Have you ever thought about being more effective in business, in relationships, in life? If so, you probably have already read the book
"The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" by
Dr. Steven Covey. Millions of people
became more productive encouraged by the powerful lessons collected in this volume. If you have not yet gotten a chance to read this book, we recommend that you do so, as it can become a gold mine for ideas about how to improve your personal and professional management and how to form quality relationships with other people.
Among other concepts of effectiveness, Steven draws our attention to organization. How can you organize your life? Steven’s idea is that you should get a
good tool that will help you to organize. A good organizing tool, according to Steven Covey, should match 6 criteria. They are:
- Coherence
- Balance
- Motivation
- Ability to deal with people
- Flexibility
- Accessibility
If you have a tool that matches all these criteria, you will be able to organize your plans and activities. Steven notes that there
2 ways to organize: organizing yourself through a schedule and delegating to other people. The biggest challenge here is to be able to control your own schedule and follow the results of the others at the same time. How can you do it? Wrike has the answer.
Wrike is project management software that lets you organize your personal and business to-dos in one place. It perfectly combines two methods of organization: your personal time management and your delegated tasks.
Wrike has all of the characteristics of a good organizing tool, giving you a big picture prospective. If you work in a team, every team member will have the opportunity to organize his or her life with Wrike, and your business plans will still be interconnected.
First of all, Wrike gives
coherence to your vision and mission, your goals and roles, your plans and your commitment. Steven draws our attention to one observation: we play many roles in life. For example, you can be a manager, a designer, a sales person, or even a combination of all three. To perform successfully in all those roles we need to define our goals and then write them down into an organizing tool like Wrike. In Wrike you can create tasks for every plan and every goal. The best thing is that you can review them anytime you need. We suggest you create special folders for your different roles, for your long-term commitments and your short-term plans. Wrike lets you organize your tasks in various ways, so that it is easier for you to organize all the information and figure out your priorities.
This is how you get
balance with Wrike, which is the second characteristic. You keep everything in one place you can wisely spread your time and energy between your family, professional preparation, and your colleagues. Wrike gives you the whole picture of all your roles and goals, both business and personal, as you get all of them neatly organized in folders. You won’t neglect any important part of your life and you won’t forget anything. Wrike will “press against you,” sending you smart notifications and reminding you of every event you have scheduled for yourself or for your colleagues.
Steven states that a good tool should
encourage you to spend time on your long-term commitments and spare at least half a day for the things that are most important in your life. You should not spend all of day trying to solve routine problems. You should reserve time for bringing your mission and vision to life; otherwise, you won’t be able to fulfill them. The key to success here, according to Steven Covey, is weekly planning. Wrike will help you plan your activities through a week or even through a month and set your priorities. You set due dates for every task as you create it and then see what things you and your team members need to get done this week and this month on a timeline.
Then, according to Steven, it is absolutely necessary that a good organizing tool should
deal with people and help you to collaborate and delegate.
No other tool will help you collaborate better than Wrike. Wrike gives you a unique opportunity to store all the communications on each task and every project and everybody involved in the project can easily access them. Your main benefit is that you can always go back and review your communication and the results you’ve agreed upon. Nothing is lost!
The beauty of Wrike is that it lets you to delegate seamlessly. Wrike lets your associates control their own tasks, make plans, set and change due dates, and make updates. You and everybody involved in the project are informed of all the progress in your team’s work with Wrike’s smart email notifications. Wrike lets each person on your team get a progress report on how well he or she is doing. This way people become less dependent upon you and you get the complete delegation. People get an opportunity to organize themselves around their priorities. Here you benefit from the 5th criterion of a good tool that is found in Wrike -
flexibility. You start using Wrike by creating several tasks that later can be organized in folders according to projects, departments or clients. You environment may change every day.
Wrike lets you reorganize your plans, your goals and roles in seconds. You can tag your tasks, including them in folders according to your daily, weekly or monthly priorities.
You can make changes to your plans, to your tasks and projects from any computer with an internet connection, since Wrike is Web-based. Being
easily accessible, Wrike gives you and your colleagues the freedom of working anywhere and anytime.
Even at home, even at the airport waiting for your plane, Wrike will keep you organized and let you track the results of others. Wrike lets you schedule your life and delegate tasks to other people, so that you can spare time for the most important things like: leadership, recognizing new opportunities, defining the goals and having a rich private life.
Wrike can be the best supplement for your
7 habits as it lets you be
highly effective in your organization.
Capgemini, one of the world's foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, realized that this process can be improved with Wrike’s help. We recently discussed how Capgemini was able to streamline its client support processes with Daniel Stevens, Director of Marketing Services, Capgemini North America. Daniel noted that the North American Marketing Services team needed an end-to-end system to manage their internal support requests. Wrike streamlined the process thanks to its powerful email integration capabilities. The marketing team became more productive, since now all emailed tasks are populated into properly structured project plans that get shared with every member of the team. 
This approach to organization of plans perfectly serves the needs of those who have multiple products, projects, teams, departments or offices. Wrike will make you happy if you are tired of keeping track of your plans in disconnected files. Wrike will make you happy if you are tired of holding conversations about your projects, tasks, issues, ideas in your email inbox.
Moreover, Wrike recently caught the attention of one of the bloggers at 
3. We organize our tasks in Wrike by building a structure that is convenient for us. We organize our tasks according project folders. We also have “next actions” and “someday” folders. We don't need the “waiting for” folder, as the system reminds us of our tasks. It’s always possible to create more folders or change the whole folder structure. We can also put our tasks in several folders simultaneously, in case our projects overlap. We share our projects with our colleagues and track the progress together. 
