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For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

An eas­i­ly gras­pable way to plan

A ser­vice and tool I think more peo­ple should use is Microsoft Plan­ner. Allow me to tell you a lit­tle about why.

Plan­ner is a tool that helps you do just that — plan some­thing. It can be the work done by a par­tic­u­lar work­group, an upcom­ing event, an entire project, or some­thing else that con­sists of sev­er­al steps or activities.

Still notes, but dig­i­tal ones

To put it sim­ply, Plan­ner is basi­cal­ly a white­board with Pos­tIt-notes (and you can of course have sev­er­al white­boards active simul­ta­ne­ous­ly). I would even go as far as describ­ing it as Microsoft’s equiv­a­lent of Trel­lo.

A board (which is called a ​”plan” in Plan­ner) is divid­ed into as many columns (which are called ​”buck­ets” in Plan­ner) as you want and need. The columns can, for instance, represent:

• The phas­es of a project
• The dif­fer­ent areas a work­group is work­ing on
• Dif­fer­ent lev­els of pri­or­i­ty, so that you get one col­umn for high­est pri­or­i­ty, one for medi­um, one for low, and one for tasks which are not pri­or­i­tized at all

The tasks you need to do are writ­ten on notes (called ​”tasks” in Plan­ner) and added to the dif­fer­ent columns. You can assign every note to some­one who then becomes respon­si­ble for doing what the note says. Even if you are only work­ing on a sin­gle board, I sug­gest you assign the tasks to your­self since they then become vis­i­ble in the view ​”My Tasks” that gives you an overview of all the tasks you have been assigned from all the boards you are involved in.

The tasks are easy to move between the columns in order to change your work­flow, alter the lev­el of pri­or­i­ty a task has, or what­ev­er the columns rep­re­sent to you. When you com­plete a task you eas­i­ly mark it as done by click­ing a green, usu­al­ly hid­den, but­ton at the top right cor­ner of the task.

There are sev­er­al oth­er func­tions and fea­tures, but if you are not yet famil­iar with Plan­ner, I think that will do for now.

More appro­pri­ate for big than small

How­ev­er, I would not rec­om­mend hav­ing Plan­ner as your to-do-list. Why? Well, hav­ing all your detailed to-do-tasks as notes on the num­ber of boards you would need to cov­er all your projects, events, areas of respon­si­bil­i­ty, clients, or what­ev­er, would become too messy and dif­fi­cult to get an overview of. But for the pur­pose of plan­ning things and col­lab­o­rat­ing on more exten­sive projects and tasks, where the notes rep­re­sent some­thing some­one needs to do (you, for instance) down to a lev­el of detail just above ​”Call some­one”, it is an excel­lent tool.

Do this

If you still have not tried using Plan­ner but think it might be a tool for you, then do this:

1. Choose some task or project you have to do that will take you longer than a full work­day to com­plete and which con­sists of sev­er­al to-do-tasks. It can be some­thing you do in col­lab­o­ra­tion with oth­ers and which allows you to try the col­lab­o­ra­tion-fea­tures but does not nec­es­sar­i­ly have to involve some­one else for it to be worth famil­iar­iz­ing your­self with it.
2. Cre­ate a new plan — mean­ing, a new board.
3. Decide what the columns will rep­re­sent and name them accord­ing­ly. Is it hard to think of just the right names for them just now? If so, try using ​”Before”, ​”Dur­ing”, and ​”After”. If these turn out to be wrong or not per­fect, you will prob­a­bly already have thought of some­thing bet­ter to call them.
4. Cre­ate the to-do-tasks you already know you will need to do in each column.
5. Add a new bul­let-point to your week­ly run-through of all your major tasks and projects. From now on, you will also look through and update the board you just cre­at­ed as you look through all the overviews of oth­er major projects and make sure that they all have clear­ly defined next steps to take, thus ensur­ing you progress in each and every one of them.
6. If you like how it works, decide to use Plan­ner for oth­er projects you are involved in as well.

Easy to get an overview

If you start using Plan­ner you will get a bet­ter overview of what needs to get done (and who needs to do it) in projects that are too exten­sive to fit com­fort­ably on your to-do-list but not com­plex enough to need an entire project-man­age­ment tool. When you use it to col­lab­o­rate with oth­ers it will give you all a com­mon view of where you are at which is much more dynam­ic and eas­i­ly adjustable than, for instance, a project plan in Excel usu­al­ly is.

Quite handy, if you ask me.

What’s your way?

If you already use Plan­ner, what would you say a typ­i­cal project you would use it for looks like? Feel like shar­ing? If so, email imme­di­ate­ly.

(Do you know what a change project’s most treach­er­ous word is?)