Increase Your Productivity With Task Tracker – Template Included

If you’re the type of person who has created more to-do lists than you’d care to admit, you know your current methods of managing your to-dos and task aren’t working to increase your productivity and efficiency at work. Maybe your projects are overloaded with more things than a simple to-do list can manage. Creating a routine with your work is the key to taking the next step with your productivity. It may seem that productivity and routines simply aren’t conducive to creative work, but they are perfect together.

When your work is well organized, you can spend your time and energy accomplishing something instead of keeping track of what you need to do. For example, if you make multiple to-do lists but never really organize the tasks correctly, you’ll end up overwhelmed without getting anything done.

It’s time for a true task tracker.

What a Task Tracker is, and How it’s Different Than a To Do List

A task tracker is a single place where your team can organize and prioritize tasks for everything you need to get done while collecting all required resources, files, comments, and more. It’s not enough just to know what to do, but you need to know when it’s due and what’s required to accomplish it.

When teams start collecting their tasks together, it’s essential to contain all important files, links, and comments in a single location that can be tracked.

How to Create a Task Tracker

There are multiple ways to create a task tracker. You can use a simple online note that lets you track task assignments, add images/PDFs, make comments, and track progress. Countless project management systems can expand on these features as well.

It’s important for teams not to overcomplicate their task tracker. The best task tracker is one that you’ll use and keep up to date. An ideal task tracker would be tightly integrated with email for adding files, making updates, and reading comments. An overly complex task tracker will consume all of your time and energy without completing your goals. When teams have to work to use their system, they’ll become frustrated. An ideal system tells you what needs your attention with what resources.

How a Task Tracker Contributes to Productivity

The human brain is excellent at completing tasks, but they’re not designed to remember what you need to do. When you use your brain to keep track of your tasks, you’ll have less brainpower to keep your projects moving forward. In computer terms, most people store their tasks in their RAM when they should be using their hard drive space. Your RAM is where you are creative and become a problem solver.

When you have a proper task tracker for your team, you’ll spend less time and energy keeping track of your projects and spending more time and energy on the project’s tasks. Because technology can automate actions that used to be manual, our time and energy can be spent with tasks that are best suited for the things only humans can do.

Create a Task Tracker Using Spike or Our Task Template

Spike is a complete digital workspace for individuals and teams that can track all of your tasks and essential files, providing a collaboration space that works well for both in-office teams and remote employees. Spike starts by organizing your email into Priority and non-priority items. We all get more emails than we’d like. Email is used for newsletters, receipts, project updates, and critical alerts, so Spike helps bring the important emails front and center while keeping the less important ones away from your primary inbox, while still making them easily accessible in the future.

Next, Spike adds a unified calendar so you can stop checking multiple calendars for your personal and work appointments. Spike handles the merging of all of your calendars into a single location with an app that can sync with multiple calendars simultaneously. You can easily combine your Gmail, Google Workspace, or Microsoft 365 calendars into a single list.

Spike Groups is the ace up your sleeve for tracking your tasks. Spike Groups is to email what group messages are to texting. It’s a way to loop everyone on your team into an easy-to-follow thread that works as an email but feels like a group chat. You can easily see what information has been shared and how it relates to the rest of the conversation by scrolling through messages (emails) like a group chat. With Spike Groups, you can easily access ALL files, images, docs, etc. in the Group Chat’s info box on the side. What’s even better is that attachments no longer pile up and get lost in the thread history. Files, images, and more can be uploaded from your computer or directly from numerous cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.

Spike then adds a task tracker to your inbox. You can create everything from complex tasks to simple to-do lists in seconds. You can quickly know who is working on what, view update history, and get live status updates with real-time alerts without ever leaving your email app. Don’t let your team waste their time jumping between their email apps and different project or task management tools. Spike enables you to manage your workflow from right where you are at – your Inbox. As we mentioned at the beginning of this guide, one of the keys to a task tracker is to keep it simple. When a system becomes overly complex, they end up not being used.

Your Inbox is where everything in your digital life can live, and you can have a clear understanding of what is demanding your attention at any given time. Using multiple applications for email and tasks will not provide you a clear picture of your day, what’s demanding your attention, and understanding what needs to be done. By having a single view into all of your incoming communications, tasks, and updated documents for review, Spike becomes a virtual assistant that becomes the perfect task tracker for individuals and teams.

You can also download our free task tracker template if you want a simple place to get started.

For more information on managing your tasks and other productivity tips & tricks, visit the Spike blog or let us know how you do it at @SpikeNowHQ.