Task management is the practice of recording a team’s work in one shared place, giving every task an owner, deciding what comes first, and following each task until it is done. It is not the name of a piece of software. It is a way of organizing work. You need a tool for it, but what really matters is that everyone sees the same picture of who is doing what and by when.
What does task management consist of?
Working task management rests on five elements. You can put them in place in a notebook, a spreadsheet, or dedicated software.
- Capture. The task goes into a shared place. It does not stay a verbal agreement or get lost at the bottom of an email thread.
- Owner. Every task has one person who drives it to completion. Others may help, but one person is responsible for closing it.
- Status. You can see where the work stands. Statuses such as “To do”, “In progress” and “Done” show this.
- Priority. It is clear what comes first when not everything fits.
- Timeframe. The task has a deadline, or at least an expected finish date.
When any of these is missing, things start to wobble. Without an owner, a task is orphaned and everyone assumes someone else has it. Without a status, managers start chasing updates. Without priority, people work on whatever happens to be closest.
Task management software treats these elements as fields. In MyPro Sync, for example, a task has a main assignee and can have additional assignees. Importance is A, B or C, priority is a number from 1 to 5, and you can set estimated effort in hours, an expected finish date and a deadline. Statuses can be configured per project, and every status change is logged.
How is personal task management different from team task management?
Personal task management is about organizing your own work. It is enough if you understand it and you can see it.
In team task management, work moves between people. Someone produces something the next person needs. A colleague goes on leave and their work has to be picked up. A manager wants to see who is working on what. So every task must make sense to everyone, and owners and statuses must stay current.
Working as a team also introduces a new problem, dependencies. A task often cannot start until another one is finished. We cover this in detail in our article on task dependencies.
How does task management differ from project management?
Task management deals with the smallest unit of work, the individual task. Project management is the planning and steering of a connected set of tasks tied to a specific goal and deadline.
A project is made of tasks, but not every task belongs to a project. Closing the books at the end of the month, answering a customer request, or running a recurring check are part of ongoing operations. They still need managing, but there is no schedule behind them. We explore the boundary between the two in a separate article.
When is a list in your head no longer enough?
In a small team, agreeing on tasks verbally and keeping personal lists can work for a long time. A few signs suggest it has stopped working.
- People keep asking who is handling something, and nobody knows for sure.
- Missed deadlines only come to light after the fact.
- The manager asks for a status update every day because there is no other way to see progress.
- Someone waits days for another task to finish, and nobody else knows.
- When a colleague is away, nobody can tell what needs to be picked up.
If two or more of these sound familiar, it is worth moving to a shared system. Whether that should be a simple list or task management software depends on the size of the team and how complex the work is. We walk through that decision in our comparison of to-do lists and task management systems.
Where should you start?
Introducing task management does not start with choosing software. The first step is getting all of the team’s open tasks into one place, each with an owner and a status.
Start with only a few statuses. “To do”, “In progress” and “Done” are enough for most teams at the beginning, and you can add more later if the work genuinely requires it. Priorities and deadlines can wait until the second week, when you can see how much work the team actually has.
After a month, look at which tasks still required someone to ask a question. Those show you what information your tasks are still missing.