A CRM is not only great for keeping track of customer relationships, they are a great way to organize your work and personal life. Most customer relationship software come equipped with some form of task and or project management tool. These productivity tools can be used to keep track of all the deliverables you have due and have a productive day!
Within your CRM, you should set priorities to determine which items you need to complete first. Its sometimes difficult to decide the order in which you should complete tasks. I also struggle with this but have come up with a set of questions I ask to gague the priority of the task, here they are.
I utilize the divide and conquer approach to my work day. For example, I divide my tasks into 'blogging' and 'coding' exercises. From there, I further decompose my coding tasks into 'patches' and 'feature updates'. This allows me to better assess priorities.
For example, I will always tackle patches, especially security-related ones before feature updates like app layout or color scheme changes. I break my blogging tasks down by the topic, complexity, and length. This helps me grab the low-hanging fruit and leave more time-consuming tasks for later.
I prefer to aim for incremental, frequent delivery of content over infrequent but large content output. It helps me rank faster in Google and keeps me sane!
Nobody gets through this life alone. If you have too many tasks or a deadline you can't meet, don't hesitate to reach out to a co-worker. The worst thing they can say is no. With Super Easy CRM, you can set a task's status to 'Needs Help' and it will immediately drop into a queue for a team member or supervisor to assist.
Job aids help new and veteran employees alike execute faster and more accurately. This is especially true if you have a fluid workflow with a number of complex business requirements. With procedures that you use less frequently, it's difficult to recall from memory how to do them.
In your CRM, you can store an electronic job aid that includes step-by-step instructions. This way, you don't have to reach out to co-workers or a supervisor. Independently executing tasks increases confidence which subsequently boosts productivity.
Knowing how long it's taken you to complete a task will help you tremendously in determining the turnaround time for said task. Utilizing your CRM, you can track when you started a task and when it was completed.
Using this information, you can decide how much a client should be billed or how many people should be involved in the task. In addition, you can use this data to identify opportunities for process refinement to decrease the task completion time.
Burnout can occur at any moment and normally stems from trying to do too much in too short of a time period. It's important to know your limits and slow down when you feel yourself getting too stressed. If you log into work one day and see a gigantic number of time-consuming tasks assigned to you, ask for help.
If help is not available, don't feel like you HAVE to finish everything assigned to you. No job is worth your sanity and its perfectly fine to have days where you are less productive. You are a person, not a robot.
If you receive a series of tasks that are all related, it may be best to turn them into a project within your CRM instead of using a spreadsheet as a task tracker. Viewing a group of tasks as a project is sometimes better than tackling them individually because it allows you to better decompose tasks and provide stakeholders with incremental deliverables. Within a project, you can set milestones that signify how you are progressing with your tasks as a whole.
This logical grouping as tasks makes the workday much less daunting and increases your chance of success.
Workflows are similar to projects in that they contain a group of tasks. They differ in that workflows generally contain tasks that may or may not be related to one another. A workflow typically has a start and end date, like a project, but they normally don't last more than a week.
Within Super Easy CRM, workflows are broken up into priorities that let the team know which tasks need to be completed first. This eliminates the confusion and frustration that sometimes arises when there are many tasks to complete. Having everyone's tasks in one place allows team members and supervisors insight into each other's day.
This should help prevent any single person from being overallocated or underutilized.
Posted by: Matt Irving on 6/19/2022