Chapter Three
Structuring Your Team’s Work

Building Block 3: Tasks

You are now a master of all things workflow and projects, which generally cover about 90% of the work that you and your team need to track. Now let’s break down the remaining 10% that most people don’t put enough thought into: personal tasks, task lists, and repositories.

Personal Tasks

Workflows and projects usually make up the bulk of the team’s work structure and house the majority of the work to be done. However, in addition to work that exists in various workflows and projects, each member of the team has personal tasks to get done as well. This is an important part of structuring your team’s work that typically gets overlooked.

When I say personal tasks, I’m not talking about things that need to get done at home, the grocery list, or weekend plans. I’m referring to solo tasks related to professional work. There are always tasks that fall outside of team deliverables. These are typically tasks for which team members are responsible but which don’t require collaboration. They’re personal.

My Tasks Board

If you were to audit your team or company today to find out how they manage their personal tasks, I imagine it would be quite eye-opening. Some people might even say that they just track them in their heads. For obvious reasons, that’s not good enough and will likely fail repeatedly due to human error.

It is essential from a team perspective to make sure people are managing their personal tasks in an effective way. All tasks, including personal tasks, should be tracked in Rindle.

Each team member should create a board called My Tasks, or Brian’s Tasks, or something along those lines. This will be their dedicated board for personal task management.

This board could contain a workflow like this:

Workflow Image
Figure 1: Personal To-do, Doing, Done Workflow

Or something more in-depth like our Baseline Workflow

Personal Baseline Workflow Image
Figure 2: Personal Baseline Workflow

Or it could be a list view like this:

Priority Based Workflow Image
Figure 3: Personal Priority Based Workflow

Creating a dedicated board in Rindle gives personal tasks a place to go. If the tasks don’t have a place to go, they are much more likely to be forgotten, with a slim chance of actually getting done.

Task Lists

There will be situations that don’t require complicated workflows or approval processes, and all you need is a simple task list. This applies when the tasks and work you’re managing are not moving, but you still need them to be properly tracked.

As we discussed in Chapter 1, boards are flexible. In addition to workflows and projects, boards can house task lists. Task lists are great for organizing things that may not require a workflow. Task lists can be used for things like:

  • Checklists
  • List-Based Projects (discussed in Chapter 3)
  • Personal Tasks Lists (discussed above in this chapter)

Checklists come in handy when you have simple tasks that you need to track for various applications. These are typically tasks that don’t require complicated workflows, multiple steps to complete, approvals, etc. Some examples include:

  • Office supplies order list
  • Onsite checklists (real-estate, interior design, etc.)
  • Start-of-week checklist
  • End-of-week checklist
  • Employee onboarding checklist

Checklists can also live within a task as subtasks. So for an office supplies order list, you may want to use a board with List View enabled, like this:

Breakpoint and Dropoffs Image
Figure 4: Office Supplies Checklist

However, for a start-of-week checklist, you may want to create a repeating task with subtasks that need to be completed, set to repeat every Monday at 9 a.m. It would look something like this:

Repeating Task Image
Figure 5: Repeating Task

Repositories

Being organized takes many guises. While managing workflows, projects, and tasks is important, sometimes you simply need a central place to store information that you need to reference when the need arises. We call these “repositories”, and they include things like:

  • Ideas (blog posts, product ideas)
  • Bookmarked websites
  • Employee manuals
  • Team resources

Instead of sending yourself an email, bookmarking a website, or sticking yet another sticky note on your monitor, you can add them to a repository board to stay organized.

On these boards, lists often represent buckets, or categories, instead of steps in a workflow, making it easy to sort and organize information. Tasks can be created for each item—with additional information in the task’s description—so that relevant links and attachments are all stored in each task.

Here are some examples:

Blog Post Ideas Workflow Image
Figure 6: Blog Post Ideas
Employee Manuals Workflow Image
Figure 7: Employee Manuals
Sales Workflow Image
Figure 8: Sales Team Resources

We have now covered everything you need to know about the three essential elements that make up the foundation of your team’s structure: workflow, projects, and tasks. You have also seen many examples of how a reliable software system like Rindle can take those elements and organize them in a way that is infinitely advantageous to the success of you and your team.

With that in mind, let’s dive in to the reigning king of workflow structure and talk about the Hub and Spoke Model.