Project Management Supports Productivity
In law school, I was more organized than any other time of my life, until now. I had writing assignments, client tasks, and reading that had to be completed, often on a daily basis. But what was unique about my busy days was that they were for the most part, very predictable. Clients needed research into the factual and legal aspects of precedent cases with subsequent legal documents produced for hearings, professors needed research into the factual and legal aspects of precedent cases with subsequent legal documents produced for grading, and professors needed the students to read massive amounts of material each night to even hope to understand their classroom lectures. Research and writing, research and writing, and reading is what it boiled down to. I didn’t need a project management tool to know what was coming up for my evening ahead or the next day’s classes.
Client work in the search marketing industry has been a bit different. I am currently working on SEO, PPC, social media, and reputation management. Each of these core areas requires research and writing, but the tasks are inherently smaller in focus. Writing an optimized title, doing competitive link research, adding tracking codes to PPC ads and keywords, submitting content to social news sites, organizing RSS feeds, the list goes on and on. I have previously mentioned that I love my USB stick with GTD TiddlyWiki, but I’m finding that my claim of tracking progress with projects just isn’t working out that well for me on my USB stick. Enter Clocking IT. It may not be the prettiest project management solution, but it’s free, and it really aids in tracking progress. I create each of my websites or projects as a client. Each “client” then appears in the column under “projects” and individual milestones and projects fit under the client and then there is a task level. It is easy to add time to really track each task, and completing a task is a simple checkbox. It’s not integrated to go offline, but it does what it says.
