In this blog post I want to share our team’s experience of how we transformed our projects and tasks management from chaos to clarity.
Problem
There are many tools for project management which we tried within our own team or while working on projects together with clients or partners. That list of tools includes Google To-do lists, spreadsheets, Slack plugins, Trello and some other specialized tools. And all of them did not satisfy us. That’s why we created our own solution powered by flexible Notion databases.
We started using Notion quite a long time ago, exactly for the purpose of task management. We used tasks and projects databases to do it. I believe that even at that time our setup was better than many other approaches used by companies today. It had good features:
- A list of weekly tasks;
- A list of tasks you are the owner of;
- A list of tasks to be checked (you are the owner and the status is 'Check');
- A list and even a timeline of tasks for a project.
However we had no idea of how much volume of tasks everyone is assigned every week, or how much time it actually took to complete a particular task. So we were planning things blindly and were not measuring anything at all.
For all that time I had a feeling that we were just checking tasks and coming up with the new ones spontaneously during the meetings. The time frame was one or two weeks . Planning out entire projects was a struggle.
Solution
In October 2024 our team turned to full remote working style. Now, since we could not meet each other face-to-face every day, we really needed to come up with a system to plan tasks and projects effectively.
Step 1: Time tracking
I personally had a feeling that I was spending the whole day working, but if you asked me what I did, I couldn’t answer clearly. So I started to think that I was just busy, but not productive. The most important decision I made from this feeling was to start tracking my time.
In Notion I created a new database called “Time Logs”. It had a date field with start and end time, and a formula calculating the duration in hours of every working time slot I had. I would start my day with a short 15-minute slot called “Planning” to plan time slots out for the whole day. In the graphs at the bottom I could see the sum of all the hours planned for the day. Later on, I started to connect those time logs to tasks and projects and sum up the time spent on each.
During the day, as work was being done, I would switch a time log’s status from ‘not started’ to ‘in progress’ when hitting a planned time slot, and to ‘done’ when that time slot was over. Of course, the time schedule could be adjusted during the day if a task took a bit longer or shorter than expected.
By the end of the day I knew exactly how many hours I worked and what I spent time on. Planning the time ahead for the whole day also felt like magic because it gave clarity about what my day looked like and what I was going to work on. It was a clear easy-to-follow roadmap.
The best thing is that now, when I open a task or a project I worked on, I can clearly see how much time it took me to complete it. With that data as a reference I can plan new tasks and projects more accurately, assuming they will take around the same time as similiar ones I had completed before.
One more benefit of time tracking is that, since you want to be honest with yourself, you want to make sure a time log is not shared among different tasks. So you will be less likely to often shift between tasks, thus improving your focus. This means you will stop checking your phone while working or talking to someone, because that would mean lying to yourself — the time log would no longer be exclusively spent on a single task and your data will not be accurate.
For the first month I was doing time logging just for myself. My team was skeptical about its efficiency, so I ran it as a personal experiment. But after that month I asked everyone to try it as well, and it turned out they actually loved it! One of them even said “It's so addictive!”. It really feels amazing to visualize your work and see the results of adopting this new approach.
Step 2: Planning with Estimates
The next step for us was to figure out how to not only track each one's time, but also accurately plan work for the team.
We came up with adding an estimated time to complete for each task. So I would create a task “fix hero section” and add an estimate of 2 hours for that. Next the assignee will create time logs while working on those tasks and in the end we will see if the actual time spent was higher or lower than our estimate. By seeing that difference, we could adjust the estimate next time for a similar task.
It eventually grew up into a planning hub - a page in our Notion dedicated to planning out tasks for the whole team. It has a timeline of all of our projects visualizing our work in macro view. And a set of timelines for a micro view. There are task timelines for all items, with a grouping by project and by people. We now can identify blind spots in each team member’s schedule and fill it in with tasks.
On a graph we can see estimated working time for each team member for each week and the whole month. So we can balance our work making sure that people do enough tasks and they are distributed equally between team members and weeks in a month.
Step 3: Measuring Performance
Finally, we have setup a performance hub, which is a page where we analyze our time logs.
We can see time spent by each member. Overall team’s time spent on work or meetings, marketing, sales, development, or other functions. We see time spent by each team member each week in the past months and each day in the past 10 days.
This way if it happens so that some task is not finished on time, we could go and investigate why it happened so that there was not enough time to finish the task.
Results
Moving to our current setup for team management took almost a year of try and errors. And it still not ideal, but it already bring us recognizable results which I believe are worth sharing.
- We brought clarity to our work. With all work documented we now clearly see what we have been working on and for how long.
- We now better understand how much we can do in a week or a month and plan out the tasks accordingly. One recent example of when it was useful is this month. I planned out all of my client tasks for September and saw that I have little time left to work sales. It immediately triggered a decision to redistribute work within the team to free up my time for other tasks.
- I now can measure profitability of our client projects much better. It is clear how many hours we spent on delivering each project and what is our hourly rate. I can see which projects are brining good profits and which were underestimated in price.
What’s next
From now on we will continue to improve our system. I want to add more metrics which will help us to visualize the share of tasks with missed deadlines and percentage of how much was the difference between estimated and actually spent time on task.
For us this system has proved itself extremely useful as I showed in the results section on this blog post. We believe that this setup can bring same benefits to many teams so we decided to launch a service dedicated to helping companies to setup the same process as ours.
If you are not satisfied with how your team is managed today and want to bring more clarity to task planning and start measuring performance, check out our solution page and book a free consultation with us.
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