Productivity. We’ve all heard the term a million times.
But, how does a team become productive? By stuffing their schedules with as much work as possible and hoping for the best? By haphazardly rushing through tasks and chasing deadlines?
The key to being productive is to plan your work properly. That’s why most successful teams use productivity planning software.
In this guide, we’ll delve into productivity planners: what they do, how they can help you, and how you can use them. We’ve also listed the 7 features your productivity planner should have.
What is a productivity planner?
Productivity is a way to measure how much work you’re completing in a given period.
For example, you could measure it by the number of tasks completed or the number of deliverables submitted.
Many people use a bullet journal, vision board, monthly calendar, or a dated planner to track daily tasks and set goals. And a manual monthly planner might work if you’re handling very little work or if you enjoy spending hours planning and editing your schedule.
An online productivity planner lets you add and manage tasks in minutes. A good productivity app also helps you stay on track with extensive project planning, time tracking, reporting, and collaboration features.In simple terms, an online productivity planner is an improved version of a traditional planner — with additional features to maintain focus and streamline project management.
A productivity planner gives teams an overview of their upcoming tasks and deadlines, so they can clearly set their schedules to meet these demands. It helps keep employees motivated towards their targets and overcome procrastination.
The benefits of using a productivity planner
Let’s look more closely at how a productivity planner can boost both individuals and teams:
- Centralized information: when all relevant project information is stored in one place, it improves accessibility and planning.
- Better time management: with time tracking, reminders, and notifications, productivity apps help you set and hit weekly goals.
- Saved time: productivity planners can automate tasks, streamline workflows, help you find information faster, and simplify task execution — thus saving you and your team valuable time.
- Greater transparency: everyone on your team can see what they have to complete on a given day. They can also track project progress, deadlines, and goals.
- Improved collaboration: equip your team to work together seamlessly with collaboration features such as easy file sharing and in-task comments.
- Efficient remote working: remote workers can flourish when all their team members and tasks are easily accessible across multiple devices and platforms.
- Reduced spending: all of the above benefits can help reduce spending. For example, you could take your entire organization online and save money on office space and other overhead expenses.
3 use cases for a productivity planner
Let’s take a look at some customer stories that highlight how a well-built productivity planner on a platform like monday.com can elevate every team.
Make smarter decisions, faster
Team leaders equipped with a productivity planner have a clear overview of projects and the resources they’re using. This bird’s eye view enables them to make crucial decisions quickly.
They don’t need to go back and forth looking for information that affects their decisions. Everything is right where they need it.
Playtech, for example, got automatic notifications from monday.com when external resources were no longer needed. These notifications helped them end contracts or subscriptions quickly and save money.
With a platform like monday.com, you can make every project-related decision that requires precise details without delays caused by inadequate information storage, miscommunication, or lackluster data.
Improved decision-making directly boosts project planning and management.
Improve organization-wide visibility
Individuals might improve their productivity with notepads and checklists, but organizations need a comprehensive system in place to manage different projects.
A large-scale marketing agency cannot rely on scattered information and individual tracking to maintain productivity and hit deadlines. Instead, they need a platform that lets them handle all their campaigns centrally and enables a collaborative workspace.
Genpact, a global professional services firm, loves monday.com precisely for this reason.
“Since adopting monday.com, our global marketing department has seen a 40% improvement in cross-team collaboration for successful end-to-end campaign planning and execution,” Sarah Pharr, AVP of Marketing at Genpact, said.
With a good productivity planner, there’s an added layer of transparency throughout the workflow, which consequently boosts engagement and collaboration.
Boost remote working efforts
Many organizations have team members and resources spread worldwide, including the National Hockey League (NHL), which works with an agency in Belarus to create custom applications.
Senior Director Carol Dann explained:
“It was tough to operate. What was in QA? What was on hold? What was coming next? What was pending? No one knew. Nobody had the overall picture of our development world, which was hard to deal with because we could never plan ahead. It was just a mess.”
A productivity planner that also has project management and analytics features, like monday.com, helped the NHL collaborate efficiently across 3 different time zones.
Even if your remote team’s needs aren’t as great as the NHL’s, it’s worth investing in a platform that can help your workers communicate and work together effortlessly rather than relying on endless email or text chains.
7 features you should look for in a productivity planner
There’s no point investing in a productivity planner if you’re going to choose the wrong one. So, here are 7 essential features to help you make the right choice.
1. Intuitive project boards
Since the primary goal of a productivity planner is to boost scheduling and avoid silos, your software must have intuitive project boards that effectively visualize all your project details.
Essentially, a PM should know everything going on within a project — who’s working on what, team progress towards deadlines and milestones, any potential bottlenecks or delays — at a single glance.
A detailed overview of everything that’s happening helps them address any potential issues before they become disasters, alter work schedules, and ensure overall adherence to project plans.
And since you don’t have forever to manually set up every project board — especially for teams with several clients — monday.com’s extensive templates can help you set up in a jiffy.
Since different teams and projects have varying workflows, your productivity planner must also be flexible. monday.com provides 8 different board views, including the Timeline view that tracks important tasks on your daily timeline.
2. Effortless collaboration
Collaboration is key to productivity. You can’t have a productive team if comms are disjointed and everyone’s on their own personal mission.
In order to bring everyone together and move them towards a common project goal, your productivity app needs to have the latest collaboration features.
Features such as file sharing — so team members don’t have to hunt for information — and central communication — so all work conversations happen within context — are a must.
monday.com offers both of these, and since everyone can see the project board, they’re all engaged in what’s happening.
For example, if Tom needs to find information about Task A, he doesn’t need to send emails back and forth. Instead, he can simply leave a comment on the task itself, asking for an update.
3. Time tracking
Time tracking is an essential productivity software feature. Individuals can track how much time they spend on a task and aim to reduce that amount as they evolve professionally.
For PMs, time tracking helps identify silos and address them.
If a particular team member is taking longer on a task compared to their peers, you can reach out and offer help. If several tasks are stuck in the same work process, it’s an indicator of an underlying issue.
On monday.com, you can track the time spent on each task. This way, you identify how much your team members are working and reduce workloads to avoid burnouts when necessary.
4. Easy task management
Planning is not enough for productivity. You also need to execute your project plan.
For PMs, this means task delegation, adding task details, such as notes or files, tracking tasks across the workflow, and making alterations quickly
On monday.com’s high-performance planner, PMs get an overview of all tasks and associated information via 8 different board views. They can instantly alter tasks using the drag-and-drop interface or by just clicking on a task.
Each task can have multiple assignees, customized columns, descriptions, file attachments, and in-task comments — all of which are updated in real-time. PMs can see changes as and when they happen.
They can also track the time spent on each task to measure productivity.
Since projects have multiple elements, you can group tasks as you need. For example, you can group tasks by day, week, who they’re assigned to, or status.
5. Dashboards for KPIs
While factors like deadlines and milestones can help you understand productivity to a certain extent, you need actual stats to back up your perceived levels of productivity.
You also need accurate data to make project-related decisions quickly.
monday.com’s dashboard is the ideal space for PMs to get visual oversight of all project KPIs, such as budgets, workloads, time tracking, project progress, and more.
Every project board on monday.com allows you to create an individual dashboard. This is great for PMs and teams that are handling multiple client projects.
You can add 15+ different types of widgets to your dashboard to measure analytics.
6. Automation
Any project plan will fall apart if workers are wasting their time on low-impact tasks. This is why most productivity planners and project management platforms provide automation.
monday.com is no exception. You can also streamline your entire work process using simple yet dynamic automation rules. No manual daily planner can do this.
The platform uses “if this, then that” automation logic to help you automate all repetitive, mundane tasks, notifications, and reminders. For example, you can automatically notify a team lead every time a task is completed within a project rather than sending a manual email.
monday.com’s automation rules are easy to implement, and there’s no limit to the type or number of rules you can create.
7. Integration
Your productivity might improve when using a basic online daily or weekly planner, but you still waste a ton of time switching between different tools to get things done.
When you have to juggle your main tools used to complete a task along with communication, reporting, and productivity tools, there’s a higher chance of miscommunication, poor information distribution, and a general lack of cohesion.
You need to opt for a productivity planner like monday.com that integrates with 100s of third-party apps, including leading design, development, and communication software.
By combining integration and automation, you can elevate the way your team works.
Productivity planning software boosts collaboration and streamlines work
A productivity planner can help individuals and teams plan out their work, and it gives them the features to enable a focused mindset and successful project completion.
With monday.com, you can build the perfect planner for your needs rather than having to adjust to a generic planner.
Not only can monday.com help plan your work and develop better habits, but we have all the features you need to manage your tasks and budgets in order to help you achieve your goals.
Get a taste of what we have to offer with our Work Calendar template.
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