The Three Pillars of Workload

You’re probably familiar with Workload if you’ve been following our updates recently. If you don’t know what Workload is, here’s a quick overview: Workload is our latest feature that expands the ActiveCollab workspace. A bird’s eye view of all the activities your teams are undertaking on a daily basis, weekly, and monthly basis. A visual overview of all your tasks and projects. ActiveCollab Workload is a living system that uses tasks as its basic structural and functional units. No matter how complex or simple, tasks are part of the system and require certain elements to make it work. We like to call these “the three pillars” of Workload: estimates, assignees, and due dates.
No matter how stressful, deadlines can be essential. Without them, we wouldn’t know our priorities and procrastination wouldn’t be as easy to manage because you wouldn’t have the burden of time on your shoulders. It doesn’t matter if you complete this task today, and not in two months. How do you know what must be done first? If you want a task in Workload to appear, it must have a due date. Assignees
Due dates are an essential part of a task’s passing grade. This is the minimum they must have in Workload to be managed. Next, assign these tasks to your team members. This is not a difficult topic to discuss. It doesn’t matter if someone has to do it. If a task isn’t assigned, it will show up in Workload but at the top in the “Unassigned work”, waiting for you to assign it to your team members. The Big Book of Team Culture
This article is only a part of our Big Book of Team Culture. This ebook is free and will teach you how to build a team, improve teamwork, be a leader in modern workplaces, and create a positive team culture. We are grateful that you have subscribed! All newsletter subscribers can download this (and many other ActiveCollab Project Management Guides). Download the Ebook We are unable to subscribe you at this time. Please double-check your email address. If issue still persist, please let us know by sending an email to [email protected] Try Again Estimates
Let’s now talk about time estimations. You know how long it will take to complete a task 100 times. 20 minutes to make your latte, 10 mins to listen to your favorite song three more times, and 5 mins to post a social media post. What about your work activities? Even if you fail the first few times, you will get better over time. Workload wants to know the time you spend on each task so it can calculate how many hours per day. If you have an illustration that requires 4 hours to complete and Workload sets the task duration at two days, Workload will calculate that you’ll spend 2 hours on the illustration Tuesday and Wednesday. If you don’t give an estimate but the task has due dates, Workload will display it with a warning sign. ActiveCollab Workload can’t tell if the task is one large task that will consume the whole day or if there are 17 smaller tasks that can be done in that time. This information is essential as the timeline cannot be trusted. You can’t trust what the timeline shows.