Organizing myself to stay sane
Featured
I launched Wrike at our manufacturing company about 6 months ago. Initially, it was aimed to just track process improvement initiatives. Quickly I saw the potential of Wrike to be able to handle all kinds of projects, and I added tracking management projects, customer rejects, production approval, and maintenance items. In addition, I've added personal projects to my personal workspace. All that to say, there's a lot in Wrike now. We've organized this into 4 spaces (Process Improvement, Management, Customer Projects, and Knowledge Management), and the personal workspace.
Here's a handful of questions for the community:
- What are the ways you use to organize yourself to know what are the urgent projects?
- How do you keep your workspace organized? My To-Do list has become a cluster of projects from every source.
- Are there ways to organize the "my to-do" (or other dashboards) to group projects and keep it all organized?
- As we continue to add content, are there better ways to highlight urgency or highlight importance? There's little day-to-day stuff that is less critical than keeping some projects on time.
Hi Mike Fank sounds like you have been very busy setting up Wrike! We have found dashboards to be very useful in organising our work and keeping track of certain projects. I have a few dashboards that serve different purposes. My personal dashboard keeps track of all my current tasks and projects. I have organsied some of the widgets to filter tasks from 1 particular folder so that all tasks relating to that body of work show in that widget. We also have dashboards that monitor tasks from just 1 project in particular. We have filtered the widgets to show all the various workflows i.e. in progress, awaiting approval etc. We also have team dashboards which show what everyone is currently working on. You can filter the widgets on a dashboard to show as much or as little as you want and we have found this super helpful. Dashboards are always the first thing I open in Wrike after looking at my Wrike inbox.
One way to highlight urgency could be the workflow assigned? You could create a workflow for the day-to-day stuff and one for other work. For example we have a 'Request workflow' which shows the different stages of new incoming requests (we monitor this with a dashboard). Then we have our regular 'Project workflow' to show the stages of work there.
Hope this helps. I look forward to reading other responses.
Hi again Mike Fank Further to my comment above you can set different Importance levels on tasks/projects - Normal, high and low. You can then also filter by importance :)
Hi Mike Fank the three important categories of Wrike are a start. If 3 levels are not enough you can use custom fields. In principle you can make your own system (depending on what you need and how precise) if you make a custom field with urgency and one with importance. You can even build an Eisenhower Matrix as a third custom field you calculate from the urgency and importance.
Or you can make a field with importance and use the dates in the task planning as the signal of urgency. (this is what we do).
We do not use my-to do list for project managers. For project coworkers this is normaly ok (as they have a limited amount of tasks at a time). For all others I would recommedn to set up a dashboard (you can use then the importance marking system you use to make different buckets).
Thanks for the ideas!
I like the Eisenhower Matrix idea, to keep focus on the important and urgent tasks. I think this will make a big difference as that's been one of my headaches, the little tasks that say they are due but are much less important.
It's also good to know that your project managers don't typically use the my to-do. I was finding this to be a cluttered mess. I'll make some dashboards to pull projects from the different spaces.
Hey Mike!
One way I tried to make things easier for everyone on my team is integrating Wrike and our email service. Unfortunately for us, our custom IT configuration prevents us from utilizing these direct integrations - Wrike Apps & Integrations. Hope you have better luck and a more standard setup which is compatible. Eliminating the gap between two highly used systems could speed up workflow and make things easier to organize.
Those like us who cannot utilize the native integration can use email forwarding to link email and Wrike. Email Integration in Wrike – Wrike Help Center
Sven Passinger - Thank you for your recommendation of the Eisenhower Matrix. Very helpful!