It is an old adage that what you measure you manage, and even though we are experiencing great technological change which impacts our work, that adage still rings true. Despite that, it is still amazing how few people and businesses actually measure what they need to get done. We think this is because of a few reasons;
- Writing lists is boring to some people and combined with our natural optimism of what we can get done in the short term, it can also be frustrating to finish the day with outstanding tasks.
- Processes can be complicated and details missed, especially when a task is required to be completed by some else before we can work on our bit. When you start to depend on others some initiative can be lost
- Prioritising and maintaining a list can be really difficult in real time, so you end up with an outdated or disorganised list and then it is easy to lose faith and go back to what is easiest, keeping it in your head.
The trouble with keeping your tasks in your head is that life gets in the way, it is easy to hide or ignore failure, and it is very difficult to learn anything which might improve what you are doing
How we think of this in Propellor is to try and make it as easy as possible to create a task list. Where there is a process that consists of multiple tasks you can create a Flow. This Flow can then automate some of the list building. We make it easy to delegate tasks to individuals or to teams, and with Propellor Metrics we can add deadlines and measurements to those tasks to help ensure they are done when they need to and not done late. In Propellor we have made making a new task item as easy as making a tweet, with similar shortcuts and the ability to interpret what you type into something very powerful when used with Flows.