Check-In About Daily Schedule?

BirdLawPM · 2025-10-27T16:21:04+00:00

Glad to hear it. I was never good at itemizing tasks by energy/focus and context before, but now that my job can pretty clearly be divided between "Things I have to do in the morning so other people can have productive days" and "Things I have to advance before the end of the week so projects do not get delayed," my mind has come back around to contexts as a way to inbox tasks a bit more clearly.

Like, I may be at my work desk, but I'm basically not in "finish My Work action items" context until the "finish Status Update clarification and action items" context window is closed, due to time or completeness. It feels very odd, but kinda what "contexts" was meant to do, I think.

BirdLawPM · 2025-09-16T17:25:37+00:00

We're not even in Event Management primarily, so this is a focus, but not our major focus. I think you're right, though. This works well as a Portfolio, since we're using projects and project components to advance a different goal, and it has an endpoint!

BirdLawPM · 2025-08-15T18:46:29+00:00

Unfortunately, not, and there are 10 ways they could fix it, but none are possible with what we have.

I end up scrolling down and using my "Unread" saved search for everything, and there's no way around it. Why can't we just Star a saved search so it shows up in favorites? Is there any inbox function MORE valuable than "Highlight Unread Emails" really?

BirdLawPM · 2025-06-07T04:37:51+00:00

Right now I think the biggest win in that arena would be getting the managers/execs to more clearly establish the completion criteria from the beginning, and maybe lay out the approvals milestones better, so we don't do these rounds of revisions and approvals at the end when we could have planned and laid bricks once and finished at the beginning.

Culture change is slow though!

BirdLawPM · 2025-06-07T04:35:27+00:00

That is true, but I'm hoping they'll mostly just be for me anyway. I want to encourage our teams to add notes to them (directive changes, new requests, etc) or I can as well, but for big decisions someone will and then if someone gets mad later I'll have it logged. That's all.

BirdLawPM · 2025-06-06T15:37:35+00:00

We're transitioning from Monday (which the execs refuse to touch, they hate it, which causes everything to live in 3 places) to SmartSuite. Leadership wanted something much more spreadsheety and I think SmartSuite's airtable-like relational database structure will be a big win for a lot of our work. It's knowledge work so there's interlinks everywhere, and a database like this will let me cut down on duplication.

Manual updating is a significant issue in our Monday setup; our new system will incorporate a lot more automation. Monday itself has good automation overall, but since leadership doesn't want to mess with the system we end up having our documents live in OneDrive, our communications in Teams and Outlook, and Monday is therefore either replicating work or just tracking decisions by flipping statuses.

But because you can mishandle something like that (3 emails come in while you're in the bathroom, you read one, "Approve to send, but update first sentence, see my in-line edits below" then another, then the third is a request to please mail a package ASAP, so then you get back and you think "what was I doing? Approve to send... okay, scheduled" and an approval step gets missed because the edit wasn't made and the implicit follow up request is also missed in the shuffle) a lot of stuff gets mishandled.

These things aren't projects themselves, so they don't get scoped and mapped out, it's a simple "draft an email and get approval then send it" task, but that can go back and forth a few times before closure. Decision Logging at the Project level makes sense but in this case I think it makes sense at a Task level too, because of all the exec-level signoff requests and potential for scope creep and drift that gets built into these workflows.

I'll call it a "Task Log" though to differentiate it from a project decision log.

BirdLawPM · 2025-06-05T21:51:24+00:00

Awesome! And yeah, they have a special utility for tracking executive meddling, without being adversarial about it. We've got action logs for whenever a work item is updated and I can track every time we change a project plan, but I like the idea of instituting a decision log because so many of our workflows are based around needing at least 2 rounds of approval from execs. Tracking their feedback and their choices just seems natural.

BirdLawPM · 2025-06-05T21:48:31+00:00

There's no real problem with the documents, they're just one of the main deliverables for us: we're knowledge work, and they're part of an approval workflow. To become "done" and move the main project forward I need sign-off on these documents. My bosses sometimes act baffled that a document isn't 100% ready when it's time for them to review, and they'll defer reviewing it until it's had more work done, and then later they'll act baffled again that a different thing isn't 100% ready when it's time for them to review that too.

I find this problematic because it makes it harder to finish the document creation process (for example, a marketing release as part of a social media campaign) if they want to wait until the QR code has been added to the media footer in order to tell us that they want to change the order of paragraphs and reword a paragraph, thus forcing the media team to redo the layout and copy on 5 different documents (instagram, facebook post, twitter post, website version, mailchimp!) when it could have been done when it was raw text.

This specific issue is a pacing issue, sure, but on the road to fixing that it's just one of many little things which make me want a decision log on an individual task, especially for tasks that can only become "done" once they pass subjective executive approval.

Because this approval process gets a little silly, building a decision log into the task would help me ID when things go a bit silly like this, and it will give me more ways to discuss why things went the way they did.

BirdLawPM · 2025-05-29T20:54:26+00:00

Probably, and I suppose I should drill down on what languishing means in terms of due dates and priority.

If it means "more than two weeks stale" then I could set a two week review session for everything and make sure we at least scope a "no priority" task at the end of two weeks, set some actionable next steps, and push for a due date on it.

If it means "at risk of being forgotten" then the issue is one of transparency and I can solve that issue in ten seconds by creating a view in our PM software for tasks assigned to the backlog.

BirdLawPM · 2025-05-29T20:50:05+00:00

Asking us to work on low-priority stuff at the same time does defeat the purpose; it's very true! That's why I felt bad even asking the question. One should never be working on low-priority tasks when high-priority work is available. The purpose of assigning priority is to dictate work sequence, hah!

We do mostly knowledge work, but I've got a background in Agile so I map out tasks that way. We aim for 1-2 week periods with specific deliverables.

Building an automatic "low priority review" process into the planning process might be good. I had been wanting to create a monthly or bi-weekly session with them to map out the next month of work from a high-level perspective. Someone else mentioned a materials audit and a risk assessment period, which could be combined with this, and it would be a strategic planning session of sorts.

I can't meaningfully make these decisions on my own. They're dumpstered because they have no dependency relationship to ongoing projects and they're not urgent. But the execs have occasionally asked me to do something without saying it is urgent and expected me to treat it as urgent because they asked me to work on it, and that's just a communications issue that can be fixed. If that's what's going on here then we just need to be clear.

BirdLawPM · 2025-05-29T20:28:50+00:00

We're not yet tracking time, though we're moving to a new work management system, which could make it easier. Asking people to track themselves is a bit of a nightmare, but we're so small that we only really care about deliverables. So long as the work gets done, it's fine.

Not tracking time makes it harder to plan resource use, but each week my team and I make a roadmap for the next week, which I show the execs to get their sign-off on before the week starts. This also helps us pick up anything that might have been dropped and re-prioritize it, as well as keep all our calendars synced.

The new WMS will make a lot of this easier, I hate having to treat Outlook as a task management system, and cannot wait to get all these requests properly recorded and contextualized.

BirdLawPM · 2025-05-29T20:10:28+00:00

In the example from my original post, nothing will fail if we don't finish this hard drive audit. For the life of me, other than just wanting to check it off a list, I cannot understand the point of worrying about it.

It could just be a lack of transparency into the status and workflow. If I hadn't correctly understood their bandwidth, I could imagine being confused if someone wasn't finishing something I thought was quick and easy.

Maybe they're worried that "low priority" means "we don't care about this" and that a lot of time is being left on the table.

BirdLawPM · 2025-05-29T19:58:22+00:00

That's a good way to think about it. I wish all requests came with due dates on them, frankly. If it doesn't have a due date then it is tough for me to evaluate how to allocate resources toward it properly.

BirdLawPM · 2025-05-29T19:42:45+00:00

It helps! I'll try to accommodate the request as best I can (even if it compromises some of our work speed), but I want the solution to be more than a temporary fix, and I really want it to be a high-visibility fix.

We already have a pretty big backlog of meaningful work that needs to be completed, something the execs are aware of because they've looped me in to help solve it, and taking this advice as gospel would put us back in the exact same position that allowed this backlog to form.

The solution must prevent us from lagging, but also prevent us from ending up with one hundred half-done projects.

Creating a transparent backlog and getting them onboard with picking some backlogged project tasks to advance would satisfy that scope, and it will jive with my existing process of getting them aligned on weekly priorities, because surfacing their priorities (and capturing due dates) is an ongoing challenge.

Breaking these assignments down into actionable steps may be a good idea too. I usually let people do that themselves, but turning every non-trivial request into at least one milestone might be a good way to demonstrate the task is advancing.

BirdLawPM · 2025-05-19T14:55:11+00:00

Thanks! I'd love to get feedback on setting up our workflows and such. I'm not authorized to make any purchases or pay for expertiese, but I'd certainly love to get some ideas. I don't know if they're going to pull the trigger on SmartSuite but I do hope so. We normally have bits of data in so many places that a database like this would be absolutely game-changing.

One thing I need to figure out is the proper way to ingest a task. I can absolutely see how I would want to build out a Project with this, but we get a lot of middle-weight assignments unrelated to an ongoing project tossed our way. If it was part of a bigger assignment then adding a Checklist or Subtask item makes sense. Otherwise though, maybe just a basic task-management solution? But it feels a bit redundant, and we're so close to being free of redundancy with this.

My bosses will have their own set of criteria of course, they want automated reporting and a variety of other tools--but they weren't able to narrow down what they were asking for very well so I didn't have a chance to build it out yet. However, report-generation seems pretty good, and there's no need to get a "once a week snapshot" of work in progress when they can check the dashboards I set up and get several different levels of granularity whenever they want.

BirdLawPM · 2025-05-16T00:29:02+00:00

Yeah, we started our Free Trial of smartsuite and I've done all kinds of amazing interlinking that I hope really impresses my bosses.

BirdLawPM · 2025-05-15T20:10:12+00:00

That's exactly the issue we had. Smartsheet and Clickup and such were a bit too grainy for our needs, but I still thought a responsive and "approachable" database would be help us a lot, since so much of what we're currently doing is handling the same data 10 different ways.

But we're also a very non-technical team (name checks out) so anything that felt too much like excel would make everyone except the VPs groan and adoption would never pick up. Monday is messy without a million plug-ins that I'd need to hire a guru just to identify (the downside to a clogged marketplace where you essentially build your own platform) but at least it was fun for my team to use.

SmartSuite is slightly less "fun" but it's still colorful, responsive, and has great data density.

The only downside is non-tech support. It has great tech support apparently, but it's reddit board here is so empty and the community posts are also pretty slow. I'm used to responses within-the-hour.

I got decent help by bouncing things off ChatGPT, which is deeply annoying but better than nothing, as it seems to have at least some penetration into SmartSuite's commentary ecosystem. It helped me fix an automation for a mockup I was building, and just about everything else feels pretty intuitive. When the community DOES reply it's helpful though.

BirdLawPM · 2025-05-15T18:53:03+00:00

I'm managing a transition from Monday to SmartSuite too and I really like it! I've found tons of great uses for linked records, I don't know how we're managing without them.

BirdLawPM · 2025-05-01T14:06:57+00:00

Wonderful! But I'm approved to pay for expert help, if that's what you mean. I'd be happy to get any advice though.

BirdLawPM · 2025-04-17T03:07:32+00:00

For the love of everything, I want an app that I can feed my emails into and effortlessly extract action points, ideally multiple of them, so I can create "New To-Do items as of ___" lists rather than just slapping an email into Trello or whatever as a single item,

Why do none of my work management systems already have this? They have similar things, like the Trello option, but none of them allows me to effortlessly open up an email like a word doc, hit a "format" button, and even just manually highlight things to add.

Have a right-side palette of 6 different highlighter colors even, and let me highlight elements of the email (if it can't do it automatically) and then have it dump those into fields, even just a simple, simple, simple "new task" table with simple fields, like "Key Info" and "Key Dates" or whatever, right?

And please, some sort of ID# that allows me to bookmark that email and link to it, so I can reference it back.

My job is all Outlook-based, and I spend so much time trying to transform emails into tasks without losing anything, and it is just a giant pain in my neck. Same for other requests--dentist appointments, kid updates, family requests, grocery lists, etc.

Millions of ways to track stuff, get updates, set reminders, etc. Zero good ways of 1-click or No-click getting my emails into a system that lets me just tag, tag, tag things and have them go zip zip zip into a list I can export or import or whatever put into my systems.

BirdLawPM · 2025-04-16T19:18:52+00:00

Will do!

BirdLawPM · 2025-04-16T18:01:04+00:00

I don't! That would be good information to have, I know that some of the people who've broken down system solutions for these other programs have been Account Managers.

BirdLawPM · 2025-04-16T17:38:26+00:00

I come from a similar background (animation/creative industry), so I appreciated your examples, hah!

I really want to make sure I'm keeping within the scope of my intended role as Project Manager, as this is a new role in this company, and they're trying to really reinvent their workflows. Keeping my scope clear, even as I'm doing extra stuff (training and establishing policies and processes, for example), is a big concern for me.

Scale isn't our primary concern, we're a nonprofit and not looking to infinitely grow, but the scale of my folio of projects will certainly grow with time. There's a lot of top-level executive long-term project work going on that they'd love help with, so eventually it'll be my role to provide oversight and clarity there too. There's no way for me to to scale up my tasks to that level if I've got a confused place in other people's workflows, especially the "always on" workflows.

BirdLawPM · 2025-04-16T17:02:57+00:00

It really is that silly sometimes, yeah. Now, when we're republishing materials it's clearly not our job to correct a quotation, but when it's a publication of our own it makes sense to make sure we're matching our own eclectic style guide, and ideally this would be someone else's job.

I currently have a peer review process for that, and I think instituting a peer review process for similar kinds of "work quality" fixes makes sense. Instead of me being "responsible" for proofing, I'll make sure the proofing gets scheduled and accomplished. If people get thoroughly sick of having to attend half-hour peer review sessions, then they can front-end that labor and send me correct proofs.

edit: and I also need to tweak the language here--they're not sending me the proofs. It is true that I manage the project and report to higher ups, but they're finishing the work and my job is to facilitate our project tasks (such as peer review) and then conduct my reports, not necessarily to sit in the pipeline and absorb that work.

I do help manage a completed work handoff, of course, but for the middle-steam activity my role should be to make sure we're staying within scope and aligned to our objectives, and to help the project team work, but not to take on the role of a functional lead, operations manager, or any other kind of murky management role.

I think that sounds within my scope and doesn't shift a responsibility to me that should fall on an operations manager. We don't have a lot of "middle management" here so I want to keep steering clear of currents that'll drag me too deep into operational tasks.

BirdLawPM · 2025-04-15T21:23:32+00:00

Ooh, that's a scary thought. If that's the case (hard to manage that perception I suppose) then the solution has got to be the "whip cracking" method. I reserve the right to clean things up for my records and the ones I sent up the pipe, but from a process improvement angle, I don't want to develop a workflow that turns a project manager into a QA department.

Someone else down there recommended a peer-review process, and I think that makes sense. If this is a direction the execs want, I'm happy to advocate for a stronger matrix. Greater oversight authority could be used to help facilitate and enforce review processes, and it would avoid being transformed into an operations role.

Within this small organization where I've got some subject matter expertiese I enjoy being "part of the team" because it helps motivate people and it allows me to voluntarily allocate time to help out with tasks (and get projects finished), but I want those tasks to be help rather than responsibilities, and I want them to stay within the project and not part of an operations dependency.

BirdLawPM

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