Creating more productive work days...

[kynabaker16]

I know we often talk about how busy we all are... but I was wondering, how do we create more productivity in our day-to-day, without simply getting busier.

Do any of our wonderful Workfront family have any great tips on how they use Workfront to make sure they (or their workers/collaborators) are staying productive and not just doing more work?

I've seen great conversations on the use of request queues to identify priority or urgency of incoming work. Any other thoughts out there on how you know the work you're doing is contributing to becoming more productive?

[Heather_Kulbacki]

To prioritize work coming in, we really liked the idea of the Scorecards, but unfortunately those are only available at the project level and we needed a way to prioritize issues just coming in to our team so we know what needs to be converted to a project first.

So we created an issue custom form with fields based on the business strategy, using values for each option in the various dropdowns, then a calculated field to add up those fields to create a score. This allows our project managers to see at a glance what needs to be reviewed/converted to a project first.

For myself, I've created my own to-do list project in Workfront. I used to have a bunch of emails sitting in my inbox, often with subject lines that didn't really indicate what I needed to do. Trying to re-prioritize those emails as higher priority items came in and often re-reviewing each waiting email to see what really needed to be done first was a real time waster. I also had Outlook tasks set up as reminders to do things like quarterly reviews of our cleanup dashboard and things like that - those worked fine, but once I had a to-do list project it made sense to set those up as recurring tasks instead.

Now when I get those emails with something I need to do, I use the Outlook integration to push those into Workfront as an issue - I can name the issue something that makes more sense to me about what I need to do rather than using the email subject line. I can give each issue a planned due date based on when I think I'll be able to get that item completed considering the other work I already have planned. If someone emails me more info on any of these items instead of replying in Workfront, I can use the Outlook integration again to push that to Workfront as an update.

This has saved me a ton of time as I'm no longer reviewing and re-reviewing emails before I get to that item. Some of our project managers and even a few people on our management team have started their own to-do lists in Workfront.

[kynabaker16]

Oh interesting! I love the idea of a personal to-do list. Do you just have the to-do project live forever? Or do you create a new one every quarter or year?

I like the idea of creating the issue custom form to automatically score things too. That's an interesting idea, and you could customize it to different areas of the business as well.

[Heather_Kulbacki]

I plan to create a new to-do project yearly. We bill our time out to our business partners and the majority of my work benefits all so it's allocated out based on a percentage each year. So to keep billing clean, I'll create a new project each year with that year's percentages.

Some of my work does get billed to partcular departments, so when that's needed we have a billing custom form that I add to my issues as needed to be sure the time spent on those issues gets billed to the right place.

It was also super handy at mid-year review time. I just filtered my list of issues to show closed issues to remind myself of everything I had done so far this year.