Have you ever done a group project where everything was disorganized and no one was on the same page? It’s a bit hard to keep your sanity, isn’t it? When working with groups (big or small) and organizations, one of the best things you can do to make things easier and to keep everything organized is to find an effective project management solution like Taskworld. There are many project management tools on the market, but not everyone has the same needs or preferences. So, if you like to do a trial and error before choosing the perfect solution, Taskworld should be at the top of your list of tools to try. Here’s a look at what this advanced project manager has to offer.
Setting Up an Account
Just at first glance, I was already happy to see that I could use my Google account (via Google sign-in) to sign up. You can use your email if you prefer, but personally, I don’t need yet another login.
You can also choose your preferred language after sign up which is great if you speak Thai, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, or Japanese. It’s nice to see that they have support for such a variety of languages.
Up and Running with Taskworld
Taskworld realizes that not everyone likes to figure things out on their own, so they’ve added a really handy tutorial to get you started. Of course, you can skip it if you’d like, but it only takes a couple minutes and is worth following along with.
There’s a Sample Project for you to play around with before you create one of your own. Inside you’ll find “Tasklists” and sample Tasks. This can all be deleted but is very beneficial to beginners.
The tutorial really gives you a good feel of how everything works and just how organized you can get your team. Upon completion, I was pretty eager to get started.
Creating New Projects
After learning the ropes, you can get started by creating new Projects and adding Tasklists and Tasks to them. Doing this is very easy since there’s a “New Project” button at the top right of the site.
I love that you get complete control over the privacy of your Projects. You can choose to have them Public (available to your entire workspace) or Private (available to the members that you specify).
One of my favorite features is Project templates. You can choose one for each Project that you create. Along with doing things your own way using the “Blank” template, you can also choose:
Weekday template – Gives you a Tasklist for each day of the week Single Team template – Gives each team member their very own Tasklist Departments template – Gives each department their own Tasklist (ie. Sales, Design, Finance) Kanban template – Gives you a To Do, Doing, and Done Tasklist (my personal favorite)
Creating and Managing Tasks
Adding Tasks to your Tasklist and managing them is just as easy as creating Projects. The “+” is in the perfect location (next to each Tasklist title) so that you can quickly add new Tasks as needed.
What’s also great is that those Tasklist titles are not set in stone. You can rename them to something better fitting or more motivating.
When it comes to Tags, there are already premade ones that you can choose from. You can also add your own.
What’s also really convenient is that you can search through your tags using the search bar. There’s no need to scroll through a list to find the one(s) you need.
I was pleasantly surprised by the additional options that popped up when clicking on a current Task. Being able to change the label color is really important for me since I like to use colors to represent urgency and importance. The checklist feature is also sure to come in handy, especially for shopping lists and supplies needed for a project.
Something that Taskworld also does very well is incorporate conversations within tasks. They’ve actually created their own chat system instead of integrating another tool. Clicking on “Comments” allows you to leave a comment and even add some basic formatting. Likewise, everyone else who can see that task can also add comments. It definitely helps to free up your email Inbox.
You can also send private messages to your team members by clicking on their “Chat Head” in the left panel; up to five team members can be pinned here for easy access. Again, it cuts down on emails and is an extremely effective method of communicating with team members.
Since I often like to attach images and links to tasks, I’m happy to have the “Files & Links” section to do so.
Best of all, you can upload files them from your computer or add them from the Cloud (Box, Dropbox, Google Drive). Most people use, at least, one of those services.
Other Features
One of the coolest features of Taskworld is the horizontally scrolling Timeline feature for Projects; it’s currently in Beta. It allows you to get a different view of your Tasks; you can see everything at a glance. There’s a Legend that explains what everything means so that you don’t feel like you’re just looking at a bunch of shapes and colors.
I haven’t seen this with any other similar tools I’ve used. I also want to point out that this is in addition to the Calendar view (also available) which contains Tasks for all of your Projects. You get a Timeline for each Project. I find it easier to see everything at a glance here.
One of the most invaluable features for each Project is Analytics. It allows you to see who’s doing what, who’s slacking, and how much time is productive vs. unproductive. There’s even a “Burn Up” chart that compares the scope of a project to the total work done to help measure your team’s velocity.
It’s also nice to know that you do not need to have a Project in order to add tasks for yourself. With “Direct Tasks” you can add tasks to your personal Inbox. These aren’t associated with any Projects and are for your eyes only.
This is great for personal and household things – especially since you can have repeating tasks.
Final Thoughts
If you’re familiar with Trello, you’ll notice that Taskworld is set up and works very similarly. As a matter of fact, Taskworld even has a comparison page that will show you all the features they have to offer that Trello doesn’t. You can even import your tasks from Trello to Taskworld in just one step (upload your Trello JSON file, and you’re done). As someone who has used both Trello and Taskworld, I can definitely agree that there are way more features here. A few other similar tools are Asana, MeisterTask, and Teamwork. I’ve tried them all but am most impressed with Taskworld. If you’ve been looking for a new Project Manager, I absolutely think that Taskworld will win you over. It has a user-friendly interface, a ton of features that you’ll actually use, and a very small learning curve.
