Have you ever gone into the office in the morning and taken a look at all the tasks around you and wandered: HOW WILL I BE ABLE TO DO THIS? I know we have - Between juggling website design, branding and content creation it tends to feel like juggling balls all the time! So how do we at Pathfind Media cope?

TASK MANAGEMENT.

We found an absolute lifeline in using task management software. Now we have the ability to arrange our tasks in terms of importance, tick off as we go and even use it for off-site storage (more on that a little later!)

What is Task Management?

According to Wikipedia:

Task management is the process of managing a task through its life cycle. It involves planning, testing, tracking, and reporting. Task management can help either individual achieve goals, or groups of individuals collaborate and share knowledge for the accomplishment of collective goals.

Let's apply this in an office context. We work in a digital space and as mentioned above - Pathfind Media offers a variety of services. It is vital to be able to manage a task through its entire life Cycle from the initial quotation phase right through to receiving the final nod of approval. It is also important to be able to manage the whole process when you have multiple tasks running simultaneously. This is what task management tools do. You get to see the whole picture and then you can focus on completing tasks one at a time instead of trying to do everything at once. After all, Rome was not built in a day! According to Exforsys:

Task management is deemed very important because it increases productivity; it reduces the time allotted for setting priorities, encourages us to make use of the art of delegation, and enables us to differentiate from the four kinds of individual tasks which are: urgent and important, not urgent but important, urgent but not important, and not urgent and not important.

Trello

At Pathfind Media, we use a combination of two very popular task management programs: TRELLO and BASECAMP. Trello is free with the ability to upgrade to the premium version while Basecamp is a premium tool. This software can be used hand in hand to accomplish the challenges you face from a task management perspective and it is important to understand the individual strengths of both programs to best utilise it. Trello's power lies in managing your day to day tasks. It comes with a built-in checklist that you are able to utilize immediately. This is key as any task could have a couple of subtasks to accompany it. It has been proven that one of the biggest sources of motivation lies in the completion of tasks. When we accomplish goals, we get a sense of achievement and it then spurs us on to get more done. Trello assists in this regard this by means of its checklist as you can tick off the tasks as you go and will tell you via a percentage how far you are till completion.

Basecamp

Where does Basecamp fit into all of this? Basecamps power lies in project management. Even though both programs have the ability to create tasks and tick them off as you go, Basecamp is the better software for managing a project from start to finish. You can track due dates, make notes and assign different team members different tasks within the project. And to top it off, it has a built-in feature for getting project approval at the sign off stage.

Basecamp has many cool features and we have listed some of them below:

• The ability to add clients to your projects so that they are a part of the whole process
• The ability to email clients straight out of Basecamp
• Off-site storage (Protection from data loss!)
• Chat feature in Basecamp to communicate with colleagues and members of your team

As you can see, both programs have their strengths and can really help you and your office increase the productivity and maximise results.So don't wait around, test drive both programs and find which one works for you!