We all want to save time managing our tasks and be as productive as possible at the same time. Putting the two together can be a challenging thing. Not everyone has it in his/her blood to make the right decisions at the right time. And not everyone is equally good at organizing the management of the tasks they perform.
Working remotely and across many projects usually means a lot of issues, status updates and notifications about changes and new things.
- How do you and your team process through the swirl of noise to get the information you need?
- What is your controlled approach to your daily tasks?
- How do you decide what to do next without wasting time?
It’s getting easier, with the help of the counter box functionality of the Redmine Reporting Plugin. You provide yourself and your team with different ways of deciding what to work on next, according to the Getting-Things-Done method.
Counteracting a lack of employee engagement
As a project manager or team lead, you are responsible for the productivity of your team. However, you can’t always follow everyone around and decide what they need to work on. You have to be able to demand a certain amount of personal responsibility from your employees.
Nevertheless, you have the opportunity to influence the decision-making process to a certain extent. By thinking together with your team about how you can structure the tasks that everyone has to deal with more or less urgently and set the corresponding guidelines.
Group similar tasks together
We have a solution, which will help you to group similar tasks together in order to make the decision making process for your employees more easy. All you need to do is finding out what structure would be useful for processing tasks in your project teams. Here are some examples, that might work when grouping tasks together.
Tasks by priority
Completing tasks by urgency or time-based deadlines is probably one of the most common options. Those who sort their tickets by priority could build the counter box as follows.
Tasks by time estimation
One way to decide what I want to get done today can also be the scope of a task. Sometimes there is simply not enough time for several hours of concentrated work. In order to get something done quickly anyway, you concentrate on the tasks that go quickly. Here it helps to concentrate on the time estimation of a single issue.
Tasks by category
There are people who build fixed rituals into their work week. They focus on completing certain tasks at certain times. For example, important meetings are completed first thing in the morning. Emails are only answered before the end of the working day. Or starting a marketing campaign every Monday. Here it helps to focus on tickets according to the categorization.
Tasks by tracker
Another popular method is to structure tasks by tracker status. It is usually well suited for every employee - from new to the team to the veteran . This is because, on the one hand, it maps the workflow of a ticket in the meter box area. And it makes it easier for new employees to find their way around quickly.
No matter which of the above examples you choose. As a rule, one look is enough and you and your team will know directly where to go or what to do.
All you need to do to make the Getting-Things-Done method work with the counter boxes is:
- use the Redmine Reporting Plugin
- activate the option “counter boxes” for the Redmine main page and or project overview page and add it as a dashboard block.
- open the cross-project ticket list and create individual custom queries for the relevant tickets. These are then activated for the counter boxes and used directly afterwards.
We have written about the use of counter boxes before. The plug-in documentation also explains how to use the counter boxes.
Read an older Blog post on the Get-things-Done method in project management.
Who is it recommended for?
The Redmine Reporting Plugin is suitable for companies with cross-functional IT and business teams that use Redmine as a project management tool and want to get a better overview on timelines, progress and budgets.
All information about our extensions for Redmine is available on the product page. The commercial Reporting plugin is als part of various plugin bundles. Customers whose Redmine does not meet the minimum requirements or who prefer to hire someone to install and regularly maintain their Redmine instance have the alternative to book our Managed Application Hosting for Redmine. Here, the plugin is already part of our hosting offering. The functionality can be tested extensively in our online demo.