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Key features of the best productivity planners and how to choose one for your team

monday.com 11 min read
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You might be surprised to learn that over 75% of employees don’t think they’re productive during the workday.

Some distractions, like a coffee break or a chat with a colleague, are inevitable and can even be valuable.

Others, like attending endless meetings or sorting through email, can be a significant drain on your employees’ mental capacity.

A productivity planner is a useful tool that can help you cut through the noise and organize your workday better.

In this article, we’ll be discussing how a productivity planner can help your team. We’ll also talk about which elements to consider if you’re planning to roll out one of these planners at your company.

What is a productivity planner?

A productivity planner is a tool that can help you organize your to-do list, prioritize tasks, plan your workflow, track schedules, and celebrate small wins.

Planners can range from a simple paper planner or bullet journal to keep track of your daily tasks to complex software with advanced features that can help you automate your work.

Why use a productivity planner?

Picture this: you’ve been in Zoom meetings all morning, and you’re still working on that deck for your afternoon presentation. Meanwhile, your to-do list for the week keeps piling up, and you’re feeling like things are spiraling out of control.

Most of us have faced a similar scenario at some point in our work lives.

Luckily, there are dozens of productivity apps, tools, or planners out there that can help you stay on top of all your work, whether this to help you focus, plan your week, or achieve inbox zero.

It’s up to you to choose a solution that matches your needs, but the benefits of using a ‘digital’ planner cannot be understated.

There are so many tasks and activities that need to be planned into our working lives that using pen and paper may not cut it for very long.

A core benefit of these virtual planners is being able to easily access, edit, and store your work in a single place so that you’ll have everything on hand.

With a productivity planner, you can:

  • Store everything in one place: collate and view all your work, including to-do lists, task lists, documents, files, schedules, workflows, and appointments.
  • Work on the go: having access to your work on a mobile device means that you needn’t stay tethered to your work desk. You can easily edit and update your work anywhere you are.
  • Set reminders and deadlines: this is super useful when you’ve tons going on and need to prioritize and follow up on different tasks.
  • Have a safe backup of your work on the cloud: having everything sync easily across devices means that you always have a copy of your work backed up for when you need it.

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How can a productivity planner benefit your team?

It’s common for employees to deal with different kinds of organizational challenges in their working lives. They may fail to prioritize tasks, struggle with multitasking, or face distractions during this day.

Needless to say, every employee could do with some support to improve their personal productivity and time management.

Using a productivity planner is super useful because it can help teams address some of these issues by helping them organize and plan their schedule.

to do list in monday.com

Here are some of the benefits of using a productivity planner:

  • It increases productivity by helping everyone view, organize, and manage their workflow.
  • It helps you list and track the progress of your tasks so that you don’t drop the ball on anything.
  • It helps you focus and prioritize the most important tasks on your to-do list.
  • It helps all employees manage their time better by scheduling appointments or meetings.
  • It decreases the stress of balancing everything on a hectic schedule.
  • The ability to share your schedule with peers allows for greater transparency and collaboration.

What are the key elements of the best productivity planners?

If you’re convinced that a planner is what your team needs to efficiently manage their day, then you’ll want to understand more about the key functionality required.

Some of the best productivity planners have the following features:

Team and individual task management

Daily task management lies at the heart of productivity at the workplace, so you’ll want an app that can help you organize and track your work easily.

Whether you’re talking about employee productivity or team productivity,

Your planner should be able to handle a simple to-do list that may typically be an employee’s task list. Alternatively, look for a platform that can also impact team productivity with an ability to handle complex task lists across teams or functions.

You’re in luck, because there’s a really cool platform that can do all the heavy lifting for you.

It’s called monday.com, and it’s a flexible and intuitive work platform that’s designed to help teams boost their productivity.

task management dashboard in monday.com

Here’s how monday.com can help you with task management:

  • Keep all your tasks (both individual or team) in one place, and view and track progress via a range of visually appealing dashboards.
  • Easily assign tasks to owners, prioritize them, and set due dates with a few clicks.
  • Set reminders for important tasks, and alerts for upcoming deadlines so that you’ll never drop the ball on anything.
  • Get started with ready-made task management templates — there’s no major learning or onboarding required.

Multiple views that help you keep track of work

Seeing things laid out visually is a great way to understand where things stand at a glance, without having to read through lists or notes to understand everything.

So, you’ll want to choose a planner that has strong visual functionality, so that you’ll spend less time trying to understand everything.

multiple views in monday.com

Again, monday.com is your best bet if you’re after visual design and functionality.

Not only is it simple and user-friendly to use, but it can also help you chart out your workflow — the status of your task or project, who’s working on what, what’s done, what’s not.

Basically, monday.com can help you visualize, well, everything.

Additionally, our platform can:

  • Help you manage your resource capacity and team workload with the latest data on assigned work and roles.
  • Help you pull reports across your workflow so that you can see what’s working, what’s not, and make decisions based on data analysis.
  • Respect the individuality of your team members by allowing them to customize the way they chose to see their work using different views, including Gantt charts, map view, Kanban board, workload, timeline, and more.

Integrations with popular tools

Your digital planner should easily be able to integrate with and complement your existing suite of tools so that you’re not spending ages transferring data from one to the other.

Integration also ensures your team isn’t wasting time logging on and switching from one platform to the other when they need to access information stored in different places.

Imagine how useful it’d be if your productivity planner of choice could integrate with your external calendar on your phone or mobile device. All you’d need to do is glance at your calendar to view daily meetings, interviews, or appointments in one place.

With monday.com, you can sync up the items in your external calendar to be able to view, edit and manage everything without having to switch between tools.

You can even take it a step further, and add reminders or alerts for upcoming appointments or deadlines.

In fact, monday.com integrates with dozens of the most popular apps and tools with a few clicks.

So if you make changes in one, you’ll see it appear where it needs to, saving you the hassle and time of having to update your data separately.

Weekly planner and to-do list templates

Imagine if your digital planner of choice can already predict what you need to keep things organized, and includes ready-made templates to give you a headstart?

Well, that’s exactly what monday.com offers.

If you head to our template center, you’ll be able to access and use 200+ templates for every kind of business, industry, or team.

The best part? These are fully customizable so you can get up and running, and change what you need along the way.

Take a look at our weekly to-do list template  — perfect if you’re focused on nailing your weekly tasks in less time.

Weekly to-do list in monday.com

Facilitates cross-team collaboration

When you’re working in a team, it’s vital that you communicate quickly and efficiently with each other.

Your planner should make it easy for you to collaborate with the rest of your team, whether this via easy document sharing and permissions or in-app messaging.

monday.com excels in this regard because it offers many features that are designed to improve communication and connectivity, such as:

  • The ability to share boards and data with internal colleagues or external stakeholders.
  • Messaging and in-context notifications to cut back on email back-and-forth.
  • Easy file-sharing and time-tracking capabilities.
  • iOS and Android apps for smart devices, allowing you to work on the go.
monday.com team tasks board on a tablet

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Why is monday.com the ideal productivity planner?

Ultimately, choosing a productivity planner for your team boils down to the kind of features you’re looking for.

But, one thing’s certain:

Whether you’re a one-person army who is looking to get organized or a thriving global organization that’s aiming to increase productivity — monday.com has all the functionality you need to get organized.

That’s become the monday.com Work OS gives you the kind of flexibility that can empower your employees and super-charge your team to produce their best work.

grid view of monday.com templates and features

monday.com’s work operation system (Work OS) lets teams develop their own workflow apps, allowing them to organize and manage daily tasks, workflows, and processes.

Apart from robust task management capabilities, super-useful templates, and effortless ways to collaborate, we also offer the ability to:

  • Customize everything you need, whether this is your task board, columns, views, your daily workflow.
  • Automate your routine work and recurring tasks in seconds with our powerful automation capabilities, freeing up time to focus on valuable work.
  • Get up and running in no time — our all-in-one work management platform allows you to track and plan everything in a single place, so you needn’t rely on multiple apps and tools. monday.com’s visual interface is simplistic in design, super visual, and a pleasure to use with minimal onboarding.

How Lonely Planet UK boosted team productivity with monday.com

To illustrate how you can use monday.com to improve team productivity, let’s take a look at how Lonely Planet successfully manages its weekly tasks and overall operations.

The UK Lonely Planet Finance team needed an organizer to view and manage a variety of reporting, management, and transactional tasks weekly.

They use a monday.com template to add task list items based on what needs to get done by the end of each week. The board also includes details like timeframes, backlogged tasks, and completed items.

Having everything displayed on a board and shared with team members helps everyone communicate easily and step in if anybody needs help or if there’s a backlog of work that needs to get done.

Try out their template, or read about our other success stories across a range of sectors and functions.

Ready to choose a productivity planner for your team?

When you’re choosing a planner, it makes sense to go with the option that ticks all the right boxes for your team.

Whether it’s the ability to automate tasks, share your files, or organize a task list on the go, using a planner can really help to boost your team’s collaboration and productivity.

Luckily, with monday.com, you’re getting a platform that covers your every need —  task management, to-do lists, a calendar app —  the works!

Take a look at our full list of features and benefits. Or give us a go right away using one of our useful templates for all kinds of sectors.

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