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Some Of The Largest Task Management Tools
Compare Project Management Tools: An Overview
Lock in Productivity
Did you know that people get a hit of dopemine (pleasure chemical) just by checking things off on their’to do’ list?
The important thing is to ensure we are doing the ‘right’ things, not just checking off tasks that add littlevalue to our goals.
The easiest way to ensure you are getting lots of ‘productive checks’, with a strict focus on important tasks is to use a project management tool. These online tools will focus you (and your team) on the right tasks that need to be tackled next to achieve your target outcomes.
What’s The Best Tool?
As with many things, “what’s best?” depends on your budget and what you want to achieve.
To begin, decide whether you are managing a project, or a process.
A project has a fixed start and point of completion. Examples of a project might be a website or software design. Once the completed product is given to the client, the product development phase of the project ends.
A process is a recurring set of tasks that need to be executed to run your business. For example, when site visitors engage with your content they might convert to a new sales lead. These leads then need to be handled according to your internal processes. Every new lead is handled in the same set of defined rules to ensure you can help prospects in the best way possible.
Depending on whether you are managing a project or process, some tools will be better than others for your needs. For example, some tools include Gantt charts, which shows a project timeline. These chartsare great for project management, but not much help for recurring processes.
Measure Twice, Cut Once
The past few years has seen an explosion of high quality tools that can help you manage your business. A quick Google search for “project management tool” will produce dozens of offerings for you to explore. They all have a different balance of features, pricing and utility so there is lots to choose from.
Making the right choice for your business is key. Once you move to a solution, it’s really hard to change your mind. This is especially true if you have a team that is integrated into the same solution. You probably won’t be able to easily export and re-import your data to the new solution if you decide to move to a new product. At best you’ll have a couple of months where you are using overlapping systems while you transition.
Before you commit to a new management tool consider the team and company behind the software. There are a LOT of tools on the market, and some of them won’t be operational in three years. No matter how good the solution, the market is getting more and more competitive. Ideally you want to work with a company that will be maintaining their solution for many years to come.
Most solutions offer you a free trial to use their product. They know that the more you use their solution, the more likely you are to convert to a paying user. Use the free trials to narrow down your ‘short list’ of software matches. Most solutions will be very happy to have you do multiple free trials if you contact them and ask for an extension.
Where to Start?
Below are a few of the most popular tools on the market. The list is by no means exhaustive, but it will get you started.
Trello
Wrike
Bitrix24
Zoho
Airtable
Asana
Jira
Zenkit
Pipefy
TeamworkProjects
Monday
Basecamp
It’s worth noting that Trello, Bitrix24, Zenkit, and Pipefy have very robust free pricing plans. You can get a lot of productivity management without paying a cent.
How Credible Is Klout?
How credible is Klout? Is it really true that people are being refused jobs in Silicon Valley because they have Klout scores below 50? It’s also been rumoured that airlines have been offering free upgrades to people with high Klout scores and likewise, that some restaurants have given priority to customers if they have a high Klout score.
If you find it hard to believe then you should take a look at this article by Seth Stevenson on wired.com. Stevenson recounts stories of interviews being cut short when lower Klout scores for interviewees were pulled up by interviewers and how these job applicants had greater success when subsequently boosting their Klout scores. He also raises these stories about the unseen power of Klout:
At the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas last summer, clerks surreptitiously looked up guests’ Klout scores as they checked in. Some high scorers received instant room upgrades, sometimes without even being told why. According to Greg Cannon, the Palms’ former director of ecommerce, the initiative stirred up tremendous online buzz. He says that before its Klout experiment, the Palms had only the 17th-largest social-networking following among Las Vegas-based hotel-casinos. Afterward, it jumped up to third on Facebook and has one of the highest Klout scores among its peers.
Klout is starting to infiltrate more and more of our everyday transactions. In February, the enterprise-software giant Salesforce.com introduced a service that lets companies monitor the Klout scores of customers who tweet compliments and complaints; those with the highest scores will presumably get swifter, friendlier attention from customer service reps. In March, luxury shopping site Gilt Groupe began offering discounts proportional to a customer’s Klout score. Read the full story here
If it is going to carry this sort of influence, it’s got to be time to assess how credible is Klout. An interesting article on this subject recently appeared in The New Yorker courtesy of Nicholas Thompson. He argues Klout is evil but can be saved. Here are a sample of his views:
Klout grades users on a scale of one to a hundred based on some proprietary algorithm that counts how often your comments are retweeted, liked, or shared. If you want your score to go up, tweet more and get influential people to retweet you. Don’t ever go on vacation. If you’re on a social network, Klout gets your score, whether you’ve ever logged into the service or not. Think of a mercenary socialite, holding a calculator and trying to figure out who to invite to a party based on import. Then put whatever number she arrives at on every guest’s lapel. That’s Klout. Rick Ross has a score of eighty-five; Rick Santorum has a score of eighty-two; Rick Perry has a score of sixty-six. Rick Astley has a score of forty-seven.
The idea is very clever, and very timely. There are all kinds of ad-hoc ways to figure out how influential people are on social networks. You can count their Twitter followers. You can figure out the ratio of followers to the number of people they follow. Or you can divide their followers by their number of Tweets. Klout takes those indicators, adds a few more, and then just gives you a number. Klout doesn’t equal real-world clout, but, as the ratio of Ricks demonstrates, the numbers are pretty good.
But clever ideas are not necessarily good ones, and Klout is designed in a way that makes it likely to fuel both unhealthy obsession and unhappy competition. When you log into Klout, it makes it easy to see, in order of score, exactly how all your friends rank. The number is more personal than those used by other social networks, and Klout displays it prominently.
The structure of social networks subtly changes the way we act. And Klout seems to encourage nothing good. To make your score go up, you have to tweet out of obligation, and you have to try to influence the other influencers. Read more
There’s certainly a place for a reliable gauge of a person’s influence in their areas of expertise, but is Klout the appropriate tool? How reliable are it’s mysterious algorithms? It certainly baffles me that I appear as an influencer in certain countries far away from me which I’ve neither visited nor expressed an opinion about. Do real influencers tear their hair out trying to play the Klout system? I suspect that most don’t give a damn but the danger is that by default a distorted gauge of how genuine an individual’s influence is being produced where groups of users with nothing better to do can pump out floods of tweets on automation to share between each other to boost their ratings on Klout. That surely cannot be the way to gauge genuine influence.
In his well argued article Nicholas Thompson believes Klout can still fulfil the role it seeks, provided it changes in some key areas including allowing privacy options. Is that your view or is there a need for a more credible alternative to Klout to emerge? Any comments would be warmly welcomed.
The Abundance Of Opportunities For Entrepreneurs
These are exciting times for the genuine entrepreneur. Money making opportunities for entrepreneurs are everywhere, despite what doom-mongers might tell you! Times may well be traumatic for those who simply want a steady job to toil away at or a traditional trade marketed in the traditional ways which no longer work in the modern world but for anyone willing to look beyond that treadmill, there is an abundance of opportunities waiting to be grasped.
The facilities and tools available to the ordinary man or woman, sitting in their own lounge or conservatory are truly mind-blowing. What’s more, they are available for next to nothing.
Take creating a book, for example. Up until just a few years ago, to create a marketable book, you would had to spend thousands on typesetting and printing. If you couldn’t afford to print 5,000 copies – then tough! The unit cost was very high. Today, you can get a book to market fast and for free. Just upload it to Amazon from your laptop in an hour or two and it’s immediately available for the whole world to buy.
This sort of change has been mirrored in just about every sphere of business and has transformed the landscape for any would-be entrepreneur. If you have a particular interest or passion, a domain name and webhosting for your website can be acquired for next to nothing and you can immediately compile or collate articles and information about your interest and monetise it with downloadable reports and affiliate links to related businesses of your choice.
Marketing too is very inexpensive with a vast array of Social Media sites to use and engage with those who are interested in your niche. These people can be easily traced be following relevant discussion threads and freely participating in these discussions. This is a far cry from the days when any business needed premises for customers to visit, employees to man the business and facilities for storing stock.
Information is now instantly available at the touch of a button and choices for everyone now have never been more stark. Either embrace the new era or get left behind. One thing for sure is that waiting for a past era to return is futile. Historically it seldom happens. A long period of uncertainty and disappointment lies ahead for those with a traditional mindset. Those who successfully move with the times and who are always willing to adapt will be the successful entrepreneurs of the Twenty-First Century.
Sleepwalking Into Financial Slavery
As the father of children approaching what could be termed “university age” and having naturally come into contact with the parents of their friends over the years, I am struck by how the “system” is geared up to emasculating them in a significant form of financial bondage that will influence them for most of their lives.
Their years at school are naturally geared towards learning core skills and values to equip them through their lives, eg developing their reading, writing, speaking and numeracy skills and hopefully passing examinations which will be universally recognised when they apply for employment etc.
Beyond that however, I can’t help but think that the education system is no more than a conveyor belt towards a cycle of financial slavery that few have the imagination to breakout from. This is because the whole emphasis in their final years at school or college is based on going to university. Little debate takes place on why they should go to university or what it will achieve for them. They get caught up in an atmosphere that they must go to university because that’s what their friends are doing and also all their teachers would have gone to university so they must do the same. Either that, or they don’t yet know what they want to do in the long-term so the easy way to put off that decision is to go to university.
This has also been accelerated by a shift towards university based training for many vocations such as nursing, business and public administration and journalism. These callings may have had a university level entry option in the past but the majority of entrants would have entered at “shop floor” level either as school-leavers or after a career change. In many areas this option is no longer available due to the qualification levels required or a mentality where an employer doesn’t look at an applicant unless they have a degree.
At no time do young people seem to be encouraged to stand back from this before it’s too late and to ask important questions such as “Do I need to go to university?” and “What do I aim to achieve by going to University?” There is no consideration of alternative options such as starting a small business at a time when individuals have little to lose, before they’ve also been drawn into long-term commitments like mortgages and bringing up a family.
The opportunity to start a business instantly has never been easier. The tools for starting one are right at your fingertips in the form of a laptop and an internet connection. Never has it been easier for an individual to make a good living from their passion. If your passion is “Bodybuilding” why not start a blog, write some articles and monetise it with some Adsense and relevant affiliate links. Better still, build a list of contacts and subscribers and develop or rebrand a product about it. You would then be on your way to an alternative and far more enjoyable and rewarding lifestyle. It can all be largely automated without the need for buying and storing expensive stock funded by business loans, franchise fees or paying for ridiculously expensive and unproductive forms of conventional advertising.
Despite the economic troubles affecting the world there has been little sign of it stifling the phenomenal growth of the internet. If anything, studies suggest these problems are actually contributing to accelerating that growth!
Without wishing to be critical of many well meaning and dedicated individuals, aspiring students need to be aware that the education system is an industry. It depends on large numbers going to university or further education colleges (the target in the UK is 50 per cent of all school leavers), so that these institutions can get the funding they need and the work for their lecturers to remain on the payroll.
This may not have been particularly harmful in the past era of student grants, but the financial consequences in this new era of student loans are profound. Student fees in the UK are scheduled to rise from £3,000 per year to £9,000 per year from 2012. Additionally, the typical cost of university accommodation is £900 per year (based on 3 terms of £300 per term). A typical student will therefore walk away from university with a debt of £29,700 after a three year undergraduate degree course and that is before any consideration of living costs and subsistence over those three years.
This is just the start of this cycle of a lifetime of being locked into debt. The first temptation of anyone with a low level of cashflow is to boost it by using easily available credit cards. In 2008 the UK average credit card and other personal debt (such as car loans) per household was over £8,700. (In the USA the average credit card debt per household with credit card debt was $14,750).
The next norm in the UK after finding some form of long-term employment is to buy a house. This is typically financed by means of a mortgage, usually lasting 25 years. “Google” the details and it will show average household UK mortgage debt standing at around £140,000. If that £140,000 has been borrowed at an average rate of 6% over those 25 years on a repayment mortgage, it will cost £902 a month, £270,500 in total and £130,500 in interest.
So there you have it. Two major planks of society, the education system and the financial institutions depend on this mentality of debt. It will lock individuals into clinging onto jobs they think they cannot afford to lose for fear of failing to support their families, losing their homes and having County Court Judgements against them for failing to keep up their debt repayments. With much consumer spending financed on debt, the whole system hinges on borrowing. As individuals will typically spend all of their available income regardless of its level, never has it been more appropriate to describe a job as standing for “Just Over Broke”.
Every Aspiring Information / Internet Marketer Should Try To View This Programme
There was a programme on TV in the UK during January (2011) called “Dream Lives For Sale” where each week a couple who want to move aboard, start a business and find a new lifestyle are shown 5 potential businesses, and given the chance to work in them. The costs are then broken down including the investment to buy the business and the potential profits.
I HIGHLY recommend that anyone interested in Internet or Information Marketing, or attempting to establish an Online Business watches at least one episode and pays close attention to the cost of the businesses and the returns they offer, compared to the costs involved in setting up and effectively operating an online business.
The programmes already broadcasted have included businesses on offer typically for £500k+ with an annual return of £70k down to an investment of £80k (ish) for an annual return of £16k.
These businesses have also required extremely hard graft whether in a restaurant, out in an olive grove or in one case, running dog kennels!
One of the great advantages of Information Marketing businesses is that you DON’T have to invest tens or even hundreds of thousands to get started, BUT that has also been one of the down sides.
This is because, as there’s usually very little investment required, most people don’t take it very seriously, and jump from one opportunity to another when the going gets tough or if a new bright shiny object comes along. Additionally, its all too easy to get distracted or show insufficient discipline to your business just because it can be operated from anywhere if you have a laptop and an internet connection. If tens of thousands had to be paid upfront as in the businesses featured in “Dream Lives For Sale”, I’m certain there would be a very different attitude!
The people featured in “Dream Lives For Sale” have typically had to sell their homes to raise the capital for these businesses, borrowed vast sums from their Bank with all the accompanying interest charges, arrangement fees etc, etc or they’ve tied up vast proportions of their savings. In return they are then locked into their commitment, often having to carry out quite menial tasks over many hours per day and await anxiously for sufficient customers to meet their overheads.
In comparison, if you wish to start an Online Business, a Domain Name often costs little more than $10 (even for a dot.com domain) and webhosting little more than $10 per month with the option of adding further websites to your hosting account. Other costs, such as an AutoResponder system are also quite minimal.
Today it’s easier than ever before to start and grow your own online business, provided its treated exactly as that, a serious business requiring commitment and attention. If you do that, then you’ll see your business grow into what you want it to be.
Compare this with the businesses on this programme (you’ll be able to find them on SkyPlayer depending where you live) and you’ll soon realise that there really is no better opportunity for a great return on a small investment than with information/internet marketing.
21st Century Business Entrepreneur
Patrick Clarke – 21st Century Business Entrepreneur
Commerce has changed drastically, just witness the boom in online trading and the success of online businesses such as Amazon and eBay, then set it against the decline and increasing closures of traditional High Street shops and stores (even well-established ones of many years such as Kodak and Woolworths). Why waste time sitting in a queue of vehicles or pay penal charges to park, when far more choice and better value is available at the touch of a button?
Further, skillful use of Social Media and online marketing strategies such as Google Local and SEO are proving far more effective and much better value than expensive newspaper, television and other traditional forms of advertising which re in clear decline. More and more it is becoming increasingly evident that the Internet and Social Media are revolutionising the way that people, businesses and organisations of all kinds operate. There are far more and far easier opportunities for everybody to follow their passion, their interests, their causes, their trade or profession and, if they wish, to monetise it.
Internet Marketing is empowering more and more people to take control of their own lives instead of being locked into traditional time-consuming and expensive business methods.
No longer is there a need to store your own stock in a warehouse or shop, to organise the printing of a newsletter or magazine, to pay vast sums to a franchiser for the privilege of starting a time consuming business with often negligible profits and expensive overheads.
It can all be done with minimal expense at the touch of a button. I have progressed from offline business interests (some of which I still retain) to monetised online businesses. That is my passion and my primary business focus.
If you are looking for assistance in progressing your business online through Social Media networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook or want to capitalize on the advance of Google Local, then get in touch. I would be pleased to assist. The results might astonish you!
Mail Me For A Free Consultation
Patrick Clarke – 21st Century Business Entrepreneur
