Trouble Focusing? Try Teamly for Task Management

It’s 9 a.m. You’re at your desk, and the day is young. No, wait… It’s noon? People you need right now are slipping out the door to lunch. Soon, afternoon meetings will start and those never end. You’ve barely looked up from your inbox and the big project is still a mess of notes. Yikes!

That’s how the day goes for most. Best intentions get caught in the time warp of a busy office. I’ve tried a dozen or so of the built-in “to do” list programs on various desktops, downloaded freeware, fooled with smartphone apps. I even once made awful Gantt charts in Excel. Nothing seemed to work as well as a single piece of blank paper, folded once, flat on my desk.

But even that level of simplicity brings trouble. How do you prioritize? Ink is permanent, and paper gets stuck under other things on the desk — books, reports, whatever people drop as they come by — and quickly disappears. I’m not cool enough to carry around a Moleskine notebook, and I’d lose that, too.

Enter Teamly. I was suspicious but getting a little desperate. I needed to nail down a system and get to work. But Teamly has it figured out.

It’s cloud-based, so the link just sits up in the browser bar. The interface is nearly as spare and elegant as a Google search page: a single box, a choice of time frame, then hit the Teamly logo to enter the priority.

Here’s how it works:

Pick your priorities

Teamly has a secret weapon: You can enter five priorities — just five — in a limited, plain-English time frame. Today, Tomorrow, This Week, Next Week, This Month, Next Month, This Quarter, Next Quarter.

Once you enter a priority, the cement starts to dry. You can quickly edit or delete it, but in 20 minutes the priority locks and can’t be rewritten or dropped. You can “abandon” a priority in order to add a new one, but old ones stay there, grayed out, to taunt you. You still only get five active priorities. Finish a task, though, and the red type font goes green. Done! Next priority.

Learn what’s possible

Frankly, it works. Limiting to five goals makes you really stop to think about what matters and what doesn’t. If something bombs into your inbox during a busy morning, you can calmly send it to tomorrow — or next week — and put it out of your head. It won’t disappear.

Teamly teaches you to be realistic in exchange for the intangible but satisfying reward of completing a list: all lines green. You can rearrange them by dragging them around that day’s list, but you can’t kill them. Sooner or later, you learn to set achievable goals. That’s the key to successful goal-setting, at least in terms of project-level work: realism. (Hopes and dreams are another matter, and probably better off in a Moleskine.)

If something really gets by you that day — force majeure happens — then you can push the priority to tomorrow with a click, no tears. But there’s a record, and you learn to be a bit more realistic next time.

Talk to the team

Teamly is after paying corporate users, so the interface scales up pretty big, with levels for managers and directors. Like bug-tracking software (but a million times more elegant), the system will create discussion threads and can ping you with notes and suggestions from colleagues. Used correctly, it should reduce the flow of painful reply-all management by email.

But the Teamly philosophy is still very much about individual responsibility and realism. For instance, managers can’t set tasks for their reports. They can suggest them, of course, but it’s up to the recipient to make the task a priority and to set the time frame. You can set tasks for yourself, too, and prioritize them later. Good for clearing out the brainpan.

Autonomy first

Once a suggested task is sent to a user, the manager has visibility on progress. Is the task a priority yet? When is she targeting completion? Has she abandoned it or missed her own deadline? Of course, Teamly generates reports and graphs on all of this and can create views based on individuals, teams, and priorities by date. It’s ultimately project management software from the bottom up.

Yet, on the face of it, and certainly from the user perspective, it’s still about getting simple things done on time. What a relief!