The Secret of Efficient Task Management: Tips from ROI Revolution

I love the fact that Wrike hit everything in my dream list! With Wrike's help, we get vastly better results, we get more things done and done faster. rqoute

Timothy Seward
Chief executive officer of ROI Revolution

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Challenges of Task Management in the Digital Age

When there were only 5 employees at ROI Revolution, it was easy for the founder to delegate tasks and monitor results in an informal way, because everyone was sitting in the same office. As the company developed and the team grew up to 30 people, the increasing pressure of multitasking required a special management tool. The company tried to use email and Outlook Tasks for this purpose, but has rapidly outgrown both.

According to Timothy Seward, CEO of ROI Revolution, the problem with these tools was that they "provided no visibility, no collaboration, no easy way to update tasks, unassign or reassign them to someone else". When there were more than 30 people in the team, Timothy realized that task management became really clumsy. The existing pattern of assigning, discussing and tracking tasks challenged the efficiency of team collaboration on tasks and their timely completion. ROI Revolution needed a robust task management system to get things done more efficiently and on time.

ROI Revolution Solution

Timothy Seward shares how ROI Revolution adopted Wrike: "We were fully productive in marketing department within first two weeks. After I saw the benefits I rolled it out to my accounting and administrative team and then the whole company".

Wrike provides ROI Revolution with an easy and helpful way to organize the workflow, accurately structure tasks in neat hierarchies and break the work down into smaller, easier to tackle actionable items. Wrike eliminates the stress of multitasking, since there is no need to keep a large number of tasks in mind and team members can fully focus on nailing tasks on hands.

www.roirevolution.com

runs measurable, ROI-driven online advertising in Google, Yahoo, MSN, Facebook and Youtube
leading expert in Search Engine Marketing
certified partner of Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer

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Flexible folder structure	Email communications merged into task planning	Friendly collaborative environment
Wrike allows you to group tasks and structure them in an easy, accurate and flexible way by various criteria: by projects, responsible people, departments etc. You can create different views on the same group of tasks for your team members while having a complete picture yourself. This task structure is not rigid: by simply dragging and dropping items, you can quickly restructure your workflow to be always up-to-date in this ever-changing digital world.	Every day a manager receives piles of messages ranging from expo invitations, that the marketing team has to take care of, to important business proposals that require thorough thinking. With Wrike, you can just forward relevant emails into the task management system and either add information to existing tasks or create brand new ones. Wrike ensures that no valuable information will ever be buried in the depth of your inbox. According to Timothy, this is "one of the things that were a total delight".	Wrike's friendly social interface naturally encourages team members for collaboration and task discussions. Timothy comments on the benefits of Wrike's Activity Stream: "It allows people that are working on the task together to share very intricate nuanced details about complex tasks, so that everybody stays on the same page. I think it is just a fabulous feature of Wrike." Collaboration in Wrike is just as effective as face-to face communication. "Within just the first couple of weeks that we've been using Wrike, I was able to immediately save 50% of the time that we used to spend on meetings," says Timothy.

Lesson learned

Timothy Seward, CEO of ROI Revolution shares his opinion about using Wrike for task management.

In our digital age, it is not about paper or conversation anymore, it’s about keeping things moving very fast in the digital space. An effective task management system should provide easy access to tasks, a handy way to share files and the ability to update tasks with a couple of clicks. On top of that, a manager needs a flexible system to provide certain team members with access to tasks they are responsible for. Wrike has everything that I was looking for in task management software and a lot of extra good features.

ROI Revolution’s tips for effective task management

Break down tasks into smaller actionable items

According to Timothy Seward, trying to focus on everything you have to do for a specific task or a whole project can be rather stressful. Instead, it might be more productive to figure out what is the very next thing that you can do to move that project forward. Wrike allows to easily break the work down into smaller tasks. When you tackle and complete smaller items one by one, you are never stuck in this never end of "70% complete" and don't have overdue tasks always cluttering your view.

Log all your ideas into the system

Don't use your mind as a warehouse for ideas — some valuable items can be easily lost when you have too many things to remember. It is way more efficient to let the software system remember these ideas for you. In Wrike you can easily organize your ideas into agile plans. If the task is not on the high priority right now, but you don't want to forget it, enter it in Wrike as a backlog task. This way you can free your mind and focus on one thing that you are doing right now versus having ten things that you have to do tomorrow.

Let the system remind about tasks to your employees

Keeping track of all deadlines and manually reminding people about their tasks can be rather time-consuming for a manager. Wrike's interactive to-do emails help to minimize routine operations, so you have more time and resources to focus on your job. Wrike conveniently aggregates the summary of the most important information on the dashboard making task management faster and easier than ever. The dashboard gives the team members an overview of the recent updates and helps them stay focused on the most important items.

Share your data in a granular way

Information overload is a big challenge in the digital age. Excessive data draws attention away from the task's essence and consumes precious time resources. Wrike allows you to selectively follow updates, receiving notifications only about changes in the most significant tasks. In Wrike, it is incredibly easy for a manager to selectively share tasks with the team. Moreover, if you collaborate to those tasks that they are involved in.

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