Having too many tasks on your plate can be debilitating. Even the best of us find ourselves crippled into inaction by our workload every now and then.

With a staggeringly long to-do list staring you in the face, it’s difficult to know where to get started. This problem is acerbated when you’re responsible for a team. Your inaction can have a domino effect, attenuating all-round productivity.

Orgzit work load management
Having too many tasks on your plate can be debilitating

The key lies in reorganizing your to-do list and prioritizing effectively. And achieving this can be easier than you might think. Here’s how you can go about managing your tasks effortlessly:

Make Exhaustive Lists

Making lists can be therapeutic. It’s important to put down every task so that you have at least one less thing to worry about, that is, remembering everything on your to-do list. Orgzit apps are lists that help you store, organize, and manage your data. The Orgzit library app “Task Management” is a useful starting point to begin managing your tasks, and is a great place to create, manage, and collaborate on an elaborate task list.

You can use Orgzit to manage your own tasks or your entire team’s tasks, so that everyone’s on the same page about what needs to get done.

Orgzit Work Items app
Manage all your tasks with Orgzit’s Task Management app

As you go about creating your task list, keep these simple Orgzit hacks in mind:

Assign Task IDs

When you create a task list, it’s good practice to assign an ID to each task. This makes referencing easy, and you don’t need to spell out the task each time you are communicating about it with a team member.

In Orgzit’s Task Management app, task IDs are unique, un-editable, and auto-generated. As a result, there’s absolutely no chance of overlap or repetition.

Categorize Your Tasks

So you’ve noted down all your tasks and given them IDs. The next step is to organize your tasks on the basis of priority. Use a decision matrix such as Eisenhower’s Decision Principle, popularized by Stephen Covey as the Time Management Matrix in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Covey's matrix for Task Management
Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix

Each task can be grouped under one of the quadrants in the Covey matrix. Once all tasks are categorized, you can start working on them in order of importance and urgency.

– Tasks that fall under Quadrant 1 are both urgent and important, and should be your first priority. These are your most pressing, high-value tasks, and ignoring them is likely to lead to a crisis situation.

– The tasks that lie between Quadrants 1 and 4 should either be placed second in line of priority or delegated to other team members.

– Tasks that fall under Quadrant 4 are neither important nor urgent, and belong at the bottom of your priority list. These are your most low-value tasks, and can easily be put off for later.

In Orgzit’s Task Management app, you can categorize all your tasks as per the Covey matrix. The app also allows you to monitor tasks and check their status at a glance. Tasks can be “In progress”, “In review”, “Completed”, or “Blocked”. If you like, you can also include other status values, such as “Not going to do” or “Postponed”.


Lighten your workload with effective delegation. While planning tasks, keep in mind the knowledge, attitude, and skills of every individual in your team, and consider their existing workload. Communicate tasks to each team member clearly, so that they know exactly what to deliver.

Orgzit lets you assign and communicate tasks to any team member from one screen. Each time you assign a task to a particular name, the team member is notified automatically through an email as well as a mobile push notification.

Fix deadlines

It is absolutely essential that your team members know how much time is available to complete each task. It is also a good practice to log actual completion dates of tasks so that you know which team members or tasks are falling behind.

The Orgzit Task Management app captures due dates as well as completion dates. It’s a good idea to set up the app so that you, and only you, can enter or change due date values for your team’s tasks. Completion dates, on the other hand, should be automated. It’s smart to set up finish dates so that they get populated automatically only when a team member marks a task as complete. This eliminates the chance of anyone going into the task list and altering dates manually.

Filter and prioritize

Now that you’ve got all your task-related data organized, it’s time to start filtering it to get to the tasks that are important to you.

In Orgzit, you can filter data absolutely any way you like. You can even apply a combination of filters and save it for later, so you don’t have to re-create it each team you visit. It’s logical to filter tasks by due dates to see which deadlines are creeping up on you and need to be prioritized.

Pro tip: If you’re using the Covey matrix, another way to prioritize is to filter tasks by Quadrant, and know at a glance which tasks need immediate attention.

It’s also good to go one step further and apply multiple filters to derive vital information from your task list. One example is to filter assignee names as well as task statuses to see how each team member is coping with his or her workload.

Remember, when you filter data in Orgzit, it doesn’t affect how other team members view the same data at the same time from their individual Orgzit accounts. So your team members will still be able to view the entire task list and apply filters of their own.

Visualize Your To-Do List

When doing task management, it’s easy to get lost in the details. Looking at your task list diagrammatically helps you zoom out and gain perspective. There’s a also a certain amount of aesthetic pleasure to be derived from looking at your data graphically.

Orgzit’s graphs and charts let you look at all your tasks from the macro level and plan better. The Task Management app comes with a bunch of pre-built reports, or charts, that you can generate at the click of a button.

Orgzit Work Items reports part 1
Orgzit reports: “Number of Work items by Status” and “Number of Work Items due Next Week”
Orgzit Work Items report 2
Orgzit Reports: “Work items by Owner and Type” and “Number of Work Items per Owner”

You can also generate your own customized reports to get perspective on the task list in a manner that is relevant to you.

Communicate and Collaborate

Unless you’re working in a silo, it’s impossible to manage tasks productively without proper communication. Task-related communication includes articulating task goals, setting expectations and finish dates, discussing processes, and collaborating.

However, communication can often become a task itself. A lot of time is squandered away sifting through and drafting emails or trying to get a hold of someone on the phone.

Orgzit solves the problem by letting you store all communication and files relevant to a particular task in one place – right inside your Orgzit task list.

Orgzit task management commenting
Tag team members and enter task-relevant comments

You can add relevant comments or sub-tasks for each task in your Orgzit task list itself. This way, team members don’t need to hunt for task-related information in their inboxes. You can even tag team members in your comments so that they are notified as soon as they’ve been mentioned.

Each task has a files section, where you can upload pertinent images, presentations, or other documents that may help your team member complete a task.

Let’s say, for example, that the task is to plan an office party. You can use the files section to upload a shopping list, invitee list, party budget spreadsheet etc.

Orgzit also lets you automate certain types of communication. You can set up your task list so that when specific changes are made to it, mobile push notifications and emails are automatically sent off to concerned team members.

Orgzit is completely customizable, and can help you manage your personal or team’s tasks from start to finish. If you’d like to get your task management processes organized with Orgzit, call us anytime on +91-9871123583 or on Skype (nitinv8). We’d love to give you a personalized demo to show you how even the lengthiest of To-Do lists can be managed effortlessly with Orgzit.