5-Minutes of Morning Productivity with the Right Task Management Tool
What you do first thing in the morning has a big impact on how you feel about the rest of your day. The secret is to get a quick understanding of what will transpire during the day based on a prioritized list of actions.
Get Into This 5-Minute Morning Productivity Routine as You Enjoy Your First Cappuccino
First, My Cappuccino
After you make the tough decision of what kind of coffee you will have after waking up, your next step should be to understand what the day ahead of you will look like. If you follow these 3 steps, you will be able to get organized and feel better in just 5 minutes:
1. Understand Exceptions
Your first goal is to understand needs your immediate attention. Managing by exception is an effective and long-tested approach to efficient allocation of resources. The challenge has always been to develop the processes and the supporting technologies to be able to identify and flag these exceptions in an efficient manner.
Once you identify where your attention is needed, you can then take action and/or add to the things take care of today.
2. Understand To Dos
Your second goal is to review the action items assigned to you that are due today. Once you identify these items, you will need to prioritize them in order of criticality. You will get a nice sense of accomplishment as you take care of the most important things first during the course of your day.
3. Adjust Things
Things change. Due dates get moved, urgency levels change, tasks are no longer required, team members get reassigned, client priorities change, unforeseen things come up. As you review your exceptions and action items, adjust things as needed to maintain their relevance and accuracy.
With the proper technology support, this morning productivity boost routine should take 5 minutes, as you enjoy your first cup of Joe. The benefits of knowing what needs to be done and feeling like nothing is falling through the cracks is worth its weight in gold.
Technology Support
Using a productivity and task management tool like CommandHound can efficiently help you go through your 5-minute morning routine as follows:
1. Dashboard to Identify Exceptions
CommandHound’s dashboard is specifically designed to highlight the tasks, action items, or milestones that need immediate attention by turning them yellow or red depending on their severity. CommandHound allows you to define escalation paths for tasks that miss their due dates by changing their severity levels as they progress.
2. Inbox to Understand To Dos
CommandHound’s Inbox is a centralized place to find the tasks, action items, or milestones that have been assigned or escalated to you and are due today.
3. Control Towers and Control Points to Adjust Things
Once you take care of exceptions in your Dashboard and action items in your Inbox, you can go around and look at things at a higher level by reviewing CommandHound’s Control Towers (processes) and Control Points (milestones) to perform any adjustments necessary based on changed priorities or new information.
Driving Accountability
CommandHound has a unique feature used to drive accountability as it manages all of these processes, action items, and milestones. CommandHound accomplishes this by keeping track of how well individual team members are completing the tasks assigned to them and tying this to a performance review or incentive system.
By knowing that this daily activity tracking will be part of a performance review process, accountability ensues.
Get Started
How does this 5-minute routine sound as you enjoy your first cappuccino? Would you like to learn more about how CommandHound can efficiently help you feel great and under control as you begin each day?
