I suffer from CRS; Can’t Remember… I also have a deep-rooted need to constantly keep myself busy. Since high school, my workaround has always been lists – lots and lots of lists. I have been carrying spiral ring notepads around with me for years.
One of the first things I did during quarantine was to create a list of personal and professional goals that I wanted to knock off. There is no doubt that sheltering at home sucked and I hope we never have to experience it again. However, my lists helped keep me focused and I was fortunate to have been able to use isolation constructively while getting some memorable quality time with the family.
Since I started working for myself in 2008, I’ve gone paperless using a combination of Outlook and MS Notepad to keep track of my priorities. The problem is my notepad to-do file is 10,502 words and 108 pages long. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve got around 180,000 emails archived in four different installed versions of Outlook. Literally terabytes of data.
My system works but it’s messy. It is difficult to share information effectively and there is limited transparency. I’m the king of email chains. It works but is it efficient? To say that managing data, projects and teams is an issue is an understatement. It’s more or less what most of us do all day, every day.
I started using monday.com on a recent project with a third party and it has already dramatically changed the way I run my business and plan my life.
At the time that I was first introduced to using monday.com, I was working on two identical website development projects with two different clients. One project used monday.com and the other one didn’t.
The difference was immediately night and day from the project kick-off. There were other factors at play, however, the project management tool was a major part of the success of the project that used it. The project that did not use the tool was a complete disaster. No one knew what to do. Time was wasted. People were duplicating efforts while other items were neglected. Floundering is a fitting word.
It was the complete opposite situation for the project using monday.com. Each member of the team knew exactly what they should be working on and when. Everyone could clearly see where we were stuck, what was coming down the pipeline, deadlines, bottlenecks, completed tasks etc. Total visibility.
It was new school versus old school in every sense of the phrase. The latter consisting mainly of unproductive meetings, unclear roles, undefined responsibilities, and undelivered deliverables. That is a lot of “uns.”
Appealing to my undiagnosed need to tick items off a list, I have found an amazing amount of satisfaction in turning the status on an item to green with monday.com. I also discovered that if you break projects down into nuggets so everyone is clicking “done” a few times a day, completing work tasks becomes addictive. Pride and confidence in one’s job improve. Team members show how much they are contributing. Managers keep track of what everyone is working on, identify bottlenecks and make sure the team is moving in the right direction.
Monday.com creates real transparency by making data easily accessible to everyone. It turns data into action. The platform is more than just a project management tool. It’s a work/life organizational hub that is scalable from managing personal to-do lists to leading an entire company and anything in between. It is adaptable to any industry and/or business.
How much time do you spend either being distracted or reviewing long email threads? If used properly, this system eliminates chain emails. Dashboards let managers get key insights and metrics all in one place. It doesn’t matter if your team is two or two hundred.
If you are interested in an account that is free forever and has more features than you’d expect, please sign up through porayko.com so that we can each earn free add-on items.
Rich Porayko is a professional writer and founding partner of Construction Creative, a marketing and communications company located in Metro Vancouver.
richp@constructioncreative.com
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