class is designed to help you simplify projects, organize your workload and build systems that work with your life, not against it. This class, you'll learn how to break down big projects into what's called work breakdown structures, which makes them far more manageable. Identify and act on your MITs, which are most important tasks to focus on what truly matters. Use visual task tracking tools like Trello and clicker to organize and track your tasks effectively. You'll learn how to build workflows. That keep you on track, even on your busiest days, whether you're managing team projects, working on personal goals or just trying to bring some order to your daily to do lists. This class will give you the tools and the strategies to feel in control of your workload. By the end of this class, you'll have a clear approach to managing tasks and simplifying projects. If you're ready to bring order to the chaos and work smarter, then let's get started. 2. The MITs: Your Shortcut to Prioritizing What Matters: Hey, and welcome back to another key lesson. We're going to be talking about MITs in this lesson, which stands for most important tasks. Now, you might remember from a previous lesson when we talked about the Perito principle, also called the 80 20 rule. This is where that applies to your task. So your MITs are going to be the 20% of tasks that are going to yield the biggest results. So these are the ones you need to focus on. So given a list of ten tasks, your MITs are going to be those two tasks that will yield the best results. Those then become your priority and are the task that you should carry out first before anything else. Here's a little pro tip. From your MITs, pick the tasks that are the quickest and easiest to carry out. It might seem a bit counterintuitive and not going for the most difficult one first, but by picking the quickest and the easiest task, what you're then doing is creating psychological momentum. So you're able to start completing tasks quicker. And once you begin, it's going to be easier to continue. So that's it for this lesson, and it was quite a key one. MITs are a very important concept to work with, and they should be part of your daily routine, identifying the 20% of tasks from the full list that are the most important and really just tucking into those and making sure that you get those done first. That's it for this lesson. I'll see you in the next one. Goodbye. 3. MITs Planning Ahead: Welcome back to another lesson. We're looking at MIT still, and these are your MITs for planning ahead. There are two parts to it. There is the weekly MIT list, as well as the daily MIT list. And what this is is you're able to have an overview of all the important tasks you need for the week. That would be in the weekly MIT list. And then you'd go into a little bit more detail with the daily MIT list. So let's take a look at that. The weekly list, it should only take 10 minutes to complete, and ideally you want to do it at the end of the week so that you're able to take stock of everything that's gone on during the weeks because there might be some carryover task that you want to complete in the next week. But it's generally a good idea to do it at the end of the week because you're still in that working mode, and you're able to plan ahead that way. So that would look like a list, you could call it something like MITs week 40. And in there, you would five of your main business tasks, you would have three side projects or side hustles if you've got some things going on the side, and, of course, three to five personal tasks. That is a good amount to be able to accomplish because a lot of these main business tasks or project based tasks, there's going to be a lot of sub task to each of them. So you want to keep it manageable. You want to have it big enough and large enough so that you ensure that you're getting everything in there, but not too large that it becomes unmanageable and daunting to tackle. So where would you store these tis? Well, you could use your favorite task tracker like Trello or click up. You could even use a Google Doc, or if you wanted to go traditional, you could use a diary and just put it down on paper. Even a notepad would do the trick. And ideally you want to do it each Friday. That means you're setting up the week ahead to be a success. Then looking at the daily MIT task list, this should also only take 10 minutes, and this will have a bit more of a granular approach to it. There's a little bit more information to the task there. You would include things like deadlines and priority, resources, people involved, documents, and just give a bit more information to some of the task there. Again, good place to keep them is Trell or click up. Notepad, as well as a diary is equally good as well. And the best time to do that would be each working day, first thing. The benefit of it being first thing is it can become a ritual before you sit down to do all of your work. Or even last thing for the day ahead. That is also good because it allows your brain to just disengage from the workday. You've written everything down. You kind of have a good picture of what's coming tomorrow, so it does have that benefit as well. But whichever way suits you, whatever feels more natural and more productive to you, that is going to be the best way. So that wraps up this lesson. I also just wanted to mention that, of course, there's going to be other tasks that are going to come in throughout the week. Those you would just add to the list. However, you've already put all of your MITs on the list. So any new tasks that come in, they're going to fall into a lower place on the task list, and they're not going to be able to sneak up and steal the coveted spot at the top, which is where your MITs are going to be sitting. So of course, there's going to be more tasks coming along, but this way, the most important tasks are there at the top, and they'll be tackled first. So that's it for this lesson. I hope there was some valuable information that you could use. And why not give it a go? Why not start by creating a weekly MIT list and progress from there. You could even then do a weekly, as well as a daily list and see how that helps you and how you really are able to get your most important tasks that are going to be bringing the biggest results, getting them done first. With that, I hope you're able to get some value from this lesson, and I will see you in the next one. Goodbye. 4. Project Planning Made Simple: Hey, guys, and welcome back to another lesson. We're going to be talking about project planning and project management in this lesson and those to follow. This is a very important topic because there's projects of all shapes and sizes, everything from building a office complex to running a marketing campaign to developing a website, to creating a software application. All of these projects all started out as just a list of tasks. And what might seem incredibly daunting, I mean, looking at a building, it's hard to imagine that anybody could actually complete the task of building an entire office block or a house. But every one of these projects was broken down into tasks. So every task would be completely mapped out. There'd be a start and an end date. There would also be milestones to read. So milestones might be a collection of task. And once that milestone is met, then they would move on to the next phase. So the same principle can be applied to your projects, whether that's developing a website or creating a marketing campaign or anything that you're looking to do. The trick is to look at everything that needs to be accomplished and then break them down into the individual tasks that need to be accomplished. And with each of the tasks, you could then have stages. So you would have a planning stage, you would have a development stage, you would have a review stage, and then you might have a finalization stage. Once you look at all of these stages and tasks broken down into the lowest common denominator, which is individual items, it then becomes a lot more manageable, and the more manageable a project becomes, the quicker it can be completed and the milestones met, as well as just the psychological momentum that you create by getting all of the early tasks done on time and completed successfully. And it's amazing what you can achieve once you have a breakdown of all of the task for a project. So in the next lesson, we're going to be looking at breaking down the task into what's called a work breakdown structure. That is where you take everything and you break it down into its components to be able to execute more quickly. But in the next slide, let's look at three important aspects needed for successful project planning. Determining project outcomes. So every project needs to have a goal, it needs to have a deliverable, and also what are the results that would determine that the project has been successful? So, for example, in a marketing campaign, the evaluation criteria might be something like the number of leads generated the overall traffic that the campaign results in, as well as possibly engagement rate on social media. So once you have all of the goals that you need to achieve, that is the first step in planning a project. Then the next step is breaking down all of the tasks into a structured and organized list, as well as setting the start and due dates for each of those and most importantly, having either stages or milestones for those groups of tasks. So that will allow you to see some wins early on. You're able to get to a stage or a milestone, complete that. And once everything is completed correctly, and all the stakeholders are happy, and you're able to proceed further, then you can start with the next stage. So developing a timeline is the next step, and this is where you take all of those tasks that you've created, and you realistically plan out the timelines for each of them. So that would include the start and end dates. And with that, you are able to create a clear picture of how long the project is going to take, and you'll be able to gauge along the way, whether you're on track or behind, and once you have that information, you can either accelerate some of the task or cut out some of the task if they are not critical, and it just helps you to progress further and further and just manage your time a lot more efficiently. In the next lesson, we're going to dive a little bit deeper into the task and creating a work breakdown structure. That will also be useful for other advanced ways to track and manage your projects. Some of them are the Gang chart, and you can use your favorite list based software such as Trello. But the important thing will be that you have all of the tasks mapped out, and that is something that we're going to be diving into for the next lesson. So stick around, it's going to be a good one. And for this lesson, that is everything. I hope you were able to just see that even daunting projects and seemingly complicated projects, once they're broken down, they become incredibly more manageable and much easier to execute. And it's important to get those early wins by starting on tasks early and getting closer to those goals of completing the milestones or even to get to the finish line and complete the project in total. So that's it for this lesson. I'll catch you in the next one. 5. Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): Step-by-Step Planning Made Easy: Hey, guys. Welcome back to another lesson. In the previous lesson, we learned about all of the tasks and how they should be broken down for a project. So the next step is to take all of those tasks and put it into what is called a work breakdown structure. So this is a term and a method that's used in a variety of different industries, things like software development. It's used in event planning. It's used in even sort of aerospace and manufacturing as well as healthcare. It has a wide range of applications, and it's a very effective way to tackle complex projects. So the idea is that you break everything down into definable project goals. So the end result of the project would be the ultimate goal. However, you would set milestones and mini deadlines, if you will, along the way, to be able to meet the different stages that a project can go through. So let's have a look at some of the steps for creating the work breakdown structure. Defining the project goals, that is the outcome and the end result you want to achieve from this project. So that could be something like creating a marketing campaign where you need to generate a certain amount of leads. It could be something like creating your website that is fully SEO Ep optimized, as well as having all of the information presented to generate leads. It could be any important outcome that you want this project to achieve. Next is to list the major tasks, and this is where you would look at all of the tasks available and all of the tasks that are needed to get from the concept to the completion stage. So this is filling in all of the blanks and all the steps along the way to have a full list of all the tasks needed to complete the project. And hat GBT or Gemini are really good tools to be able to help you create all of these tasks. So inputting the project and the end result and all of the specific parameters and limitations is what you would include in the prompt, and Chat JBT would be able to give you a full breakdown of all of the tasks needed to complete that project. Then once you have all of the tasks, you would break those tasks down further. So there might be instances where a task needs to be split into subtasks just to make it more manageable. Also, if you need to assign certain tasks and subtasks to key stakeholders or there are dependencies or things like that, it's important to have those mapped out. Then the next one is assigning responsibilities. This, of course, means, if you have stakeholders or freelancers or other key team members that are providing support on the project, these are where you would assign them to these tasks. Then you need to identify dependencies. These are tasks that rely on other tasks or phases to be completed before they can be started. This is quite crucial because if you have somebody else that is waiting on the completion of another task, they might not be able to start their work until the dependent task is completed. So it's important to map these out, to be able to optimize them further. Maybe something else could be done in place of that just so that you can maximize the efficiency and the productivity for all of the tasks. Then you would need to prioritize the task. So this is where the most important tasks are ranked and sequenced in the correct order. So as you need more important task, those would need to be at the front or the top, and those would need to be completed first before the others, which might be a lesser priority, and those would be at the bottom. Then you need to estimate the time and resources needed for the task. This is to just have a general idea of how long the project will take, how long each of the milestones will take, so the stages, and also giving an estimate of how long each task will take. This ultimately will give you an entire timeline for the project to be able to know what and how long it's going to take from start to finish. By having this in place, you can also then gauge progress as you move through the different stages, and if you are behind, you're able to try and pick up the pace or optimize things a bit further to make sure that you stay on track. Then creating a simple outline. A project does not need to be overly complicated. You don't necessarily need to use a ganchart which we'll look at in the next video. It can be as simple as having a list of tasks in different phases. That can be in a spreadsheet or a document and just working through them step by step. It can be as simple as you want it or if you do need a bit more advanced functionality like that of ClickUp where you might have dependencies, and you can map those out as well as a just start and end dates, and all of the dependencies will slide along and adjust themselves to those start and end dates. And if you need that kind of functionality, it's there and available for you. However, it's not required to complete a project. A simple outline is just as effective. Then lastly, the next step is to review and adjust. So as you look at everything and review all of the tasks and even get started with the task, it's important to keep an eye and review and assess and maybe optimize and update the schedules, the timelines, and possibly even the deadlines. It's important to give feedback to all of the stakeholders when this is happening, but this is an important step to provide. So that is it for this lesson. I'm going to be showing you just how a Gang chart works. You'll be able to see this in the productivity tool called ClickUp. This is one of my top tools that I recommend. And a Gang chart is just a super efficient way to be able to map out all of your task. So you'd have the work breakdown structure all mapped out. You're able to set milestones. You're able to have sub task. You're able to assign tasks and subtask to team members. You're able to comment at feature rich descriptions, as well as many, many other features that will really optimize and help you be more productive with the projects. So let's take a look at the demo of ClickUp. The next one is the project Gant. Now, this is where ClickUp really shines in that you can create these Gang charts that show you via a waterfall, just the full breakdown of your project. So here we're able to see all of the start and end dates for a specific task. You're then able to see the dependency. So once that task is completed, then the others could start. It has the great option that if you move these around and change the start and end date, all of the dependent tasks will change as well. That just means that if one major task is changed, you're able to change all of those tasks that are dependent on it and all those to follow as well at the same time. So it's a huge time saver for that. So the Gant is a really nice view, and it allows you to see everything at a glance and just keep things on track. I mean, you can see your start dates and your due dates. The task, they change a different color as you complete them. So this, to me, is just a really, really cool feature of ClickUp. Right. Well, I hope that gave you some insights into just the power that some of these tools offer. Again chart is an excellent way to track more complex projects. It's also a lot more intuitive. You're able to get a lot more done, things like adding dependencies as well as start and end date. However, it's not essential to complete a project. If you are somebody that just likes a good old Google document or Word document or even a spreadsheet to track all of your projects, that is absolutely fine, as well. The important thing is to just have all of your task mapped out, have the start and end dates, the due dates, as well as all of the different stages and milestones that need to be met. As long as those key elements are in there, you're good to go and you can tackle any project. So that's it for this lesson. I hope you were able to see the power of a work breakdown structure, as well as a Gang chart for project planning. And I encourage you to put this to use with your next projects. Just have a play around, set up a free account on ClickUp and just see what is possible and how it can help you be more efficient and optimize your projects further. I will catch you in the next lesson. Have a good day. Goodbye. 6. The MVP Approach: Tackling Tasks with Minimum Effort for Maximum Impact: Hi there, and welcome back to another lesson. We're going to be talking about the MVP, which is a minimum viable product. And we're gonna be looking at this specifically as it relates to projects and TA. So traditionally, an MVP is a software term. It's where you release a version of the software that has the minimum requirements. And thereafter you gather feedback and you continually improve the software. This same principle is incredibly effective when it's applied to projects and tasks. Anything that you want to carry out using this technique and method is a surefire way to get you to that final product a lot quicker. Let's have a look at what are the steps of an MVP? There are five of them. The main steps are to identify the minimum requirements and create the first basic version. So this is the basic version of the project. It won't have all of the bells and whistles. It will be a working version of the project. So it's quite common in software these days to have a single feature software, develop that, gather feedback, and then improve on that. So we're going to be applying that here to your projects and task. The next step is to release that basic version to your inner circle. And by inner circle, that means your friends, family, co workers, mentors, anybody whose opinion you value highly and who can give you constructive feedback. Once you release it to your inner circle, you then use their feedback to make minor improvements and adjustments and just get it into a more improved state than what it was as the basic version. Then step four, this is the most important part. This is where you release the MVP version of the project or task. This is where it is released out into the wild, so to speak, and you're able to then gather feedback from people that would either be using the product or the software or the project or the content that you create, and they would then start to give you feedback. And this is an important stage. The next stage is the important one, I mean, and that is to gather feedback and continually improve. So once you've released that MVP, you can then make minor adjustments. You iterate as you go, continually improving it. And after a period of time, you're able to come to the final polished product, so the final result, and that then becomes the basically the final version of your project. So the MVP, although it doesn't have all of the bells and whistles, it allows you to release it sooner, to get it out there, to get the feedback, to improve upon it a lot sooner. And as a result, you're able to have a project or a product or content that is more aligned with your audience when it is released as the final polished product. So that is the basic principle for the minimum viable product. I would love for you to try this with your next project, maybe have a look at what is the minimum requirement needed for your next up and coming project and apply this MVP principle and get people involved. I mean, you'd be surprised at how how much engagement you can get from clients, customers, team members when you include them in the process. They would love to give the feedback and help you on your journey. And at the same time, you're then able to refine the project and get it more closely aligned with the people that are going to be using it in the end. I encourage you to use this for your next project or task to get that MVP version of it out there and released so that you can gather feedback and then make a much better final polished product. And here we have a very relevant quote from Voltaire, and that is that perfect is the enemy of goods. So striving for perfection is going to mean that your tasks and projects are going to take much longer than they have to, and much of the time, good is good enough. So that's something to think about. That's it for the lesson. I hope you enjoyed it, and I will see you in the next one. Goodbye. 7. Delegation and Automation: Lighten Your Load, Boost Your Output: Welcome back to this lesson on delegation, outsourcing and automation. These can help you focus on high value activities that can boost your productivity. Delegation is all about assigning tasks to others, so you can focus on what you do best. It's not about offloading work, but instead about leveraging the skills of others to produce better quality work. Outsourcing involves hiring experts or companies to handle specific tasks or projects. For example, things like graphic design or customer support or finance and accounting, those sorts of things. This allows you to tap into these specialized skills without having to handle it yourself. Automation uses technology to handle repetitive tasks. It allows large amounts of data, repetitive task to be handled with ease and also to reduce the element of human error that can sometimes come in. So when is the best time to delegate or outsource? Well, you should have a look at what drives you. What are you passionate about, and what are the skills that you bring to your business or to your professional life that drive the most results. If you're finding yourself doing tasks that aren't your core competencies, it could be better outsourced or even delegated to someone else. Another element to look at is to calculate your hourly rate. And if that does not align with some of the tasks, and you're able to see in the marketplace, looking at platforms like five or Upwork, where you could get the same services completed for a lesser hourly rate, then it makes sense to outsource to those professionals because for you to be able to handle it, it's not something that drives you. It might not be something you're passionate about, and it could be costing you a lot more than if you were to have somebody else handle it who is specialized in that task. Another reason would be if something is just not getting done, you're not getting around to it in time, it's been put off or delayed. That is another key reason to outsource and delegate. So just to recap, when should you outsource or delegate? Well, have a look at does someone else have the skills necessary to complete the task better than you? This is something that professionals and business owners struggle with is they feel that they can do it all. Why should they involve somebody else? They could save costs and potentially time needed to get somebody else on board. But the reality is that if somebody has a specialized skill, they're going to do it far better than you could so it makes sense to have them handle it. The other reason would be if it's just not getting done, if it's something that has been delayed for an amount of time or you're just not getting around to it, this is definitely something that should be outsourced or delegated just to ensure it gets done. Is it worth your time? So this is where you would calculate your hourly rate to perform a task. You would then see what is the industry standard for that task and the hourly rate that you would pay somebody else, and just assess that, is it worth your time and money to be able to do this yourself when somebody else could get better results, and it could cost less in the process. So that's something to consider. And lastly, ask yourself, does this energize or drain you? There are many tasks that will drive us and motivate us and energize us. Those are tasks where the results can be seen. The results are going to speak for themselves. And if you're doing tasks that just aren't getting you to that point, that aren't energizing you and the results seen are not satisfactory or are less than you had hoped, then that is the prime time to get somebody else involved and outsource or delegate. So when to use AI or automation tools, these are really good for high volume tasks, things like customer service inquiries. And although AI couldn't handle everything from start to finish, what you're able to do for customer service is just remove a lot of the load in the beginning. So having a chat bot, answer questions and provide information, it just acts as kind of a prescreening step for customer service. You can even automate the processing of orders and sending mass emails, email automations. This is critical to be able to just have series of emails that would send out offers to your customers or your clients. That is a definite must have. And these are all things that can be automated. Errors are going to happen, so automation is one way to at least reduce this. It means that large amounts of data and repetitive task are handled by a machine, and therefore, the human element is removed, so there's less likelihood of errors. Then repetitive and predictable tasks. These are things like data entry, social media posting, report generation, automating these things and scheduling them with automation tools are a great way to ensure that you're able to do more and also accomplish all of these repetitive and predictable tasks that need doing. Then I'm going to leave you with an insightful quote, and this is to set deadlines and share goals. Accountability drives motivation. So by accountability, that means that if you are to share what you're doing, share your progress, share your plans with other people, you become accountable to them. So you don't want to let them down, and that is a huge driver of productivity. So you're able to boost your productivity just by sharing what you're doing with others and giving them more information about what's going on. So that is a top tip there to implement. That's it for this lesson. I will catch you in the next one. Goodbye. 8. Templates & SOPs to Stay Organised: Hi there, and welcome to new lesson. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about templates, work guides, standard operating procedures. There is an important acronym that I want you to remember, and that is to always stay dry and dry stands for Don't repeat yourself. And that's where these templates and work guides are most effective, as this will mean that you no longer have to do repetitive work. So why would you want to use templates and SOPs and work guides? Well, helps you to avoid wasting time and effort on these type of tasks. So repetitive tasks. It allows you to focus on higher level creativity and thinking. So you're able to offload the thinking that's needed for those tasks and free your brain up for more important tasks. And lastly, it helps to reduce errors caused by manual work and also to standardize your work. With templates, everything becomes a standardized format. So that is a really important aspect of it. In the next video, we're going to be looking at examples of all of these templates and SOPs and work guides, and you'll be able to see how they work in the real world and how you can apply them too, as well. So let's take a look at them. Now, I'll show you some examples of the templates and SOPs that I've created. First up is my anatomy of content Bible. This is my guide and checklist when creating articles for my website, it ensures every piece of content is thorough, well structured, and optimized for SEO. Next, we have my SEO Trello checklist. This checklist helps ensure all the on page and technical SEO issues of my website are sorted out, keeping it in top shape for the search engines. So as you can see here, it has a number of lists, and in each list, there is a card. This represents the tasks, and the status is added as a label. And what I would do is basically through each list, go down all of the cards and complete them one by one. I'm able to add more detailed descriptions in here. Any other information, tag people that I need to alert, that sort of thing. So the steps would be going through each list, going through each card, and then at the end of it, that would have the project completed. Next up is an e commerce pro checklist, and this is a conversion rate and optimization checklist for auditing the performance of a website. It covers everything from user experience to loading times and just ensures that an ecommerce website runs smoothly. Next up, here is an email funnel that has been created in a mirror. And this looks at the lifecycle of a buyer's journey. So when they're placing an order, all of the steps that they follow to placing an order, it has the purchase stage where there is conditional statements. When they place the order, they then put into an email series. Where they then follow the series in a sequence. There's also mentions for when they should be waiting before the next email is sent. There's also some notes where tags are added to the contacts so that we're able to understand what they've done and what's been completed. There's also an abandoned cart flow. This is where we potentially lose them as a customer, and this flow just keeps them in the email series where we try and bring them back and get them to come back and place the order on the website. So as you can see here is also where the templates for each of the emails that we send in a series can be seen. And then lastly, the final stage in the purchase cycle if they need to return or exchange a order. So this is just a great way to visualize an email series at each stage of the buyer's journey, and it's just a visual diagram and workflow of all of the steps that are needed for that. Next is a notion templates as a company hub. This is a Wiki style hub for a company or could even be used as a project. And it's just a central place to keep all of your documents and policies and processes and information. It just keeps everything in a centralized place and keeps it all together and easy to access. So in each of these, you would have a different page that has all of the information for that. Next up is a master shortcuts sheet. This is something I do for every project. And what it is is it has a list of all of the most commonly used files, all of the most frequently used documents, software, links to websites, links to other sheets, all of that. So everything is laid out in an easy to see, easy to find structured way, and it just really helps to get to the documents you need as fast as possible. Next is an SOP. This is an IT work guide, and it's a simple guide for sending bugs and issue requests to developers. This was created for a client of mine, and it was shared with other team members so that they were able to know the process of how to make requests with the developers. And on the flip side, the developers would have all of the information they need to be able to handle these requests effectively. Next is another checklist, and this is for launching an ecommerce website. So it has all of the different stages and tasks and steps needed for launching a ecommerce website. And this makes sure that everything is laid out in a structured way and nothing can slip through the cracks, and you have a successful launch at the end of it. Next is a ClickUp basics work guide. So this was shared with some team members, people that were new to ClickUp, and they needed to have a quick guide to getting up to speed and learning the software. ClickUp is a really good productivity and project management tool. And as you know, it's discussed in this course. So this was a guide just to help others on the team to be able to just get up to speed and know exactly what's needed to use ClickUp effectively. Then finally, there is an email template, and this is for new suppliers. So this I used when approaching new suppliers on Alibaba. It has all of the requirements for a supplier to make sure that we're only approaching the best suppliers. So there was some preliminary steps to follow before starting with the specific questions that we would have for that supplier, and those would be laid out here. So this was an email template with all of the steps to follow when approaching a supplier. So to summarize, using templates, SOPs, and work guides can drastically improve your efficiency and consistency. They allow you to focus on what truly matters and reduce errors in your workflow. And as a special freebie, I've included thousands of free templates and documents for you to download. You'll find them in the resources section of this lesson. So make sure to check them out and download all of these templates and guides, and I really hope that they can help you to improve your productivity and just really boost your workflows and help you to be more streamlined. So that's it for this lesson on productivity, strategies and techniques. Keeping productive, and I'll see you in the next lesson. Bye. 9. Task Management Made Easy with Task Trackers: Hey, there. It's good to have you back, and welcome to another lesson. We're going to be looking at task trackers in this lesson and the lessons to follow as well. I'll be discussing two of my favorite tools, which are going to absolutely skyrocket to your productivity. But just to talk a little bit about task trackers and why you should be considering them if you aren't already. So if you're one of those traditionalists and you're happy with pen and paper, that's fine. Go ahead and continue with that. But I'd like to introduce you to task trackers, digital task trackers like Trello and ClickUp. These are incredibly powerful tools that allow you to just expand the possibilities and the functionality of simple task. So you're able to add things like descriptions. You're able to add due dates, set reminders, add attach files, all of these great functionalities that will enhance your note taking and task creation abilities, they really do allow you to improve your productivity and save time. I mean, for example, having to rewrite tasks if you're using pen and paper, rewriting tasks each day, it can be a bit time consuming, and especially if there are tasks that need to carry over to the next day, having to rewrite them is just a bit inefficient, whereas these tools allow you to duplicate, you can clone, you can copy. You can move from one list to another. You can snooze it for the future. There's just a world of possibilities, and I'm going to introduce you to some of the best features of my two favorite productivity tools in the next two lessons. But I wanted to set the stage here and just give you some indication and idea of the possibilities that you can have with these advanced task trackers. And we're going to be jumping them into the next lesson. But for this lesson, that is it, and I will see you in the next one. Goodbye. 10. Trello Best Features: Hello, and welcome to this lesson on Trell. We're going to be diving into Trelo's best features, and this is just to show you how incredibly powerful this productivity tool is and task tracking tool. And it's a really good one to have in your arsenal productivity tools. So how I use Trello it's more for personal task purely because personal tasks don't have as much need for collaboration and other stakeholders team members, that sort of thing. And I can generally get away with having lists where I move it in a Kanban style from one list to the other. It goes through various stages. So it's a much more simplified, easy to use tool, and therefore I use it for personal tasks mostly. That's not to say it doesn't have the functionality that a more advanced productivity tool and task tracker like ClickUp would have. I've just found ClickUp to be a lot more advanced in its functionality, and it allows me to track and manage my work and business projects a lot more effectively than Trello. But for you, it could work equally as well. It's just a matter of what you prefer. So let's dive into the Treles best features. The main one, of course, is the views that it has. You're able to visualize task, and the Kanban board is probably one of the most well known features. So a Kanban board is a list of different stages or different ways of categorizing your lists and cards within that list, and you're able to move from one list to the other in a kind of stage fashion, so it move in a timeline way. That is probably one of the most effective ways to use it is to just drag your cards from one list to another. But you can also have other views in Trelo. So you can have list views, just purely the task laid out. You can have timeline views. You can even with a few power ups, you can even have a gant chart. So that is quite handy. Of course, rell's big strong point is that it's a card based organization tool. So you're able to create cards which can be rich with descriptions and attachments and links and all sorts of things. Then you're able to use labels. In the screenshot here, you can see the different departments and the different labels that are possible. Tagging tasks with those labels just gives them a lot more organization, and you were able to then filter on those labels, as well as set automations for those labels. So it really allows you to do a few more things. The due dates, that is a key requirement of any good productivity tools. So being able to set the start and end dates and then also to set reminders for those. It helps with prioritizing, as well, so you know which ones need to be done first. Checklists and nodes. This is a great feature the checklist. You're able to add checklist items, and you can even include links and basic formatting to those checklist. So you can really just have a list of tasks within a card, almost acting like subtask to be able to have everything there at your fingertips. Then customization, you're able to tailor these boards and customize them and make them yours. The boards, the lists. All of it is customizable. I mean, from the backgrounds to the cards to the labels to pretty much every element of the card is customizable, and that's a really nice feature. And of course, the great thing is that Trello is free to use. Once you get started, you're able to use it without spending anything. Of course, if you want to get access to some advanced functionality like power ups and other automations, you might then need to consider a paid for subscription. However, to get to the basics and get all of the functionality, Trello is really good and free to try. So that is a good one. And I've just put up here a couple of handy tri shortcuts. Feel free to save this or screenshot this for your own reference. These are just some of the most commonly used shortcuts. And with that, we've come to the end of this overview to introduce you to Trello in the next video, I'm going to show you how Trill operates. We're going to look at the interface. We're going to look at how cards work, how lists can be created, how you move them between there. We're going to look at power ups and all the nice and wonderful functionality of Trill so that you can get an idea of how this can really help you to be more productive. And that's it for this lesson. I will see you in the next one. Goodbye. 11. Trello in Action: Task Management Made Visual and Simple: Hey, guys. So now we're going to be looking at Trello, which is a visual task and project management tool that allows you to organize all of your tasks into boards and lists and cards and be able to have a visual view of everything in a C ban style setup. So what CBan is is a lot of lists where you have cards that sit in those lists, and what will happen is you will move from each stage to the next. So you'd move from a research stage to a preparation stage to a in progress stage, to a review stage, to a completed stage, all of that. So it just allows you to move tasks from individual stages. And with Trello it's super simple to do. So let's dive in and check it out. So having a look at the interface here, we can see that everything is laid out. We have our workspaces. And it's a good idea to separate workspaces, so you can have a personal workspace as well as a business workspace. The difference being the personal one wouldn't mix any of your personal tasks into the business one because if you had a business workspace, you might want to be sharing it with some team members and things like that. So it just keeps the two workspaces separated. And we then have boards. So boards are a collection of lists and lists are a collection of cards. So in each of those, you can have any kind of list that you want. So it depends on the project and how you want to set it up. You can set it up to just have friendly names that you use, or it could be stage related. So as I mentioned earlier, if you have stages of a project that you want to send the task through, it would then go from one list to the next until completion. So that is one way to set it up. So if we have a look here at my setup, this is just my personal board, and it's got some lists here, and it's a very simple setup. I didn't want to overcomplicate things. And so here we can see the list, which is next. Now this represents all of the tasks that are upcoming that I need to do, open task, things like that. So everything that comes into here would sit on this list. When I start doing the task, they then move to the doing list. And so on. So as you can see here, we then have scheduled scheduled, that would be if it is coming up and it needs a bit of time before it can be executed. It's going to sit in the scheduled list awaiting. That is when I'm waiting on somebody else to give feedback and completed, of course, that's when it's done. There's also a projects task here. This is just for additional projects side projects, things like that that I would want to just keep track of. Let's have a look at what a card would look like. If we click on here, you have the card name. You have the notifications, the due date, which is quite an important function. This allows you to set the final due date of a card. You can even set a start date, which is really good for project management when you have a strict deadline and things need to be laid out and started at a specific date. So that's really good to use. You can even set reminders, and that will send you emails as well as notifications on your app or even on the desktop app. The description, this is where you would put all the information of the card. It's got rich text formatting. It even supports markdown, so you can really go to town the amount of rich media that you can add to a description. I mean, you can add in links. You can add in images. You can format the text how you want it. You can have lists. You can even change the formatting there. So you really have so many options with creating nice rich and comprehensive descriptions for you to be able to use and know the information for that particular task. Then if you move to the right hand column here, members. So these are people that have access to the board. At the moment, it's a personal board, so it's just myself. You would add that there if you want to have email notifications. Then we have label. So this is where you can have all of your labels that you want to use. And the label is what appears here. So that's a label. That's a label there. There's two ways to view them. If you click on them, you can have just a color based system, or you can have a text label appearing there. So checklists, these are really handy. Each card can have a list of other items and tasks to perform. And you can get quite detailed with these checklist items. You can even add links, assign them to other people, which is quite nifty. And once you've added a task there, you can then set a due date. And then that will appear color coded based on the status of that. So when the due date is approaching, it will change to a amber color. And if you run over the due date and it's overdue, it will then change to red, as well. So it's just a really cool way to keep track of your tasks. We've looked at. These are the start and due dates. Attachments, you can attach all sorts of documents to these, which is really handy. Location. So this is for location based cards. I don't use this feature too much, but it is there if you need it, the cover. So if you want to change how the card looks, you can get really creative with all of this. You can add images, and you can set how it should display. So it can have the text overlaying As you can see there in the background, it's changing. So you can just really style and personalize the board, how you want it. Custom fields. So this is great. If you want to add things like priority, status, risk, or you just want to have maybe quick notes or any number of applications, you can use a custom field to be able to do that. So there we've just added a priority field, and here we can set that as high priority if we wanted. Power ups. Now, these are integrations. So you're able to connect all of your favorite applications via PowerUs. So if you had Google documents, instead of just having a Google Link, it would create a media rich preview of the documents, so you'd be able to have a bit more information from it. Snooze. This is quite handy. So if you would like to snooze a card for a few days or a few hours, you can do that here. And then action. So this is to move the card, copy it, make a template from the card, which is really good. If you follow the same procedure and use the same format in a card time and time again, you can make a template from it, which is really good. You can archive it and then share it. So automations, I'll get onto this in a moment because that is quite a powerful feature of Trello. But for now, this is kind of the features of a card. So the list settings, here's just another way where you can add the cards. You can change the color of the list. You can get to some very basic and popular automations from this settings menu. So that's the card features. Let's move on to the views. So this is a Kanban board view. This is probably the most common and popular and powerful view that you're going to use with Trello. I prefer it. I really like it to have this visually laid out, so I always stick with the board view, but you do have others. That's the nice thing. So there's a table view where you can have everything just laid out, and it's a very simple row by row, almost like a spreadsheet appearance. Timeline. So the timeline is quite handy. If you want to have a project management approach to all of your tasks. So you set up a board, you add all of the lists, you add all of your cards, which are the tasks, you can then get clever and start to map out a timeline so that you can see everything that needs to be done for that project. So to do that, you basically just pull the cards onto here, you would then set the start and finish dates. So you could do it like that or where is it gone? So let's put it over here. Okay, so here you can extend it there so you can set the start and end dates. And there you'll see those are the dates that are added there. And once you've added out all of your tasks, you'll see it creates a kind of waterfall effect of everything that needs to be done, and you can see in a timeline what needs to be done for that project. So it's just a really great way to visually map out all of the tasks that you need to complete. There's also some other views. I don't really use the other views as much because they're more sort of based on calendars or maps, which is where that map field came in handy, which we saw on the card. But I would say that the board, the table, and the timeline are probably the bread and butter of the most powerful views in Trill. So then moving on to power ups, these are very, very powerful and allow you to add all sorts of integrations from other apps. So as you can see here, we have Google Drive, which is already installed. You can have a Slack Power, and it just allows you to integrate with all of these apps so that you can bring the data from them into Trello and vice versa. So there's some really cool ones here, and developers are making new ones every day. Trello has made some of its own ones as well. So there's a Gmail power, which allows you to instantly turn an email into a Trello card, which is super handy. So if you're using Trello purely for all your task management, you would then have that set up to convert emails to task very quickly. So the other great feature of Trello is automation. So rules are a way where certain conditions are met, you can perform actions on those cards. So as an example, let's just create a simple automation. A rule. Here, we're going to select a trigger. So when a card is added to a list, let's say, to the doing list, we want to add that. We then want to add remove an element. So we are going to add a label. So here we come in, and we want to add the in progress label. So we add that. And now every time a card is added to the doing list, it will have the in progress label added to it. So, of course, that's an incredibly basic automation, but you get the idea of what can be done. There are all sorts of clever conditions and scenarios that you can use just to really automate some of the tasks that you would otherwise be doing manually on your boards and lists. So let's see that in action. Let's come back. So what's happening is when we move any card to the doing list, what we're hoping to see is that it will change it to in progress. So let's have a look. There we go. So within a few seconds, it's added that. Now, you could layer all of those automations, so you could say, add me as a member so that I can get notifications, set the due date for one week in the future, all sorts of powerful automations that you can do just to reduce the time that's needed for kind of managing your tasks. So you can filter cards here. You can search for keywords in the cards, which is quite handy. When you have big lists and loads of cards, it's always good to be able to search for them. You can share boards as well. You can add as many people as you want, give them different privileges. So if you just want them to be a viewer, that's also possible. Over here is the settings. So here you have access to some basic settings. You can have labels and stickers and other things there as well. But another cool feature is email to board. So here you're given a unique email address that when you send an email to it, it will automatically convert that email into a card and add it to whichever list you define. So you're able to if you've got a quick note or you receive an email from somebody, you can just forward it to this unique email address and it'll automatically add that to the cards. That is quite a nifty feature. Right. So that is it for Trello. I mean, as you can see, it is a very, very powerful tool, and you're able to do so much with it. I mean, between just the features of a card and all of the functionality there to creating power ups, to creating automations, it really is one of those tools that is going to supercharge your productivity. I use it mostly for personal use. I've just found it works really well for personal stuff, but of course, there are people and teams that use it for work applications as well. My GT tool for work projects is ClickUp, and that is going to be discussed in the next lesson. So for this lesson and Trelo that's all I have to show you. I hope you got some information and some tips, and I hope you give Trelo a try because it really is super powerful and it's going to help you with your productivity. So, until the next lesson. See you then. Bye. 12. ClickUp Best Features: Hey, there. We're looking at ClickUp, which is a super powerful productivity tool and Task Tracker. It's one of my personal favorites, and I use it for all of my work projects. And I actually used it when planning out the course this course that you're watching. I used ClickUp for that. So it's incredibly powerful, and let's have a look at some of its best features. So as a versatile task management tool, it really, really excels. I mean, you're able to organize and prioritize tasks into list spaces. It also works with Gang charts, which are really, really handy. AGANchart if you don't know, is just more advanced way to track projects. So you have a cascading waterfall of all of the tasks that make up the project. You're then able to set starts and due dates for each of those tasks, as well as milestones and subtasks and all of that. And it gives you a visual top down view of all of those tasks, and you're able to move and slide the start and due dates of task. And if there are dependencies on those tasks, they will slide below it, as well. You'll be able to see a demo and see exactly what I mean in the next video where we actually have a look at ClickUp and just see how it works. But some other great features that you can prioritize and group and organize task. So it has an amazing ability for you to customize the views that you use to be able to see your task, and you can group those views as well. So you can group it based on the due date. You can group it based on labels. You can group it based on which list they are coming from. I mean, the possibilities are near endless, and it just really helps for you to be more organized. And allowing you to customize it fully to how you'd like to see and use this tool. Then, of course, it has an AI powered assistant, which is super handy. It can help you summarize entire lists of tasks, so you know exactly what's going. You were able to see what other team members were working on. So if you need a daily summary of everything that went on, it can do that for you. It can also plan out all of the tasks needed for a project. So if you were to give it a campaign, a marketing campaign, or a product launch campaign, it would then be able to list out all of the sub tasks for you and have those ready and waiting for you to start working on. So gone are the days where you have to manually type out all of the tasks and sub task and milestones. There's an AI feature that will do this for you. It then also allows effortless collaboration. So this is one of the key reasons I use it more for work projects is because when other team members are involved in projects, you're able to get the streamlined and very effective collaboration environment with inside of click up. So you're able to comment on tasks. You're able to attach files into those comments, attach screencasts. This is another great feature is you can record screencast, which is great for demonstrating concepts and principles and giving tutorials and direction and training, that sort of thing. And collaboration is one of the really powerful tools that the ClickUp does offer. Then it's also integrated with thousands of other apps as well. So if you wanted to bring in the power of Zappia, you can do that. You're able to integrate with Gmail and all Google Workspace apps. So Drive, calendar, all of those you can use from within ClickUp. So it really is a powerful tool. And those are just a handful of the features, but I'm really excited to show you a demo of ClickUp, and you'll be able to see how I created all of the task for the project, which is this course. So that's being used as the demo you'll see in the screencast, and that is going to be in the next video. So I will catch you in that video where we dive a little bit deeper into ClickUp. I wanted to share some useful click tips with you. This should help you to be more productive. So using the Mode, this is a setting within ClickUp. That allows you to filter all of the task, and it's only going to show you those tasks that are assigned to you. The next one is setting up recurring task. So every task that you create, you can also convert it into a recurring task. This makes it easier to set up scheduled tasks and make sure that no recurring tasks slips through the cracks. Able to leverage time tracking. So there is a time tracking tool within every task. So this is especially helpful if you are billing clients or you need to track the physical time it takes to complete a task. Then creating goal folders, this is really great to give you a bird's eye view of all the goals for a project. You create a folder with all of them, and then add the tasks into that goal folder, and that just helps you to keep all of them together. Then, lastly, using mindmaps, you're able to visualize projects and task creatively with mind maps. So if you need to demonstrate a concept or a principle to somebody or even for your own understanding, to be able to visually map out in a diagram or a flow chart. You don't have to use another tool for this. You can do it all within ClickR. So those are just a few great tips to use when you're inside of ClickUp. I hope you found them useful, so why not give them a try. That's it for this lesson. I'll catch you in the next one. Goodbye. 13. ClickUp in Action: More Advanced Organisation to Master Your Workflow: Hey, and welcome back to this lesson, we're going to be looking at ClickUp. ClickUp is an all in one platform that allows you to manage tasks as well as projects. It is really powerful in that it allows you to break down all of the tasks that are required to complete a project. Now, I used the term project loosely. It doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be a massive project. It could be something as small as launching a social media profile or sending out an email campaign to your clients, anything like that. It really shines where you have a certain number of steps to perform to get to an end goal. So, whatever that is, ClickUp is a really powerful tool to help you manage all of the tasks that are needed for such a project. So let's have a look and see what it's all about. So here we are at the dashboard. This is the home screen, and it allows you to just have a bird's eye view of all of your tasks and folders and the agenda for what's coming up for the day. And it is just a great place to see everything at a glance. The inbox is where you would be tagged in certain tasks or things like that, and all of that would appear here. So if you're mentioned by a colleague or a teammate or whatever, this is where all of those messages will appear. The document page, this is where all of your documents are housed, so you can get to them quickly. Clips. This is another great feature with ClickUp is that you can record screen cars. So it's really great for demonstrating a concept, or if you're having a problem with something, you are able to record your screen, much like you would with other tools like Loom or things like that, and include them in the task, and even in comments, you can add clips. So this is where all of your clips would be housed. That's another great feature that makes ClickUp stand out. There's a goal section, so if you wanted to set goals to achieve, you have that time sheets. So this makes it really great for freelancers or entrepreneurs that want to track the amount of time they're selling to be able to build their clients. So that's really cool. Then you can add all sorts of other different sections. So if you wanted to create white boards to demonstrate concepts or create visual diagrams, that sort of thing. Then if we come down to the spaces section. So the way ClickUp works is there's hierarchy of spaces and folders, and then inside of those folders, you will have task lists, and inside of those task lists, you will have tasks, and you can also have subtasks that are nested underneath those. So it just allows you to go a few levels deep and really sort of get a detailed count of your projects. So to see that hierarchy in action, let's just have a look at this animation. So we have the workspace, the space, the folder, the list, task, and subtask. So that kind of lays it out there, and we'll look a bit more in depth and how this applies to an actual project, so you can see it in action. So let's go into one of my spaces. So this is the M courser space. Um, these are all the tasks that have been laid out to be able to create this course. So it has everything in stages, and each of those stages is a task, and below that is a sub task. So in this example, we have record videos and voiceovers and record demos of the tools and software. And that's actually what I'm busy with now. So this is the click up demo over here. If we go into that, we're seeing everything that I would want to cover in such a lesson. So this is what your task would look like. So creating a task, it brings up this window, and you're able to add all of the information that you need and include things like statuses, you can assign other people to this task or keep it for yourself. The dates, this is the start dates and end date. I'll show you in a second where that really becomes powerful. The priority, you can choose between urgent high normal and low time estimates. So if you wanted to share time estimates with clients or other team members, tags, you can tag this to have more filtering options. And relationships. This is a really cool feature. So you're able to add relationships to either documents or even other tasks. And when you have that relationship, it shows in this panel over here. There are also relationships that relate to the status. So if you're waiting on another task to be completed before this one can be started, those will appear here as well. Same thing for blocking. But if we wanted to say link another task, we wanted to link a subtask, we would just select it there, and then it becomes linked to this one, and we can access it very easily. So this is just a great feature that allows you to interconnect all of your task and just to have that streamlined view of all of your task and to get to the task that you need to very quickly. So in the task description, you have a rich editor, and by hitting the forward slash, you're able to access all of the different elements. So you can add things like tables, banners, checklists, columns, templates, toggle lists. And then you can also stylize the text and format it how you want to. Of course, bulleted lists, numbered lists. All of these options are available too. You can even list other tasks as a click up list table. Or even as a ClickUp list board that is quite handy, and then also you can embed other files from other applications. Having a Google Drive file or a Google spreadsheet, you can have all of that information available in your description. This just makes it incredibly powerful to have all of the information you need for a task right there in front of you. You can then add custom fields, which are really great if you want to customize and personalize the tas. Sub tis are where you are able to add nested task within this task. So this then becomes the parent task, and you would have child tasks that are nested within that. The great thing about subtasks is they would have all the same functionality as the parent task. So if you needed to set due dates start and finish due dates, you needed to set separate priorities, tag them differently, add different descriptions. That is all available to you on a sub task as well as the parent task. So that's a really powerful option and feature. Checklist. These are just nifty ways to add very simple lists of things that need to be accomplished for this task. So if you feel that you don't really need a subtask because you don't really need all that extra functionality like media rich descriptions or commenting or anything like that, you're able to just have a simple checklist here, and that would mean you could have just a bit more of a simple list of things to go through. You can also tag people to checklist items, so that's pretty cool. And then attachments, of course, you are able to attach any and all documents to a task, which is really handy. So then some of the options here as well, on a task card, you're able to add this to different sections, so favorites or personal list. You can convert it to a list or a parent task or a milestone. You can set the task type, whether it's a task or a milestone, you can duplicate that task. You can remind yourself You can send email to task, so that would be where you want to send updates or include attachments, things like that. You can merge it with another task, all of these gray things. And this is where the relationships come in as well. This is just another section where you can create those relationships or dependencies. So that is what a task would look like. Et's move on to view. So another great and powerful feature is being able to have different views. So what we're looking at here, this is just a standard list, and we're grouping by the due date. We're also showing the subtasks. Other options available to you are table. So I'll show you what this looks like. Personally, I really do like the table view because it allows you to view tasks as if they were spreadsheets. So it means that you can fit in a lot more tasks in smaller space. So over here, we have all of the tasks listed out. We can interact with these tasks right from this view. If we needed to, we can also bulk edit them. So if you say, one day just blazing through all of your tasks, you're able to select all of them and then update the status all at once, which is quite handy. You can set the assignees. You can set the dates. All of these options are available to you in this view. The next one is the project Gant. Now, this is where ClickUp really shines in that you can create these Gang charts that show you via a waterfall, just the full breakdown of your project. So here we're able to see all of the start and end dates for a specific task. You're then able to see the dependency. So once that task is completed, then the others could start. It has the great option that if you move these around and change the start and end date, all of the dependent tasks will change as well. So that just means that if one major task is changed, you're able to change all of those tasks that are dependent on it and all those to follow as well at the same time. So it's a huge timesaver for that. So the Gant is a really nice view, and it allows you to see everything at a glance and just keep things on track. I mean, you can see your start dates and your due dates. The tasks, they change a different color as you complete them. So this, to me, is just a really, really cool feature of ClickUp. Then there's also the board view, much like we saw in Trello. This gives you the Kanban way to manage tasks. I don't use this as much, but it is there if you want to use it. One last thing I'd like to show you in ClickUp is automation. So you're able to automate some basic tasks, and this helps you just to get a bit more functionality and not spend as much time manually updating tasks if you need to. So there are a lot of templates that they provide. I mean, right out the box, you're able to see so many different options. So project management automations when a task is created, then you set the custom field. When the due date arrives, change the status. All of these really powerful automations that you can run just to save you time and things like that. You've got marketing automations. All of these are available to you. So this is another powerful feature is you can create these automations and be able to save yourself a lot of time. So that about wraps up this ClickUp demonstration. I hope you were able to see just how powerful it is. You can see how I used it. For this course, to be able to flesh out everything and manage everything, I could not do this on a simple document. I would struggle on a spreadsheet. So ClickUp has made it just super easy, and I'm so happy that there is software like this to really make it easier for creating projects and managing task because it does a fantastic job at that. So I urge you to give it a try. There is a free trial. There's also a free edition, actually. You can use it quite a generous one Um, not too many limitations. I'm on the free plan here, and I was able to use much of the functionality. I'm not missing out on anything. So I'd love for you to give ClickUp a try and just see how amazing it is and how it can help you with your productivity. So that's it for this lesson. I'll catch you in the next one. Bye.