- Project management systems help organise emails relating to a project
- Some PM tools focus on simplicity, others on more features
- You can create tasks automatically via a special email address
In the previous article in this 7 Cool Tools for Fast Delegation series we looked at how the Dragon Dictation app for iOS can be used in combination with another iOS app called MeMail for rapidly creating and sending emails to your assistant or other team members.
But email – although convenient and ubiquitous – is fragmented. You couldn’t really call email a system for organising and prioritising tasks because emails can be stored in many ways, even within one business.
For example, should emails be filed according to the person doing the task, the person delegating or managing it, the project name, or perhaps the due date or priority?
To address this, a number of task management and project management tools address this issue. Most are a combination of web-based apps and mobile apps, though some also have desktop apps. They all sync the same “master copy” of projects, tasks, task lists as well as notes, comments and related files.
We have evaluated a number of these including:
Each has its strengths and weaknesses and there is no definitive “best tool”. Some are better at time tracking, some give your clients and/or contractors access to the system for collaboration, some have proper project management ability with task dependencies, Gantt Charts and capacity planning, and some focus on job management for invoicing purposes and so on.
Your preference also depends on how your brain is wired because these systems all have different approaches to how they display tasks and projects. Some (such as Basecamp) have a very strong keep-it-simple philosophy and resist adding more complex features. Other platforms are extremely feature-rich (such as AffinityLive) but with that power and feature set comes an overhead of learning how to use the tool due to its relative complexity. Others strike a middle ground.
I recommend the use of a project management and task management tool such as one of the above because it gives you a greater degree of control and transparency on who is doing what; what is due this week; what is overdue; which tasks remain for a particular project; and so on. Some tools also make it very easy to collaborate on tasks and projects not just with your own team members, but with clients and outside contractors. In this new era of outsourcing and remote teams, this is important.
However, in the context of this delegation series and following on from the theme of the previous post, a feature that is important for fast delegation is the ability to simply send an email to a particular email address and have it automatically added to the task/project management system.
The simpler this works, the better.
Basecamp has this feature but each project in your Basecamp account has its own unique (and complex) email address such as project–9976452–981a88f45bfae0dc10dbb121@basecamp.com
Even though it’s possible to look up this email address for each project via the ‘Email content to this project’ link that is at the bottom of the screen for each project, we found that too slow and laborious because you have to log in to the system to find it.
Ideally, you just want the one email address that you need to remember so you can just quickly send an email off and know that it will get added to the system as a task.
Wrike allows this. Users only need to remember the email address wrike@wrike.com and they can either send emails to that address directly or just add that address to the CC field on an email to someone to whom they are delegating a task.
This ‘create tasks via email’ ability is fast and efficient because you and your team can quickly create tasks anywhere, anytime, without logging into the system.
Combine this feature with the tips in the previous post in this series and not only will you be achieving fast delegation, you’re achieving it in a way where you can later easily manage and track everything you have delegated and are working on.
Share in the comments below which task or project management systems you have tried.
Image credit: Wrike
