According to Microsoft’s Annual Work Trend Index, most employees spend up to 60% of their days communicating via meetings, emails, and through live chats. Additionally, the typical worker admits to reading as many as four emails for every one that they send.
Managing communications with co-workers and supervisors is a time-consuming process in itself. As competing priorities pile on, tasks grow more difficult to manage — unless you have a proper task tracking system in place.
What is task tracking?
Task tracking is a form of task or project management that helps optimize workflows. Teams often use structured task tracker templates to bring order to their operations and future-proof their workflows.
When team members understand:
What the task expectations are
Who is responsible for task deliverables
When the deadlines are scheduled
Projects run smoothly and are delivered on time.
Task tracking creates an effective task management workflow, reducing the potential for missed deadlines or conflicting expectations. Your team members feel more motivated and organized — and also less frustrated or burnt out.
A task tracker template is an easy-to-use resource that gives you the ability to set priorities and manage team workflows. Learn more about how to use a task tracker template to assign, manage and review team tasks.
What is employee task tracking software?
Employee task tracking software is a digital, intuitive version of a traditional to-do list. Task tracking software is designed to help organizations track, assign, and manage tasks for teams or individuals. It simplifies the process of organizing work, monitoring progress, and ensuring accountability — improving efficiency, productivity and employee morale.
Task tracking software allows managers and team members to:
Assign tasks: Tasks can be assigned to individuals or teams, with clear deadlines and instructions.
Track progress: Project managers can track the status of tasks (e.g., to-do, in progress, completed) and get real-time updates from team members.
Prioritize work: Tasks can be prioritized based on urgency and importance, helping teams focus on high-priority items.
Collaborate: Many tools offer collaboration features like comments, file sharing and notifications to streamline communication within tasks.
Generate reports: It can generate reports that highlight productivity and identify bottlenecks, so managers can implement areas for improvement.
How does it help you and your team?
Task tracking software helps your team work more productively by providing visibility into workloads, workflows and roadblocks. It improves collaboration and communication between team members and stakeholders with a centralized domain to track all projects and tasks.
MeisterTask is an easy-to-use, intuitive, and uncluttered task tracking tool that provides your team with:
Visual Kanban boards to assign tasks and due dates
Task tracking timeline views that work like a Gantt tracker
Built-in time tracking features and automated task status updates
Centralized locations for comments and real-time notifications
Options to create checklists, subtasks, task dependencies and status reports
Improve task tracking by helping your team set priorities and manage workflows. Add MeisterTask to your task tracking process today.
Simple team task tracking in 5 easy steps
1. Use Kanban boards to visualize task and project progress
Suppose your team members have questions about their tasks or the scope of the project as a whole. Without a centralized hub to store all project details, you could find yourself spending too much time in meetings or sending emails to clarify questions.
With MeisterTask, you can build Kanban-style project boards for all your tasks and projects. Kanban is a visual project management format, and Kanban boards provide a clear overview of all project tasks. MeisterTask has pre-built Kanban-style templates that make it easy to list all your tasks and track their progress across the board.
Using MeisterTask, you can also create subtasks and checklists for each of your main tasks. Subtasks and checklists allow you to provide more granular detail about the workflow and milestones.
When team members open their MeisterTask dashboard, they can click on a task and easily view the projected amount of work to complete the assignment. This is a quick and efficient system to help team members organize their schedules, map out their to-dos and ensure they complete their tasks on time.
2. Add task assignees and tags to make responsibilities and priorities crystal clear
When beginning a new project, it’s natural for team members to have questions about who is responsible for which tasks. Rather than build multiple email chains delegating tasks and workloads, you can simplify the task assignment process using MeisterTask.
Assign tasks to specific team members so they can easily understand what’s expected of them and by when. This helps them manage their schedules and set priorities to complete the most important and urgent tasks first.
To help your team manage their time more effectively, add labels indicating the priority level of each task e.g. “Priority 1” and “Priority 2”. If team members have questions about certain tasks, or are uncertain about how to prioritize their workloads, they can refer to the project board for guidance.
You can also streamline this process to mark tasks as complete. Hover over a section header on your Kanban board, and select the “Automations” tab from the dropdown menu. Select “+ Add Automation” and choose the “Update Status” option. You can tell MeisterTask to automatically mark a task as completed when the assignee moves the task to the “Done” section of your Kanban board. It’s a more efficient way to keep track of task status updates.
3. Use notes, comments and attachments to add more context to tasks
Some projects can be complex. Your team might need to consider contextual information such as project plans, research and guidelines. This information can easily get lost in email threads or quickly become outdated if stored in static documents like PDFs. That’s why centralized, collaborative documentation is essential.
By centralizing information, MeisterTask drastically reduces the amount of time team members spend communicating about tasks, projects and workflows. Documentation and task management are closely connected in the tool — you can easily link your notes from within your tasks and vice-versa. This ensures the broader context of your team’s work is always easily accessible.
For day-to-day discussions, keep all project-related discussions on the task. Add a comment and simply tag team members with the @ function to bring them up to speed. You can also share attachments such as images and other media files. This way, you don’t need to send numerous email threads or schedule multiple meetings that eat into productivity.
4. Use the Gantt chart view to visualize built-in time tracking
Once you’ve listed all the tasks and assigned responsibilities to your team members, there’s one more essential project management task— stakeholder alignment. You need to give other leaders in the business a projection for when the tasks and larger project will be completed.
MeisterTask includes a built-in Gantt timeline feature. From your project board, click the timeline view tab to pull up the Gantt tracker. Simply drag each of your team members’ tasks into the timeline view and build a visual overview of the full project.
The Gantt tracker helps you create a full visual project timeline. Simply set start and end dates for each task and monitor deadlines to keep deliverables on track.
This one simple feature makes it easy to receive stakeholder approval and move forward with the project implementation plan. Watch this video on MeisterTask’s Gantt tracker feature and see how easy it is to build a visual project timeline.
5. Review resource management with time tracking reporting
The purpose of time tracking solutions is to help become a more efficient and effective team. As you complete each project, you can evaluate team member performance, time tracking, resource management and more metrics to refine your workflows.
MeisterTask allows you to measure project performance using several metrics. Click on the Reports tab of your project dashboard, and you can select filters to create unique reports based on the full project, individual tasks, timeframes, and individual performance.
Using your MeisterTask reports, you can evaluate core performance metrics and adjust how you build out your next project. Let the data serve as a guide so that you can improve time tracking, workload management, and other performance metrics as your team takes on new projects.
