Like many other businesses, effective project management is essential if you want to keep the doors open. There are a massive amount of tools that you can use to make this happen, but today I want to focus on Evernote. I don’t think this application gets nearly the amount of praise that it deserves. It can be used to help bring order to both your business and personal life; you just have to be creative in how you set it up.
One of the biggest selling factors for our team is that with Evernote, everything can be executed without having to use any additional applications. It is “as cliche as this may sound”, a one stop shop for collaborating with a team and/or clients.
Keep reading to see how you can use Evernote to manage projects of all sizes from start to finish. I’ll also throw in some examples of how we use it here at Apex Virtual Solutions.
Notebooks
Notebooks can be used for sorting multiple projects or organizing a large project. Some examples include:
- To sort projects by stage, e.g. Current Projects, Past Due Projects, Completed Projects
- To organize large projects into categories, e.g. A website design project may have the following notebooks: Competitors, Content, Images, Keyword Research, etc.
Reminders
Reminders are pretty self-explanatory. You can set reminders to alert you of upcoming task due dates. I continue to use website design in this article because it’s a service that we offer. There are a lot of tasks that have to be completed in order to produce a great website. Setting a reminder will help everyone stay on task to avoid project delays and potential loss in earnings.
Real Time Chat
There is a feature called Work Chat that allows you to communicate in real time. This is a great time saver and it’s less distracting because you don’t have to leave the application to communicate with your team. Work Chat makes it easy to ensure that everyone is on the same page no matter where you’re located geographically.
Lists
Checklists are a great way to keep track of what needs to be done and who is responsible for completing each item. For example, for a new website design project a few things on our list would be:
- Website strategy session with client
- Emailing client the website design questionnaire
- Collecting and sorting images for website
Team Check-Ins
While Evernote doesn’t have a time tracking feature, it does give you some options for keeping track of who’s doing what.
- You can track the progress of your team by looking at the activity stream.
- Hashtags allow you to quickly see who’s working on what.
- You can review note changes by looking at each note’s history.
I’m sure Evernote isn’t an ideal fit for everyone, as I said at the beginning of this article, there are a lot of tools out there. The best way to choose a project management tool is to create of list of needs and wants. It may be difficult or even impossible to find a tool that has every single thing you want, but having a list of things that are mandatory will make your search easier. I hope this article has been helpful, check back in for my thoughts on other small business tools. If you have some tips or questions, please don’t hesitate in connecting with me using the comment box below.