18 Apr How to Be Successful at Work with Artful Agenda
Artful Agenda is ideal for organizing your personal life: keeping track of your salon appointments, your kids’ soccer practices, your grocery list, and your daily chores. It’s also a robust planner that can help you be more successful at work. With it, you can arrange your meeting schedules, manage projects, keep track of due dates and deadlines, set weekly and monthly goals, and manage your work tasks and to-do lists. Artful Agenda’s customizable features make getting organized at work easier and more fun!
Set Up Work Master Lists
Artful Agenda’s List tab is a great place to create master lists for each of your more complex goals, tasks, or projects that you are working on. Within each master list, you can break down things you want to accomplish into smaller actionable steps. Some ideas for master lists are:
- Administrative tasks: list routine responsibilities like sending invoices, responding to emails, scheduling meetings, cleaning work area, etc.
- Project-specific lists: outline all of the tasks, start to finish, that you need to complete for each project
- Career goals: detail the steps you need to take to reach your career goals
- Meeting preparation: create a checklist of all the things you will need to complete before important meetings
- Professional development: brainstorm a list of skills you’d like to learn or develop and outline how you can accomplish them
Create a “Work Tasks” Daily To-Do List
One of the ways you can customize your Artful Agenda is by renaming the different task boxes in your Day view to suit your needs. Change one of these boxes to “Work Tasks” to have a checklist of the things you need to accomplish for work each day. This is the ideal place to track the specific tasks you need to complete for your bigger projects or goals. You can assign these tasks directly from your master lists into your “Work Tasks” box or your Weekly or Monthly Goals sections.
Schedule and Organize Meetings
By connecting your work email to your Artful Agenda account, you can schedule meetings directly through the app! You can send meeting invites to all the relevant stakeholders while scheduling the meeting to keep your entire team informed. Utilizing one of the most powerful features of digital planning, color coding, you can see at a glance what the meeting will be about.
For meetings that occur on a regular basis, like weekly project review meetings, or monthly budget meetings, Artful Agenda allows you to easily create the event once and set the pre-defined cadence. Even if your recurring meetings are a little more complex like the first Friday of the month, or every third Thursday, Artful Agenda makes it simple and straightforward to schedule.
Set Deadlines and Create Project Date Ranges
Your Artful Agenda can become a powerful project management tool to keep timelines and deadlines visible whenever you need them. Create a new calendar for each project and by entering the tasks, due dates, and deadlines as all-day events, you will create a detailed project timeline. You can do this for both short and long-term projects, always being able to see what your current focus should be. You can create events such as:
- Project Scope: April 1-10
- Budget Approval: Due April 15
- Project Design: April 15-30
- Design Approval: Due May 5
Time Blocking and Theme Days
Time blocking is a planning method that divides your day up into smaller chunks of time, and during each block of time you focus on a single task. These tasks could be project-specific or a dedicated time of day that is set aside for routine tasks such as answering emails or returning phone calls. Blocks of time can be as small as half an hour for a walking break or your entire afternoon for deep focus work. Time blocking also allows you to get a sense of where you are spending your time and if adjustments need to be made.
Theme days allow you to devote a day or multiple days in a week to a specific project and stay completely focused. It is an especially good strategy for entrepreneurs that have to wear many hats in their business. You can set aside specific days for batching tasks related to marketing, administrative work, product development, content creation, and networking. This concept allows you to avoid multitasking and helps you stay more productive.
Sync All of Your Calendars
If you are currently juggling multiple calendars under separate email accounts for your work life and your personal life, Artful Agenda makes it possible to bring them all together. You can sync multiple Google, iCloud, and Microsoft calendars to Artful Agenda, and access them on multiple devices including Android mobile devices, iPhone and iPad, Mac and PC.
Once you have synced your work calendars, you can share them with others. This will allow you to share your project calendars with your team, inform coworkers of the times you will be available or unavailable, and share events with relevant stakeholders.
Another feature that can help create work-life balance is the ability to toggle off different calendars whenever you like. You can switch your work calendars off on the weekends and turn your personal calendars off during business hours.
Spice Up Your Work Life with Artful Agenda
True to its name, Artful Agenda not only helps you stay organized but inspires you to be creative as well. You can change your covers, fonts, and calendar event colors as often as you like with just a few clicks of your mouse. A large selection of covers are available to choose from, everything from playful to ‘all business’ in solids, prints, stripes, and florals. Change them according to the season or just your mood!
Artful Agenda also offers a variety of stickers, including work-related stickers, that you can add to your monthly, weekly, and daily calendar views. A well-placed sticker can make an important event stand out so you won’t forget, and it just makes being organized more fun! Our sticker features allow you to search for the perfect sticker, quickly view your most recently used, and most frequently used stickers as well.
So if you’re looking for an upgrade to your boring work calendar and need a tool that can help you be more successful at work, try Artful Agenda now and be inspired to reach your career goals, be more productive, and have more fun while doing it!
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