Project management for 1

August 16, 2024 5:57 AM

I have a new job that involves juggling several different projects. I am looking for some sort of system or tool to keep me on track. A lot of the info out there is about finding a tool for a whole team to use. I am mostly just looking for something for myself.

The company uses Outlook/Teams. Perhaps those could be an option. I don't find them very intuitive though for keeping track of tasks. I admit that perhaps I haven't explored their features well enough.

Also open to some other online tool: trello or the like.

I currently write things down in a notepad, but then I end up writing things down, then filling up several more pages, then the original thing gets lost.

posted by iamsuper to Work & Money (16 answers total)

Monday as a single user was pretty good for me.
posted by Iteki at 6:17 AM on August 16 [2 favorites]

I’m a big fan of Todoist.

For me the more important part is that any individual item needs to accomplishable in a single work session. If it’s going to take longer than that then each segment gets broken up into individual sub tasks.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:19 AM on August 16 [3 favorites]

I always come back to a spreadsheet. I think ultimately it's the sorting and filtering, the way that search works, the flexibility (including the ability to add a column months later and it's not especially disruptive, so I can Always Be Refining my system), and a whole bunch of It Just Works factors.

And I've particularly come to like Google sheets for this, because they make dropdown chips a bit easier than Excel. You can start from one of their pre-built Tables (which I see on searching that one million other people want to give you their own templates, so that's a thing, but I literally just use the Table wizard that pops up when I make a new sheet*) and then refine from there.

The bulk of my ADHD-Menopause infrastructure is built on Outlook Calendar and my Action Log spreadsheet.

*Did you know: in your browser URL field you can type sheet.new or doc.new or slide.new and boom, it starts you a new one in whatever google account you're most logged into (I have five google accounts I'm logged into all the time, but somehow it knows which one I usually mean).
posted by Lyn Never at 6:46 AM on August 16 [3 favorites]

Microsoft has Planner, which you can use to track projects or like a to-do list.
posted by Toddles at 7:05 AM on August 16 [1 favorite]

Teamflect is an option that many people who work in a Teams environment seem to like. It integrates with Teams really seamlessly.
posted by yellowcandy at 7:21 AM on August 16

My job uses Trello (free version) and it's fairly intuitive.
posted by coffeecat at 7:40 AM on August 16

I've used a spreadsheet or a notebook, but am interested in other answers here. Might be helpful to include what kinds of projects since I imagine that could effect answers, building construction is pretty different from a new app or manufactured item and so on.
posted by sepviva at 7:48 AM on August 16

I would suggest giving Trello a try, if you haven't done so already. As you are juggling several different projects, you can experiment with having a separate Trello board for each project, or having one Trello board and making judicious use of labels to identify which Trello card (aka task) goes with which project.
posted by needled at 7:51 AM on August 16

+1 for Trello and spreadsheets. SmartSheet could be good depending on how complex your projects are.

Personally I keep coming back to paper bullet journaling because the last thing I want in my life is another window open I have to look at, and I always work at my desk so it’s not important to me to have it digital. (You have to transfer to-do items forward if you start filling up pages and losing them.) I am very unstructured, I just put a checkbox and then check the box/cross out the item when I’m done, or cross it out without checking if I’m carrying the item forward to a new page. It works for the types of tasks I have in my job right now.
posted by music for skeletons at 7:54 AM on August 16 [1 favorite]

I've used Monday at my day job, and have been using Trello for side projects for a long time. I think they both have their place.

Monday lets you view your board in a number of ways, but its primary view is a glorified spreadsheet, where each row is a task (and you can have sub-tasks), and you get to decide what the columns are, but one of those needs to show task status. This is nice if you need to track a fair amount of consistent structured data for each task. You can have multiple groups on a board, but all the columns need to be the same between groups; these groups can mean anything—urgency, current/archived status, whatever.

Trello is a "personal kanban" system where you have lists representing degree of completion, and cards in the list represent tasks. Each individual card winds up being like its own self-contained blog, and can contain an extended description, checklist, comments, and attachments. You drag cards around between lists.

More important than the specific features of a given tool is whether you use it consistently and effectively. If a piece of paper works for you, go with that.
posted by adamrice at 7:57 AM on August 16

I useAsana for work projects and while we use it as a small team, it's also very intuitive and easy to use for a single person (I have some projects where I just set up my own work products). I've been using it for a few years and they've continued to add features that enhance the free version.
posted by DoubleLune at 8:02 AM on August 16 [1 favorite]

If your company is using Office 365, look at Microsoft To Do. It is a lot like the various personal task apps but integrates with Outlook, Teams, etc. fairly well. Planner also works and has boards that are decent. Microsoft keeps adding a jillion little apps to O365 without really telling people, sort of like Google used to do.
posted by caviar2d2 at 11:27 AM on August 16 [1 favorite]

I use Notion. I used to be a power Trello user and couldn't get on board with using Notion because it wasn't user-friendly at the get go - so that's something to consider when using a new tool.

But after looking at Notion as a website of sorts with nested pages and databases, that's what unlocked it for me.

I like it because I can have everything in there like a dashboard. So for a project, I can have pages where I can write down lots of text. Then I can also have a database that can be turned into a Trello board or into a calendar view if I so choose.

I also can have just a table like you would a spreadsheet. I can have To-Do's with checkboxes.

Another useful feature is I can share a page with someone else so they can view it online.

It also has integrations with other apps - so you can embed a design from Canva, embed a PDF, link to a file in Google Drive or Dropbox, etc.
posted by benimaru at 6:07 PM on August 16

I can only use on my computer apps due to security and cloud tools we have are for multiple people. All the colleagues I have end up in excel because it’s ubiquitous and if you need to share, easy to extract a runbook or timeline or list to send.

I recently went on Etsy and bought a pre-made excel project management (this) because I didn’t want to spend time figuring out the setup and macros. I ended up having to make a manual copy for my work laptop because of security but it was way easier with the example.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:19 PM on August 16

"writing things down, then filling up several more pages"
I think your problem is an abundance of tasks, not the tool itself...

Suggestions mentioned above are all good. I use Obsidian, TickTick (switched to it from Todoist), Jira and spreadsheets.
It's good to have different lists for different projects, otherwise things get lost.

But the main thing is to go over the lists regularly. This serves to remind you of older tasks, you can cross off things that got done, you can break down tasks that you now know more about etc etc.

The tool is not the solution, the process is.
posted by gakiko at 1:47 AM on August 17

The tool is less important than how the tool is used.

Here's the simplest thing I recommend, and it's basically a very simple form of Kanban. It's easiest to do this in something like Trello, Asana, anything with a 'Kanban' view -- which just means work items separated into columns.

Column 1: task inbox (sometimes called 'backlog'). Whatever you might want to do goes here
Column 2: do this month
Column 3: do this week
Column 5: done

You can add and modify as time goes on.

Anything that goes in "do this week" should be added to your calendar. Schedule it.

You can play with things like tags or labels to keep work together. So all related work items have the same label

And then, yes, have a time every week to review. What has been done? What needs to be scheduled for next week? When specifically will you tackle it?
posted by jander03 at 11:32 AM on August 18