We recently launched a milestones feature for Intervals, our hosted project management software. The addition of milestones is intended to make the task management process an easier one, especially in the small business environment where the number of current tasks can become overwhelming. Here are some practical tips on how to prioritize your workload using milestones in your day-to-day work flow.
Avoid becoming buried in details
Task lists are great, but they can quickly grow to contain more than a hundred tasks and become overwhelming. Staring at too many tasks at once can easily cause sensory overload. By grouping tasks within Intervals milestone tracking software, you can focus on what needs to happen at the next step of the project. Milestones present the opportunity for small victories so you don’t become mired in a neverending task list.
Group tasks into milestones on a calendar
We are so used to managing our lives with calendars—we have them next to our phones, on our desks, in our checkbooks—that it makes a lot of sense to manage our small business with one, too. Seeing the month at a glance on a calendar makes it easier to shuffle significant events based on your current or projected workload.
Manage priorities by dates, not lists
Lists can be difficult to prioritize. Even when tasks contain fields like priority and status, as they do in Intervals, it helps to see visually on a calendar when tasks are due. Knowing when a group of tasks is due can help you prioritize your workday. It’s a lot easier to focus on what is due this week, instead of worrying about the next few months.
The new calendar view in Intervals makes all of these tips easy to do. Milestones & tasks can be dragged around on the calendar to reschedule them. And right-click contextual menus make it simple to update milestones and tasks and add notes to them. With Intervals, prioritizing your workload is easy.
