Episode Summary

Whether you’re working solo in your business or have a sizeable team, do you know exactly what needs to get done every day? Or do you find yourself letting responsibilities slip through the cracks because you’re struggling to keep track of it all? 

A project management tool should be your best friend as a business owner. In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, Melissa Swink discusses the importance of using project management tools to organize your business and personal life. She shares practical examples of how project management tools can streamline client tasks, track leads, manage repeatable processes, and even organize personal responsibilities. Tune in for practical tips and plenty of “ah ha” moments to help you better organize and prioritize your business! 

Key Highlights:

• Project management tools help entrepreneurs organize both business and personal tasks.
• Prioritization is key to managing an overwhelming to-do list.
• Using a project management tool can prevent tasks from falling through the cracks.
• Templates in project management can streamline repeatable processes.
• Project management tools can help track client tasks and projects efficiently.
• Using a project management tool can enhance team collaboration, especially when your team is remote.
• Setting reminders for personal tasks can reduce stress and improve efficiency.
• Choosing a user-friendly project management tool is essential for consistent use.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, I am going to teach you how to use a project management tool to organize your business and your life. And these things are going to apply whether you're working solo or you're working with a sizable team.

So to start things off, I wanna ask you a couple of questions just for reflection to see kind of where you're at in terms of how you're organizing all the miscellaneous to-dos in not only at work, but also in your personal life as well because they all are so interconnected and I know we all are juggling many responsibilities from many different angles. Not only that, we'll add another layer in if you're volunteering or you are giving of your time in other areas.

not only to your business and also your family, but you've got so many other commitments as well. So think about this first things first, is how do you know what needs to be done every day? Now you probably have an abundant to-do list that's just never ending, but taking that a step further, how do you even prioritize? Because I know that it's very easy for me and so many others to fall into quote unquote reactive mode.

because we have so much coming at us from every direction. We may start the day with a clear idea of here are the things that I know I need to get done today and you're kind of looking at your calendar and seeing what to expect for the day and then an email comes in or your team pings you with a question or there's just so many different scenarios or a sick kid comes home from school and then all of a sudden you're like, that thing that I was planning on doing, not gonna happen today. There's just so many things that can.

derail us every day, but do you know what needs to be done? How do you know when it needs to be done by? How do you know what's more important versus less important? What about your team? So that's not only just you, but what about your team? Because what you think might be the most important thing for your team to get done, they might not necessarily realize that, and they might start with this other thing over here. Don't even get me started on different work styles as well, because there are some people...

who might be very type A and morning people who dive in and do the hardest things first thing in the morning and then leave kind of their easier work for the afternoon. Or some people kind of like to warm up with some of those easier tasks before they're ready to start on the more difficult tasks of the day. There are just so many different ways that we can plan our day around the different to-dos that we have. Now, also in terms of priority, again, maybe there are things that you think are more important for your team to be focusing on.

and they're not even aware of that. Or maybe you were hoping that somebody was going to get you some information by say, tomorrow at the end of the business day so that you could take that and complete what you need to do with that project through the end of the week. And maybe that wasn't crystal clear when you had asked them for their help or asked them to do this task for you. There's just so many scenarios here when we look at the overall.

to-dos that we have every day in terms of what needs to be done, in what order do they need to be done by, when do they need to be done by, and all of that. And also just on a broader perspective of where are things at in the grand scheme of things. So maybe you're working on a large project with several people. Maybe it's a website design, for example, and you're like, okay, where are things at? Yes, you can individually ask people, hey, where are you at with the copy? Where are you at with obtaining photos from the client?

Now, where are you at with building out the wireframe and all these different things? You could ask those people individually or you could have a regular project meeting, which depending on meetings, some can be much more productive than others. Sometimes they are just a waste of time, money, energy, and sometimes they're great. Don't get me wrong. But when we take a look at the overall expectations and things that we need to do on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, year-to-year basis,

how are we managing all of this? And so my solution, I strongly recommend a project management tool for every business. And there's a couple of additional reasons for this as well. So not only did I just describe to you all of the things that are spinning at any given point in time for so many of us, but also maybe you're thinking of, know, it just right now, a lot of it lives in my head. And if that's you, I can tell you that's totally normal.

I know that's how a lot of us start out, especially if we are early on in our business journey. But I can tell you that overall, the brain is a lousy storage device. And I say that with pure respect and gratitude for my brain and so many other brilliant brains that I work with and have the pleasure of knowing, but our brains can only hold so much. And when we expect them to hold so much,

This often translates to waking up in the middle of the night and running through things or all of a sudden having that sheer moment of panic like, wait, I never sent off that email to so-and-so. You just have these moments where you're like, there's only so many things that our brains can juggle throughout the course of a given day. The other thing is, especially when you're working with a team or managing people, especially people that you can't see, like for example,

You know, my team is completely remote. There are many people on the team. The vast majority of our team, I've never actually met in person, which I would love to do something about, by the way. But we'll just, we'll not go down that rabbit hole. I would love to do like a trip maybe over a summer where I travel and like meet my team members and some of my clients in person throughout the country and so on. Anyway, maybe that's another topic for another day. Maybe that's a bucket list item for summertime.

I don't know, but I don't see my team members. I don't have a traditional office setting where I'm going in and I'm able to check up with each person and see where things are at. So a project management tool can give you a much easier way to not only manage all the things that your team is doing, but also the order in which they're done and clearly communicate due dates and things like that. If you are using pen and paper,

Currently to manage all of your to-do's and all of your projects and you know, try to keep yourself on task I think that's a great place to start especially if right now you're trying to Continue holding everything in your brain that is so much better than trying to memorize and remember everything The challenge with a pen and paper system is that it's hard to share information with others and it's really hard to delegate The other thing is to what I've found myself doing in the past

And I do use a paper planner. I use actually my own priority planner to figure out what my priorities are in terms of my role at my company. So not only do I have my tasks, but I also have them prioritized based on the impact that they make and the overall level of importance that they need to be done. But if I was only using that tool, it would be really hard for me to simply reassign something to my assistant.

If you're using a project management tool and you have these things already entered in the system, it's really easy to reassign that to somebody else, add a note with some instructions and send it on their way. It's also hard to share information. Again, if you're working on a project with a team and everybody's kind of got their own running to-do list on a pen and paper throughout the course of the day or the week or the overall span of the project, you're not necessarily seeing what other people are working on that day.

So there are several reasons why I think that a project management tool is extremely important for every business to have. But more importantly, let's move on to talking about how you can use a project management tool to organize your business and your life. I've just shared with you some of the reasons why I think this is super important, but let's talk about how, because I'm all about the how. I know there's so many times where I listen to podcasts or I read books where I'm like, okay, you've got me sold on this idea.

I understand the concepts. have the right mindset about this, but tell me how specifically I need to be doing this thing. So that's what we're going to dive into. And I'm going to give you kind of five areas, if you will, that I personally use a project management tool and so many of our clients and even colleagues of mine are using these as well. So the first thing to consider using a project management tool for would be keeping track of client tasks and projects. So for example,

I have a team of virtual assistants and we keep track of all of our clients' tasks and projects that they're outsourcing to our team in our project management system. So in case you're wondering, you know, what project management system do you use? We use Asana. I'll tell you why later on this episode. It's not important right now. There are so many great ones out there. I know there's monday.com. I know some people use Notion, ClickUp. There's so many out there. But if I use project management tool,

as I'm talking here and I substitute that word for Asana, I'm using them kind of interchangeably here. If you use something else, just feel free to insert that word in your mind as we're going along here. So we keep track of all of our clients' tasks and projects in that system. And the great thing is is that we're able to see at any given point in time where things are at, what is done, what is in the process of being done, what is going to be coming due later this week or next week or at the end of the month.

And so we have a snapshot of this. The other thing is that's really, really nice is if for some reason somebody from our team needs to suddenly take a step back from work, like whether it be something minor, like having a sick kiddo at home or something more serious like, hey, somebody's in the hospital, I'm gonna need to take this week off to tend to their needs, which we fully support on our team. We are people first. And so...

It's really helpful when we need to seek backup support or figure out, where are things at for this client so that we can jump in and help kind of either prioritize their work if it's not something that's urgent and can wait till that person's returned, or do we need to get other people involved so that this task can be completed on time if the client needs it? If we didn't have a project management tool, this would be incredibly difficult to do. It also helps us just keep on task in terms of when things need to be done.

and also to prioritize different tasks and projects. Because if we have a project up and we can see here are all the moving parts and pieces that need to be done, here's the order in which they need to be done by, everybody on the team who's working on that project can just take a glance at this and see exactly where things are at. I'm waiting for this. So and so has this step before me. They are estimating it to be done by Thursday. That means I can put this on my list for Friday.

Just giving you a general example there. So not only do we use project management for our client tasks and our projects and things, I know many of our clients use these as well. So for example, we have a client who is a wedding photographer, and when you think about weddings and just the overall, weddings are just like a huge project, right? There's so many different moving parts and pieces. There's coordinating with hair and makeup and the venue and...

the reception hall and just all of the different things, families and friends and all the people. There are just so many things that go into not only planning a wedding, but in our client's case, being the photographer. So throughout the course of the wedding planning process, there are different checkpoints that they need to have in place so that they are clear on the information that they need from their client and they are clear on the expectations and what needs to be done that day, what is the schedule for that day.

So many things, I am not in the wedding industry. So those of you in event planning might be laughing at me stumbling over this example right now, but you get the idea where there's just so many different things and they're using a project management tool to manage all of this as well. Because the last thing they wanna do is have some paper file somewhere where somebody has handwritten all these things and for that file to get lost or for that person to...

suddenly be unable to show up to work that day and then everybody's of SOL, not quite sure what needs to be done by having it in an electronic system. It just is so much easier for everyone involved. Okay, another way that you can use a project management tool to organize your business is to keep track of leads and follow-ups. this is not quite, I'm not going to pretend that this is the same thing as having a CRM.

So depending on where you're at in business and the type of business that you're at, you may need a full blown CRM tool based on how much sales and how many clients that you have and all of that. But I will say that having a project management tool, you can easily add in different tasks that involve the sales process, maybe even keeping some track of some future followups and things like that.

So to give you an example, again, kind of how we use project management in our company, when I have a consultation with a potential client, I will add a task in for creating the quote and getting feedback from potential team members who might be working on the account. Like for instance, if it's a social media client, I might have some of our content strategists take a look at their current.

online presence and make some recommendations in terms of here's how we can take what they're doing and make it even better. And here's kind of what that looks like in terms of deliverables. Here's what I think that pricing should look like getting the team involved with some of these things. And then ultimately creating and sending that proposal to the potential client. So I can keep track in Asana. I can add a task for myself.

to follow up with these team members to create that quote and get that proposal sent out. And I can time it to make sure that I'm getting that out by the time that I have promised it to the potential client. So I know exactly where that needs to fall in my overall to-dos for that particular week. Another example of this could be maybe we're talking to a potential client and they said, you know what, this is really great. I'm really excited about this.

I need to have a meeting with our board of directors to get this proposal approved. Or we are resetting our budget for the upcoming year in October and I'm going to present this so that we can include it in our upcoming budget. So in situations like that, rather than rely on my brain to magically remember to follow up with people, I'm able to add a simple reminder in Asana, hey, follow up with so-and-so.

board meeting in October or something like that. You get the idea, but it just helps me to really stay on top of people that I'm having conversations with. Okay, a third example of how you can use a project management tool to organize your business is also to keep track of all the steps that are involved with repeatable processes. So in our Asana system, we have several projects that were considered templates.

So these templates are something that we've built that includes almost like a checklist, an electronic checklist of here's all the steps that go into this particular thing, and then we're able to make a copy of that template and update it for that particular client, that particular event, or that particular, know, said thing, and then able to customize it and then check off those things as we're doing them. So a great example of this that replies to so many businesses

is the client journey. So what does client onboarding look like? Okay, so the sales process is complete. They've said, yes, we want to work with you. What happens next? Is there an intake form that needs to go out? Do you need to schedule the first meeting? Do you need to send an invoice through QuickBooks? What does that client onboarding process look like? You can easily create a simple template that includes all of these steps and

duplicate that every time you go to do that thing. Same thing applies, know, client offboarding. Maybe you work with a client, maybe you've built their website. If you're a web design company, another example, or let's say you're going back to the wedding photography example. Okay, wedding is done. Photos have been delivered. Now we need to close out this project and maybe move them into a nurturing campaign. So we stay in front of them, you know, even after the wedding so that if they have friends who are getting married or

Maybe there's other services that the photographer provides that might apply to them in the future. They can stay top of mind. What does that offboarding process look like? Does it look like sending a thank you note with a gift basket? Congratulations. All of those different steps. Again, that just helps also with some consistency in terms of the level of customer service you're providing to your clients. Again, it's out of the brain. It's not on pen and paper where it can easily get lost, misplaced, or somebody else can't see it.

It is in a system that can let everyone on the team know what needs to be done. There are outstanding tasks for this client. We need to get these things done. Okay, another example of repeatable processes could be onboarding a new team member. Depending on the type of business you have, maybe there's some type of electronic contract or working agreement that needs to go out. Maybe there are...

users that need to be set up in different systems and software that you have. Maybe you need to add them. You need to create an email address for them. All these simple things. You can create a template for team onboarding that is able to be duplicated whenever you need to do that. So another couple of examples of repeatable processes. Maybe you do events a couple times a year.

or maybe there are different service types. Like we have a client who is an attorney and she does a variety of different types of services based on the client's needs. So maybe there is a template for here's all the steps that go into this type of service. Here's all the steps that go into that type of service. She's able to duplicate that, relabel it for the client and what their particular service need is, and she's able to follow that step by step with her team. Okay.

A fourth example of how to use a project management tool to organize your life. So we talked about the business side of things. I'm going to shift gears a little bit here because I also use our Asana to organize my personal life as well. So let me give you some examples of this. Registering for kids summer camps. So if you're parent like me, I'm recording this in early January. I am already getting emails about different summer camps opening up and different

know, childcare opportunities, all of these different things. And it comes so fast and it creeps up on me every single year. And I feel like so many other parents feel the same way as I don't start thinking about summer break until like spring break, where it's like, yeah, there's only like two months, two more months of school. And then everything is full. And then you're scrambling to figure out what to do with your kids for the summer. Having a reminder, say early January every year,

Hey, register the kids for summer camp or enroll the kids in daycare for the summer. Another example of this might be travel or vacations. Maybe you're planning a dream vacation and there are certain steps that you need to take. Like I need to renew my passport or we need to get maybe some vaccines updated before we go. Maybe we need to make arrangements for a pet sitter, for the dog, all these different things. You know, again, rather than trying to remember these things and contain them in your brain,

or again, having them on a random piece of paper on your kitchen counter that's going to get thrown away by accident, have it in a project management system. And again, having it in a project management system also opens up an easier opportunity to get some help with this. I know last year, I reassigned a task to my assistant at the time to research all the different day camps in my area for my daughter at her age.

and she was able to come up with a list of all these great ideas of all these different things she could do. I didn't have to do the research. I had somebody else help with the research. I went over these things with my daughter and she said, I'm interested in this and that and the other. Great, we got that registered. But again, having some help with getting that process started was very easy to do because this was in an electronic system. Okay, another example here on the personal side of things.

Maybe you have insurance renewals every year, like open enrollment for healthcare, or maybe you want to review your auto insurance policy before it renews, maybe shop around for different rates from different companies. Maybe you wanna meet with a financial planner on a regular basis, things like that. You can set those reminders in that system. Okay, finally, I'm just gonna go ahead and say,

Step number five or the fifth way that a project management tool can organize your business in your life is so much more. And wait, there's more. So I've given you some kind of general chunks of how I use project management and how our team have used project management tools to organize their businesses, but also just the little things. So we're talking about broader things and different themes. Some of these things can be as simple as,

reminding you to update the copyright year on your website every January. I also use our Asana system for reminders like sending my book club confirmation so everybody knows whose house that we're meeting at the following week. Different things like that. It's so simple to use a project management tool to manage all of the miscellaneous types of things as well, not even just the big things. So as I mentioned,

We use Asana. There's a couple of different reasons why we've chosen Asana. They have different views based on preference. you can use Asana basically like a checklist view. You can use it as like a board view if you want to have almost like a more visual, they almost look like cards, if you will, or if you've used Trello before, it kind of gives that view to people.

There's also a calendar view, so you can pull up and pop up and see at a glance in terms of time and schedule what is on your list for today. So there's a variety of views based on personal preference. I also like Asana because it's easy to schedule recurring tasks where I can say on the second day of every month I need to pay my team or maybe it is around the...

15th of every quarter I need to send in our quarterly estimated taxes, different things like that where you can set those reminders. Now I've just given you some more examples of all the ways that you can use this thing. Okay, and also it sends email reminders, which I really appreciate. unless for some reason you, and you can opt out of this, like if you're like, I do not want one more email reminder of anything, that's totally fine. But some people really appreciate that where they get that daily email and they say, hey,

Here's all the tasks that are due this week or these tasks are coming up or these tasks are in the red, they're behind. It's nice to have that email report option as well. So that's why we like Asana. Again, there are so many different tools out there. The most important thing when choosing a tool is to make sure that it's something that is simple and easy for you to use and something that you can consistently use that you're actually going to put to good use. Not just one more thing that you kind of dabbled in and then abandoned to go back to your pen and paper.

That sort of a thing. So all of that being said, if you know a business owner or an executive or even just a busy parent who's juggling so many different things throughout the course of a given day, which is probably the vast majority of the people you know, by the way, please share this episode with them because they might pick up on something like, hey, I can use a tool like this to manage, you know, X, Y or Z, or I can use this in my volunteer role, or I can use this to keep track of

the different things that are happening with the kids and so on. So I really appreciate you listening to this episode today. I hope that you found it helpful. This is something that I'm personally really excited about. So if you want to learn about more tools that we use or our clients use that will help you make your life in business more organized, more productive, more efficient, and ultimately allow you to save time, money, and energy to grow and scale your company.

I would love to hear from you. So feel free to send us an email if you have a suggestion of something you'd like us to talk about on the podcast. Again, I really appreciate your time today and I will be back next week with another episode of Make Space for More. Have a wonderful day, everyone. Bye-bye.