Why schedule tasks with an app?
Scheduling tasks and reminders is integral to productivity in the modern workplace. We often wear many hats, and with the rising popularity of working in small teams - need to coordinate with a multitalented group that has some competency overlap. If you want to work productively within a small team, you need others to have visibility into what others are doing, and give them visibility into your day-to-day. There are hundreds of platforms that manage tasks out there, we’ll dive into a few of our favorites, focusing on those that are either free or extremely affordable.
We know what you’re thinking – more productivity apps?
It’s easy to get lost in a sea of productivity app advertisements, all making grand claims about how they transform the way you work. The key to using these apps effectively is ensuring that they can boost your productivity. Take a step back – look at what you do on a day to day basis, and then evaluate apps based on their features and how they can be effective for you.
Productivity apps should :
- Help you sift through your workload
- Improve your work in teams
- Some degree of automation
Let’s dive into the list:
8 Task Scheduling Apps to Increase Your Productivity
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is simple, lightweight, and does exactly what you want it to. It functions as the to-do list to end all to do lists. You can create a list of all outstanding tasks and invite collaborators, allowing you to easily monitor progress on projects.
Things
Things advertises itself as a “personal task manager that helps you achieve your goals.” It does this by offering a no-nonsense UI designed to create tasks, set reminders, and view it all in a detailed calendar. Things prides themselves on how easy it is to create this tasks, allowing you to get things going with a single tap.
Asana
Asana is a lightweight team-optimized project management platform. Asana focuses on task visibility, allowing you create an infinite amount of projects, tasks, and subtasks. The platform is extremely intuitive and allows you to easily manage your whole team and its tasks without being overwhelmed by features.
nTask
nTask positions itself as the most comprehensive project management platform available. nTask has a suite of standard project management features – including the ability to schedule tasks, managing collaboration, and a social module that allows comments across the platform. nTask also boasts robust time tracking, meeting, and billing features that separate it from the pack.
Microsoft To-Do
To-Do is a free – and probably already installed – task scheduler from Microsoft. Microsoft developed this in tandem with the developers at Wunderlist – so expect an incredibly functional tool designed to manage your day-to-day tasks. You can integrate to-do into your daily activities by setting it to launch on startup and remind you of outstanding tasks.
Windows Task Scheduler
Task Scheduler is another tool built into windows. It allows you to create automations based on triggers. You can set a reminder to always occur at a specific time, or to remind you and then launch an app. For those who need to remember to bill time on daily or weekly intervals, a tool like this can open up your time tracking app at a set time – preventing you from forgetting important tasks.
Task scheduler is the least user friendly of any of the apps on this list, but with a little technical know-how you can eliminate repetitive and easily forgotten tasks.
Evernote
Evernote is a note-taking platform that has been steadily adding useful features since its inception. Evernote can be used in teams to manage documents, take collaborative notes. Evernote has added checklists to its already robust notes, allowing you to manage tasks within documents. While Evernote does not allow you to schedule tasks in a traditional sense, it can greatly boost productivity by being a best-in-class collaborative notepad.
Remember The Milk!
Remember The Milk is a lightweight to-do list similar to wunderlist. Remember the Milk focuses on prioritization and collaboration, allowing you to easily add others to your lists and assign tasks.
Conclusion
Scheduling tasks is at the core of effective project management. If you’re working in teams or managing them, you need to have an effective system in place. With so many options available, you can be sure to improve your productivity and the productivity of your team by choosing an effective tool. However, you need to ensure that you aren’t creating more work. Make sure you’ve evaluated your own needs before choosing a tool, and if you have limited time and a small team don’t choose a tool so complicated it necessitates its own dedicated manager.
If you decide that it is valuable and profitable for your business to have custom software, fivestar* can develop solutions that centralize workflows, optimize processes, and enable decision-making through real-time data and business intelligence.
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About the Author: Cameron Avrigean
Cameron Avrigean is a Marketing Coordinator at fivestar*. Cameron is an analytics fanatic with a penchant for copywriting and social media. He works with the marketing team to create engaging content, and is looking for the next big thing. Cameron holds a B.S. in Business Management from Point Park University.