What to Consider When Adopting a Task Management Tool

If you're working on a project as a team, chances are you're using some kind of task management tool.

The approach to task management might be a web service like Trello or ClickUp, or it might be sticky notes on a wall.

But whatever tool you use for task management, and whatever the project or development methodology, I think individual tasks tend to share a common set of basic information they should carry. How to manage that information well is more of a know-how question about how to use the tool, so I won't go too deep into that here.

Why manage tasks at all

There should be a benefit to managing tasks — if all it does is cost extra time using the tool with no upside, there's no reason to use it in the first place.

Task management can offer benefits like the following, for example:

• Making the division of tasks clear
• Building a plan based on the tasks
• Visualizing task progress
• Managing tasks that need to be handled in the future

Listing out each benefit individually is honestly a bit hard to grasp, but broadly speaking, managing task-related information makes it easier for a project or team to "understand the current state," "look back on the past," and "plan for the future."

1. Understanding the current state

Task management lets you visualize who is currently doing what — or not doing what — and what's finished versus what isn't.

If tasks carry information like priority, estimates, or deadlines, you can also judge whether things are progressing as expected or falling behind.

2. Looking back on the past

Task management makes it easier to look back and see whether tasks were handled well.

If tasks were cleared as planned, you might conclude that the estimates and division of work were appropriate. On the other hand, if things didn't go according to plan, you can examine why and feed the lessons learned back in to refine future planning.

3. Planning for the future

Task management makes it easier to plan what to do next.

If tasks have priority and estimates, you can plan which task to tackle next and how to assign resources.

Regardless of whether the time frame is short or long, the flow of building a plan based on tasks, keeping track of the current state as it progresses, and looking back once it's done is probably followed by more or less every project.

Information a task should carry

Now that we've looked at the role task management plays, I thought about what information each individual task should carry to support that role. This isn't aimed at any particular project management methodology — I've tried to summarize it as a general-purpose way of thinking.

1. Purpose / background

When creating a task like "do X," I think it should, wherever possible, also carry information about why you're doing it.

As the number of tasks grows, you start running into cases of "wait, what was this for again?" If you only write down "what to do," you risk losing sight of important context.

There's no need to write an elaborate description — a chat log or a link to a related document works just fine.

2. Definition of done

What does "done" mean? Something like a list of objectively verifiable items, such as "finish X" or "get X into a state that satisfies Y."

Some "do X" tasks have a definition of done that's clear on their own, while others don't. If your tool supports it, managing subtasks or a to-do list under a task clarifies what needs to happen for the task to be considered complete.

3. Assignee / reviewer

Who — or which team — is responsible for a task is something that should already be decided. It might be one person or several, but a task no one is assigned to is hard to consider "in progress," no matter how specific the other information is.

Also, related to point 2 (definition of done), if your tool lets you set a reviewer for the task, it's a good idea to do so.

4. Priority

Tasks will have varying levels of priority — some are top priority, others don't need to be handled right away. Generally, you'd plan by working through the high-priority items in order.

But priority can shift depending on circumstances, and a high-priority task might get inserted partway through a plan. Either way, having priorities organized makes it easier for the team to feel confident about decisions like what to do next and why a given task is being worked on right now.

5. Estimate / deadline

Once you've decided to move forward with a task, a deadline is probably roughly set at that point — depending on how the project is run, it might be some other kind of estimate rather than a strict deadline. Also, when a task is broken down into subtasks, you can set more detailed deadlines within those.

Either way, once you've decided to do something, there shouldn't be a situation where you can spend unlimited time on it. Having a deadline or other estimate information gives you a useful benchmark when looking back later.

6. Dependencies

Some tasks can't start until another task is finished, or otherwise have some kind of dependency on the state of other tasks.

If there are tasks with similar priority, and finishing one of them would unblock the others, that makes it easier to decide to prioritize that one.

Dependencies are often self-evident, but in ClickUp we try to set them explicitly wherever possible using Task Dependencies.

Who's responsible for managing this information, and when it gets updated, will depend on the project, but I've tried to summarize the items that are more or less common across any project.

Of course, what matters most will differ depending on team size and relationships, so I think it's important to keep thinking about what your particular project needs while using a task management tool.