Do you see more overdue tasks appear on the dashboard every day, even though you and your team members are working really hard? These days we often have to deal with uncertainty, so it’s not always possible to specify fixed due dates for some tasks. Later, when you don’t meet the set deadlines for these tasks, you need to reschedule them again and again. Maybe there are some items that don’t have an actual deadline. For instance, they can be not actionable items, but valuable ideas to elaborate on sometime in the future. Whether they are tasks or ideas, in order to prevent them from slipping out of your sight, you need to record them in your plan. In a multitasking environment, it’s hard to keep them all in your head when it’s overloaded with information. Occasionally, you may miss something important in the workflow under such pressure.

To free your brain from the pressure of remembering too many things and to avoid stress, you need to get the ideas and tasks with no deadlines in safe storage as soon as they pop up. After you and your team cope with urgent matters, you can then turn to that list to develop your ideas or tackle some action item. Now Wrike allows you to keep these items neatly organized, so that none of them gets lost. If you use the new beta version, you may have noticed that now the tasks can not only be planned for exact dates or set as milestones, but also marked as “Backlogged.” Let us give you a view into this new, important feature of Wrike. 



Generally, a “backlog” is an accumulated list of work that still needs to be done. In terms of Getting Things Done (GTD), a personal productivity methodology that can be rolled out companywide with Wrike, a backlogged task can be defined as an item from the Someday/Maybe list. It means it’s a task that you will possibly pick up and complete sometime in the future. Backlogged tasks have no start date and due date. Backlogged tasks are not tied to the timeline and not visible on it. In the new version of Wrike, backlogged tasks are shown on a separate widget of the dashboard, so that you have a clear overview of them and don’t miss any item in the workflow. However, Wrike doesn’t include backlogged tasks in the daily to-do emails.

To see the tasks marked as backlogged in a certain folder, hit the “Backlog” button. Then you can easily rank your tasks by priority using drag-and-drop. As simple to implement as it sounds, this feature is a powerful tool that will help you to turn a long, messy list of unsorted tasks and ideas into a valid, agile plan. You can change the sorting order whenever your priorities change. 



With the new backlog feature, you take the load of too many things to remember off your brain. Wrike takes care of them and remembers them for you. You and your team members can store and prioritize the items in your workflow, gaining a clearer sense of what to focus on while moving toward your goals. In addition to a personal backlog, Wrike also allows you to accommodate backlogs for your projects, products, departments, etc.  Thus, this feature not only boosts your personal productivity, but turns into a very helpful tool for building your long-term strategies. For instance, you can record all your ideas about the future development of your product in the backlog. Keeping them in a neat, prioritized list that is not tied to inflexible or unfeasible deadlines, you can build a transparent roadmap of your product development and tackle the items one by one when the right time comes.
Try the new backlog feature and gain extra bonus points on your efficiency! 

If you have already started exploring the new version of Wrike, you certainly noticed that your favorite project management software became a lot more social. Avatars are one of the hot additions in the new Wrike. The task bar now shows the avatar of  the person responsible  for the assignment, instead of displaying the full name in a separate column. It will be much easier from now on to see at a glance who is responsible by looking at the picture, rather than reading a name. Plus, avatars take up less space, which is especially notable with our new three-pane interface. We give everyone in your account one of our cool avatars by default, but a user can upload his or her own picture by going to the My Profile tab in the Account Management space.

How do you get your team to fully adopt new project management software from Day 1? This can be a tricky question, as implementing a new system always involves training of your staff, which can take up to several months, right?

Yet Adrian McDonagh, Managing Director at the U.K.’s leading Internet recruitment service, EasyWebRecruitment.com, was able to find a solution that was thoroughly adopted by his team of 15 people from the first day of use. Does he know some kind of secret?

Well, this secret is simple: successful adoption is not about the tool. It’s about your team being able to use it. Adrian knows that when you look for a new software solution, it’s important to pick an application, which ties in with the technologies your employees already use and love. This lets you sneak the new system into your team members' hands while providing a familiar interface. So if you don’t want to put additional training pressure on your staff, find a system that fits the existing workflows and integrates with apps that your team members already know. This was exactly what Adrian did when he offered Wrike to his team to use for project and task management.

“Our major challenge with all the project management systems was adoption. The team was already working very hard, and we did not want to add something to their day that would take a lot of time and training to get to grips with, or add to their administrative burden. It was completely different with Wrike. I was pleased to see that, once I showed the team how simple Wrike was, even the more skeptical members of the team were quickly convinced, ” says Adrian. What became the key to 100% Wrike adoption by the EasyWebRecruitment team? Read the whole interview with the company’s managing director to find out.

Do you have a weekly status meeting? Do you have to regularly create sales reports? Or maybe you issue monthly newsletters? In these and thousands of other cases, you will be pleased with the new recurring tasks feature available in Wrike. Now, when you create or edit a task, you can check a box to turn the task from a one-time event to a recurring event.

The recurring tasks feature is great addition to other scheduling options, like customized work days, intraday tasks and task dependencies in Wrike.  Automatic scheduling of recurring tasks will help you reduce time spent on daily planning and result in more realistic plans.

Once the “recurring” box is checked in the task edit form, you will see a pop-up dialog that lets you set up the frequency of your task or event.



For example, if you want to schedule the design of a weekly newsletter due every Monday, you select the “Weekly” button, set it to reoccur every week and check the box called Monday. Then you set the duration of the task recurrence by entering the start day as next Monday, for instance, and the end day as one month later.



After you save the changes to the task, a series of tasks will be added to your Wrike workspace. The tasks will differ by date and title.  A number (starting from 1) will be added to the end of each task title in the series. In our example, we will see  four tasks: “designing weekly newsletter 1,” “designing weekly newsletter 2,” “designing weekly newsletter 3” and “designing weekly newsletter 4” with the corresponding due dates on December 21, December 28, January 4 and January 11. Your recurring tasks are marked up with a special icon in the task list, as well as on the timeline:



When necessary, you can edit the series of tasks by updating the recurrence pattern, or edit an individual task by changing its title, date, description, etc. If you change the due date of an individual task and later update the recurrence pattern, the due date of the individual task will be updated as well. Say you reschedule the task called “designing weekly newsletter4” from January 11 to January 12 and then update the recurrence pattern so that  the task is due each Wednesday, instead of each Monday, the “designing weekly newsletter4” task will be rescheduled for Wednesday, January 13.  

Many of you know that Wrike recently became available in Spanish. Initially, the language of your Wrike interface depended on the domain where you signed up: at www.wrike.com (English) or at www.wrike.es (Spanish). Now we have added the ability to change the language of your Wrike workspace easily.

First, the language option is now available on every page of Wrike’s Web site (see the top right corner of the Web page).



Additionally, you can customize the language of your Wrike workspace and the language of e-mail notifications that you receive from Wrike by using the “My profile” tab (2) that is in the "Account" section (1). Once you switch the language (3) under your personal profile, do not forget to save the changes (4), so that they come into effect!



Each user can individually set the desired language because the settings are personal and do not affect the entire account.

As you know, Wrike has a keyboard-friendly navigation that makes it easy for you to create and update tasks.

Today, we added a new shortcut for creating tasks inline: “C”. You simply click the right pane with the task list (1), hit “C” on your keyboard, and a new task is created (2). Then, you enter the task title (required), due date and the responsible person (optional) and hit “Enter.”
 


Why is this shortcut so special? It works well for Mac users!
 
As before, you can create tasks by hitting “insert” on your PCs.

We have a lot of customers in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia, and our own team is also quite diverse. Since we launched in States, we started with a U.S. date format for creating tasks via email, but we always got a lot of requests to make it international. As you know, we are always keen to implement your requests. Wrike now supports the international date format where the day goes first and the month goes second, like 31/12/2008.

By default, the date format is set as MM/DD/YYYY. However, account administrators can easily edit the setting to DD/MM/YYYY for all users in their accounts. The administrator needs to sign in to Wrike, go to “Account”->“Account Management,” choose the format that suits  his or her team best (1) and click the “Update” button (2). The changes affect all users in the account.



If two different customers of Wrike with different date settings collaborate on a task via e-mail, the date format of the task author takes prevalence in Wrike.

By the way, in the next six months we will have a limited number (15) of country reseller openings. If you know somebody who deserves to become a local Wrike reseller, drop us a note.

In the best Wrike traditions, we keep bringing the convenience of using your favorite desktop software to the Web. A couple of weeks ago, we introduced a right-click context menu for the folders tree. Now we are introducing drag-and-drop for folders.

1) To move a folder:

Left-click on the folder, hold the mouse button and pull the folder to the place where you want to see it.



2) To include a subfolder in several folders: hold CTRL.

If you want one subfolder to be included in many folders, hold the “ctrl” key while doing the previous operation. The subfolder will stay where it was before the drag-and-drop, and it also will be included in the new place where you dropped it.



Tip to remember: When you put something in a shared folder, it automatically becomes shared as well. For example, if you move a project folder to a folder shared with your client, your client will see the project folder and underlying tasks.

The brilliance of Wrike is in its ability to help people manage a wide range of activities. Some Wrike users work 24/7 to get their projects delivered as soon as possible. Others work from 9 to 5 on business days only. So that every team can plan its projects in accordance with its work schedule, we have introduced customization of working days.

If you want to change the Monday to Friday schedule for your account, then the administrator needs to sign in, go to “Account”->“Account Management,” change working days (1) and hit the “Update” button (2). The settings are effective for all users in the account and can be set by the account administrator. The changes will affect all tasks created in the future by all users in the account. To avoid potential confusion, existing tasks will not be automatically rescheduled. When you change an existing task, the new settings will come into effect.

Google Chrome has already won the hearts of thousands of early adopters. Chrome has  a number of innovative features that  Google says were developed to solve several serious problems related to browsing the Web. If you are one of the Web-workers who have already chosen Chrome as a primary browser, do not deprive yourself the pleasure of adding your favorite project management software to your bookmarks. Wrike works perfectly in Chrome, just as it does in other highly popular web-browsers, such as Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 3, and Safari 3.