Keeping things organized - online task management
Theclickdepot.com is a growing online marketing firm. And as much as it’s a whole bunch of fun growing an 
online marketing company, it also has its fair share of challenges. One of them is to keep things organized! Online marketing is a large field. We often deal with customers from markets as varied as limousine rentals to jewelry manufacturers to large public corporations - all looking for the same thing. The coveted attention of their target online community. But with variety comes complexity. We deal with tasks ranging from SEO strategy consulting, pay per click campaign management, Google Adwords, Link Building, Blog Marketing, Email Marketing, Etc. We deal with several vendors and internal staff. All this can often get pretty challenging to manage, especially since there is no real way to know what orders we are going to get next month!
Given all that, it’s truly important for us and any business really, to keep tasks managed well. There are several ways that we’ve run into over time and we want to share our experiences about them here.
1. Outlook: This is probably the most popular task management approach.
Pros - If you and all your staff have Outlook already, then this is great way to manage tasks.
Cons -
This is good only to manage tasks with internal staff. It’s hard to do this with vendors even though its not impossible. Online task management is the easier way to manage vendor tasks and freelancer/consultants.
Outlook is expensive!
Outlook is not online. So if you are traveling or on the road, you can’t look at your tasks unless you have an exchange server or access to one and your mobile phone is synced from your exchange server. We don’t have that internally and most small businesses that we know don’t.
2. HiTask
This is my favorite. Check them out at hitask.com - online task management.
Pros - One of the best implementations of Ajax that I’ve seen out there. ULTRA easy to use. You can assign tasks to your team with drag and drop features on the website itself.
Cons - Costs money and is subscription based. If you have more than 2 people that want to look at each others’ tasks, then you really have to get the Business account to make it meaningful and that costs $15/month or $90/year. Yet, its worth the money in my opinion. I’ve tried this for over a month and I love it! I haven’t signed up for the business version yet because I am still testing out other services.
3. Task2Gather.com
This one looks similar to Hitask but free. My experience is that free tools like that just don’t cut it. You do get what you pay for and that’s why I am a bit worried whether this will compare with hitask as far as ease of use, functionality and support is concerned. But I am going to give it a try anyway.
Conclusion: Give online task management a try if you are working with multiple staff/vendors/freelancers, etc. and struggling to stay on top of their tasks. Hitask is our favorite so far and you can sign up for their business account for $90/year.
FYI - we are not affiliated with hitask in any way and no, they or anyone else are not paying us to write this post :).
Image Courtesy Of http://www.videinfra.com/hitask
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