Planner - a little productivity tool for managing workloads

There is a little gem in the Microsoft suite. It is such a great tool to increase productivity and bring teams together. It integrates well with other MS suite, is easy to use and is a great little project management tool.

It is called Planner.

Many project management tools are a little clunky for the whole team to use, but often it is good that the whole team is aware of what projects and tasks are going on, what stage they are in and what it their role in the bigger picture.

Planner offers a super easy way to do all this.

It operates from your browser and in essence, it is a task management tool for individual or a team. You can assign a task for anyone in your team and they get notification on their email. If you assign a due date, Planner sends you or them notifications of when their tasks are due. If you are a team leader, you can follow up your team’s progress while they crunch through the tasks and deadlines.

How to start using it?

Planner consists of buckets that can be projects, to do lists or whatever suits your team. You can add tasks into a bucket easily, just under the bucket, press the plus signs and write a task name. You can also quickly add due date and assign the task to a specific person.

You can then click open the newly created task and add more information, include attachments and then follow the progress when your team members write comments. When they start doing the task, they check the task from ‘Not started’ to ‘In progress’ and when they have completed the task, they change that to ‘Complete’. That way you and they can follow the progress.

I find the planner easiest to use in a board view, but you can also view it in Schedule view. That shows all the tasks in calendar and it is easy to check if you or them have tasks due. Tasks can also prioritized so if you have overworked team members with huge amount of tasks in their schedule, they can see what they should do first and what can wait unless they can finish all of them on time.

You can also view all the tasks, how many are started, how many finished and how many are late. Throughout the Planner, in every view you can filter the tasks for example by date or assigned person. This is a good way to see how your team members are doing and whether they struggle with work load.

You can also use Grid view to visualise all tasks and easily transfer them to Excel or Microsoft Project. You can create data for progress reports and share them in meetings.

Needless to say, I am a big fan of Planner and I use it every day. My current team learned to use it in one day and are happily assigning tasks and crunching them away quickly and efficiently.

Every time I get an email with action item in it, I transfer the task in my personal work planner page or our team planner page. Then I can tick off that email and forget it.

In my own planner I have following buckets: Today, this week, next week, future, waiting from others and maybe on day. In team planner we have a bucket for each project or process we are doing currently. With these two planners I can so easily organize all my work.

I also have personal planner with my own account. There are many free softwares  available on internet. If I get a great idea in the middle of my evening walk or during commute, I write it down in my planner on my phone. I reorganize this at least weekly and some of the ideas get here, some to my book writing and some I use at work.

The best thing to increase productivity is planning and organizing. Planning the tasks that need to be done and then organizing them effectively are easy to do, do not require any fancy tools and can be done by anyone from admin staff to CEO.

Have a go with Planner and see if it is a tool for you!