11 Task Management Skills For Project Managers To Master
Be a Taskmaster: Better task management skills can significantly improve you and your team's productivity, help you stay organized, and help you achieve your project goals efficiently.
Organize to Energize: Developing a structured approach to managing tasks can lead to better organization, reduced stress, and increased overall work effectiveness.
Productivity Boosters: Identifying and tackling the root causes of inefficiency, such as poor task management, can help you improve work output and productivity.
If you’re struggling to maintain productivity, stay organized, and achieve your project goals, the cause might be a lack of task management skills.
In this article, I’m going to cover essential task management skills, strategies, and tools to help you control and transform the way you work so you can get more done and complete your projects on time.
What are Task Management Skills?
Task management skills are the talents and strategies used to efficiently plan, prioritize, and carry out activities in order to accomplish particular goals.
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Task management skills are more than the ability to check off something off a to-do list. It’s about managing team members, prioritizing tasks, and creating achievable and measurable timelines for the entirety of a project.
This includes decision-making abilities, managing the team’s tasks and your own as a project manager, and motivating team members to complete tasks by their due dates (or earlier). They can help you better monitor progress and manage tasks on a project, create stronger project plans, and keep work moving along the workflow.
11 Key Task Management Skills
The following task management skills are some of the most important ones to master. I’ve also covered how to talk about them on your resume or in an interview for a project management role.
1. Scheduling
Scheduling is more than setting and meeting deadlines. It is also about setting realistic timelines and identifying the proper order for important tasks so you can optimize your project workflow.
A great way to highlight this task management skill in a professional setting is to point out examples from specific projects where you set priority task lists and corresponding project timeframes.
2. Prioritization
Knowing which tasks need to be taken care of in which order is a critical skill known as task prioritization. Not only is it a key part of a project manager’s skill set, it’s one of the most undervalued skills, too. Being able to recognize an urgent task from an important task requires plenty of practice with long-term goal setting and short-term planning.
During an interview, highlight your prioritization skills by sharing an instance where short-term task progress was looking good, but you foresaw an issue further along if you didn’t make specific task adjustments to think more long-term.
3. Workload Management
Workload management is a critical task, especially in a workspace where team collaboration is valued. It means making sure team members aren’t overbooked or under-used. By paying close attention to your resources, you can effectively manage tasks, reallocate work from busier team members to those that are less busy, and delegate work to team members as needed.
If you want to draw attention to your workload management skill on your resume, call out a project where you effectively managed your resources to prevent burnout and procrastination while still hitting project milestones on time or ahead of schedule.
4. Delegation
Effective delegation skills promote skill development on the team, boost motivation, and help avoid bottlenecks brought on by excessive workload. The ability to delegate tasks so your team can stay on track to achieve the project roadmap is one of the most important task and time management skills. It helps maintain a healthy work-life balance for you and your team.
To best show off your delegation skills, discuss or briefly bullet point a project in which you were able to assess challenging tasks, discuss with stakeholders, and spread out the workload to encourage more efficient teamwork.
5. Communication
Whether you are talking with team members, stakeholders, clients, or even contractors, you need to know how to communicate effectively. This will reduce time spent playing catch-up or doing rework.
To share about your communication skills on a resume or in an interview, describe a moment when you used effective communication techniques to manage a project in real-time. This could be by outlining your method of communication or sharing about your communication strategies.
6. Time Management
Time management techniques like the Pomodoro technique, task batching, or Kanban boards (although often useful) are a dime a dozen. It might take some trial and error to find the tools or skills that work best for you, but good time management boils down to spending less time on tasks without reducing quality.
An effective way of demonstrating your time management skills is to share proof of how you were able to accomplish more in less time. This can be a brief story about a time you trimmed days off a project, for example.
7. Organization
Having a structured approach to managing tasks, deadlines, resources, and information is a vital skill for you as a project manager—being able to organize every detail is some of the most important work you can do for a project.
You can show off your organization skills by discussing the systems and processes you’ve implemented for keeping track of tasks, progress, files and versions, feedback and stakeholder conversations, and other critical pieces of project information.
8. Adaptability
Staying agile and flexible with your project plan is a major skill for project managers. Requirements might change, new stakeholders might get involved, and project scope might expand. The ability to think on your feet and shift when needed is necessary when managing projects.
On your resume or in an interview, highlight how you have adapted as project goals or timelines shifted with clients or a specific project. Share a specific instance when you needed to pivot unexpectedly.
9. Problem-Solving
Identifying a problem and then doing something about it seems simple, but there are a surprising amount of project managers who get hung up on either unimportant or non-urgent problems.
During an interview, point out how you quickly and effectively solved an unexpected problem. On your resume, outline specific problems you solved and the results of your quick thinking.
10. Critical Thinking
It’s one thing to recognize a problem, but it’s a different skill set entirely to think through how to solve it. Creative and quick critical thinking can go a long way to keeping you on track to complete your project on time.
Don’t stop at listing critical thinking as one of your skills on a resume. Showcase these skills with a brief explanation of how your creative and critical thinking improved project outcomes.
11. Knowledge of Task Management Software
There are a plethora of task management tools, apps, and templates to choose from that can help you better manage your time and project tasks. Finding the right project management software involves making sure the tool works for you and your team, not the other way around. This goes beyond making sure you have access to features for notifications, social media integrations, or time tracking.
On your resume or in an interview, explain your experience with existing tools. It’s less about the exact tools you’ve used in the past and more about the way you’ve used them to complete tasks and projects on time, on budget, and within scope.
How to Improve Your Task Management Skills
Here are my top tips for improving your task management skills.
Determine Your Peak Productive Times
Figure out when your brain is firing on all cylinders. Finding those peak productive times can be challenging—if you want to hone your task management skills, start paying close attention to when you are doing your best work.
A best practice is to experiment with when you are most productive throughout the day, according to Insightful. Define a simple task that requires a good amount of brain power to accomplish. Repeat that task throughout the day and record how long it took, how difficult it felt, and how tired you felt before and after.
Gathering this data will help you see patterns and where you are working at peak performance. Then, schedule all your brain-intensive tasks for those blocks of time.
Set Clear Objectives
Goal setting is an important task management skill, but this goes beyond big, long-term goals. Set smaller task objectives that can be easily scheduled and completed. This will keep you motivated and able to maintain forward momentum so you can maximize your time management.
What works for me is to set one major task per day that will move me towards my greater goals, followed by 3-5 smaller tasks that work towards that one major task. This way, you have a clear objective to hit and a clear path to get there.
Block Time on Your Calendar
If you have determined your peak productive time and set clear objectives, your next task is to block out time on your calendar for completing those most important tasks. This is a popular tactic outlined in many time management books, and there is a saying in entrepreneur circles that says, “what gets scheduled gets done.” Therefore, blocking time to accomplish your objectives is critical.
Time blocking can look like setting up your most important tasks by name or type on your calendar. For example, schedule one to two hours for “admin work” during your least productive time and “accomplish daily objectives” for another one to two hour block. If they are blocked out on your calendar, you will make sure they get done.
Track Your Time and Progress
There is another saying: “what gets measured gets managed.” If you spend time tracking your progress and how long it took, then you can better clear up any inefficiencies that may pop up.
A popular technique for time management is the Pomodoro Method, in which you work in bursts interspersed with brief breaks over the course of one to two hours. This helps you see how much you can accomplish in specific blocks of time. After reviewing your progress, you will see some patterns where you can manage your time more efficiently.
A great way to do this is by using the Timeboxing method—a common method used by top performers and CEOs.
Set Realistic Deadlines and Monitor Them
All of the time management and task management skills in the world cannot help you if you aren’t setting realistic goals and deadlines. Optimism bias is a psychological concept that explains how we often think we are better at accomplishing work than we actually are. However, if you track your time and progress, you can overcome this bias.
Prioritize and delegate what can be done more efficiently by another team member. Use project management software to clean up your timelines and resource management processes.
Avoid Multitasking
When I have lots of projects to work on or a variety of tasks that need to be completed in a short timeframe, I am tempted to try and work on a couple of them at a time. However, multitasking has been proven to be inefficient for the vast majority of individuals.
When you split your focus, you split your quality of work. Don’t be tempted to try and accomplish more by doing multiple things at the same time. Focus on one task at a time with your full attention and you will find yourself getting more done in a shorter timeframe.
Continue Honing Your Task Management Skills
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