When you start getting serious about management, whether to manage yourself, your team, or your whole company, you need to equip yourself with the best possible tools. And there’s a LOT of tools at your disposal, depending on your needs, maturity, and the size of your company. Here’s a helpful guide to give you a broad picture of the tools you will encounter as you grow as manager.
As the name suggests, the goal of a task manager is to keep track of your tasks so you always know what you're supposed to be working on at a given time.
Task management can be as easy as creating a to-do list on a piece of paper (and that’s what many people do), but in our digital days, there are software equivalents for the task list, some with more bells and whistles.
The fundamental goal of task management software is to make you as productive as possible: do more tasks, prioritize and do the most important ones, not waste time
Although task management will start you off on your way to being more productive, it can only take you so far, especially if you want to go beyond managing your personal tasks.
As you can see, when tasks contain uncertainty, are dependent on each other, or simply involve too many people (it starts getting tricky around 5), task management isn’t enough.
In short: Task management software can bring you some useful discipline in managing your tasks on a short term, day to day basis. That discipline can help you increase your productivity by keeping an eye on your current and upcoming tasks. But task management software tends to give very little insight, and lacks features that are necessary once your start working in larger teams on larger projects. That’s when project management software comes in.