Get Organized!

For as long as I can remember, I've kept track of things I need to do with paper lists or sticky notes. Although this suited me fine for many years, when I started working as a Tech Trainer and now an Instructional Tech Coordinator, I found my system to be inadequate, to put it kindly.

Now I am constantly on the go; I'm no longer tethered to a single room. I'm running from school to school to work with teachers, principals, and other administrators on a variety of projects. Not only did my to-do list/stickies not travel with me, the little scraps of paper that I jotted notes onto while away from my desk often got lost, or went through the wash in my back pocket. Not ideal. (Not to mention it's embarrassing for someone who is supposed to be a tech leader to keep track of tasks that way!!)

I then discovered the Tasks feature in Google.

Tasks lets you create a simple to-do list that's easily accessible through your Gmail and can therefore be added to and accessed from anywhere. You can also set due dates on tasks, which will then put them on your Google Calendar, which is great!

Even better, you can create a task from your email which will add a link in the task that takes you straight to that email so you can find it easily again later.

That worked much better for me, but I found I was still forgetting to do things and having trouble staying on top of what had to be done for a particular project vs. another. Enter GQueues!

I searched high and low for a solution that would allow me to organize my tasks into separate project lists, integrate with Google the way their Tasks do, and still be easy to use. Oh yes, and affordable please!

After almost giving up hope, I foung GQueues. GQueues not only integrates beautifully with my Gmail and Google Calendar, it lets me easily organize my tasks within projects, create subtasks, schedule recurring tasks, and tag tasks to keep me even more organized than I thought possible.

It also has a fantastic collaboration feature that allows you to share projects and their tasks with others as well as assign tasks to other people. It has a ton of features; I could go on and on.

What's great though, is that it's EASY TO USE! I don't have to deal with Gantt charts or other task management features that other solutions offer which are way beyond the scope of what I need.

Within a week of using it, I had my entire team signed up. Less than a month later, another department that had heard one of us rave about it approached me, signed up, and started using it too!

I created a short, one hour training for folks who are not at all tech savvy in an effort to help get them started. After that hour, they were off and running. Honestly, if they had played with it for 20 minutes, I think they would have figured out the basics on their own.

Best of all, many of the basic features are free to use. For the full set of features, it's just $25/year (less with a domain subscription). You can check out all the price details on their site.

Although I'm still guilty of using Post-its now and then, I have not dropped the ball on a single task since starting to use GQueues.



As a side benefit, I'm now a lot less stressed out. I hadn't realized how much anxiety it caused me to try to stay on top of everything without a good system!

If you've been looking for a great task management solution, you really should check out GQueues.

If you've got another system that you love, leave a comment below and tell us about it!