Less Planning, More Doing: How To Automate Work Management in 5 Steps

If you or your team are spending a lot of time figuring out what to work on next or planning or working on what you're supposed to be working on and moving tasks and work items around, prioritizing your week and your day, I created this video for you because if you feel your work management system is working against you rather than for you, there's something wrong. All right. That said, this should be also useful if you are not using a work management tool, if you're using spreadsheets, if you're using maybe just your head and you want to make sure you have all the pieces in place so that if you are getting into work management solutions of some sort, or if you're changing your current management solution of, um, that you had earlier, then you have, um, some of these pieces in place to make sure that that work management is done as efficiently as possible. your team spends time actually getting stuff done rather than managing their work and messing around with tasks. So let's get into it. The first and starting point is the what. This is where you want to make sure you capture everything that needs to get done so that effectively nothing falls through the cracks. You want to make sure you have one system where the tasks that need to get done, for your team, for your clients are there. And we often see a couple of different automations or elements here that can help to streamline and automate that process. I'll walk you through some of them. One, it's integrating your proposal or engagement letter tool. So if you have a proposal where you are listing the line items and listing the services that are included in a particular engagement, How can you map that to your work management tools so that the moment the client accepts, you can make sure that every— each one of those tasks is going to be there for you? You don't have to manually insert them there. Of course, there's some nuances here as well as to, you know, making sure you don't create duplicates and other considerations that you might want to, you know, take into account for your specific But that's usually kind of like a big and often very common way to make sure you're capturing those automatically. Of course, the software that you use itself should have a recurring feature of some sort. So make sure you leverage that for your recurring tasks. This is very easy to plan, but sometimes there's also automation that can help you make sure the recurring tasks are what you hope they are. They are. Sometimes we hear some people suggest that maybe the tool has a recurring task feature, but you can't, for example, make sure that the day falls on a business day and it always has to be like the first of the month, for example. Or there's some nuances here that you might not have built into your tool. The automation can potentially fill in that gap. And of course, not all your tasks are going to be things that you promise on your engagement letters, or it's recurring work. There might be ad hoc work, emergencies, issues, uh, things that will come up and you might want to use, and we would recommend you use forms for that, especially if you want to make sure that the tasks always have certain elements included. And I'll tell you a quick story about this. We started implementing EOS internally and I was the one adding a bunch of issues. Everything that comes to mind. I'm the idea guy, right? And we realized that there's all these issues. We don't know at a glance who created them and what's their level of priority. If it's just an idea that came up or it's like an actual big issue that we need to tackle right away. And we created a simple form where we asked, hey, who created this issue? This is the task, who created it, priority. Very simple. Sometimes we hear firms that they want to make sure that their teams think about how long it's going to take them when they're going to embark on the task or when they're going to start. And you can create forms to make sure some of those elements are required. The forms can be built into your work management tool sometimes. Other times you might have to have a separate form. To populate that data there, or maybe the tool has a way to create the task and have required fields depending on the context you're in. And of course you want to create those tasks as complete as possible, right? So those tasks have all the details the team is going to need and some of the things we actually be working or we're going to be talking about next. So let's go into the next level, which is the how. Zero. Or one click away. That's the concept I want to share with you today. And I think this is a very important concept because we often hear firms saying that their team is not using their tool properly. They're not updating their statuses. They're not using it as they should. We have to remind them and stay on top of them. And sometimes the solution to the problem is not, you know, hire another person to stay on top of them even more, but instead, how can we make sure that It is actually useful for them to use the tool. And part of that is equipping them with everything they're going to need to get their work done. And this is where the zero or one-click away concept comes in. What it means is, how can you make sure that everything they need to get the job done, it's in the task or a click away? What does that look like? Having the how-tos or the SOPs right there in the task so that they know what are the sub- steps, what are the subtasks, what are the, you know, the instructions they have to follow to get that particular task done. Also, how can you link to different resources that you know they might need? Like maybe you are linking to a client profile on another application, or maybe on your CRM where you know the data is going to be up to date. Can you link potentially to a client folder or wherever you store and manage their documents. Maybe you can link directly to their accounting file on QuickBooks or Xero so they don't have to jump around and be on other things. And you can see here how the more you add— well, I wouldn't say that because sometimes you may add more than is necessary, but if you add the basics and what they actually need in the task, they'll be incentivized to open it and then click and get started with their work, and that will prompt them to then come back, update their task accordingly. So effectively, by making sure everything is there and one click away, your team will be incentivized to go to the task to get their work done, and you won't need to remind them. So let's go into the next step here, which is the when. Of course, it's important to have your operations in order that you know when and how long something is going to take. And some of those things again can be automated to an extent. And I don't know if I mentioned this, but of course this here can also be automated because if you have— maybe I should have left this open. If you have an integration with your proposal and you already have the client email, then you can potentially find that client information on other places and link them straight away in your task. In any case, let's move on to the when, which is time-related fields in your task. So when is it going to start? When is it going? When is it due? And how long is it going to take you to get there? For the most part, start dates and due dates are going to be have similar approaches. Whether it is okay, we want we'll make sure we know that the due date or the start date are absolute. Maybe it is that the due date is going to be April 15th. That's absolutely the case. But you might also have and be able to set up automatically start dates. For example, maybe I want this to start 7 days after the client signs up. And you can also have event-based you can populate these start or due dates based on certain events. Like an example that comes to mind is maybe once the client gives all the information you need, then that's where the start date is going to kick off, and then maybe the due date is going to be X days or X weeks from there. That's just an example of how you can potentially automate and make sure that these things are populated automatically within your works management system. And of course, time estimates, it can be a tough one if there's a lot of variation in your firm. But maybe if you have templates, you can put the most common type of estimate, of time estimate, in the task itself. So the moment it's created, it has that, and then you could adjust it manually from there if needed. All right, so now we know the what we need to do, we have all the how And instructions to make sure that your team is encouraged to use it. We know the when, and let's talk about the who. And here we have a simple rule, which is one assignee, one task, right? You want to make sure that each task, it has a person responsible of getting it done. And a couple of options here that I want to talk through. It's first, if you have a very small firm and there's only one person responsible for certain type of tasks, like if you only have one preparer, you We only have one bookkeeper. This is very easy because then you can make sure that the templates are related to those specific tasks are directly assigned to them. Very simple. That said, as your team grows, you may want to look into other options like round robin or an assignment view that I'm going to discuss in a little bit. So round robin would be saying, hey, as I don't know, tax returns come in, we're going to assign them equally. And we're going to distribute it evenly between the 2, 3, 4 preparers we have. Sometimes that works depending on the level of complexity of the work you do, but sometimes that doesn't really cut it because there'd be— there's levels, different levels of seniority within the team. There's different levels of complexity of the work that's getting done. And when that's the case, what we recommend is simply an assignment view where a human can review A human that knows those nuances of who's the person that's most prepared or that's most competent in this particular area and that will be able to handle a more complex task in this instance. And that's effectively how you can go about streamlining the process of assignment And the who area. And last but not least, follow-ups. We know that even if we have this perfect system, people will not follow it to the T, and sometimes they need reminders or notifications to make sure they are— they stay on top of it. And we can also automate some of those follow-up reminders as well. So let everyone know. This could be both external, but it could also be internal. So external could be, hey, as we check off these tasks, Can we update the client automatically, send in an email, send in a text message, make sure they are aware of that? As potentially maybe we need things from them, we go ahead and, you know, we know that when we check off this task, now we're going to need a series of, you know, some information, some documentation from the client. We make sure to do that as well. And of course, maybe towards the end or in different contexts, maybe you would need to get the client to take an action, whether it's to book a call with you to review certain things or to sign a document or to sign up for your portal, whatever it might be. So you can make sure to have those external notifications to your clients built into your tax software— sorry, into your task. Ah, those 2 words are hard for me because they're so similar. Your work. Let's say your work, um, you know, within your work management software so that you can, um, avoid having to remember to follow up with the client and make sure they're happy and kind of aware of the stage of their project. And internally, this is also important because you might want to have like baton pass sort of notifications of, hey, I just finished preparing, I want you to review it. That Often it's very likely that happens very often in taxes for preparers and reviewers. It also happens in bookkeeping with controllers or whatever it might be. So you want to make sure that whether it is within the app itself, if the app allows, or externally send messages via email, via text messages, via Slack, via Teams, you are keeping that next person responsible up to date so they can start as quickly as possible. Possible. And of course, there are other types of content that you might share, all the types of notifications that you might share to your team internally. That could be, for example, work-in-progress reports that pull data from your work management software to let you know what's the status of certain things. So that kind of concludes my 5 levels of work management automation, where you can kind of start making sure you're capturing everything, making sure You have all the context as close as possible to the task. Your team is actually incentivized to use the tools in the first place. You know when and how long things are going to take. You are assigning each task to one person and you're letting everyone know the progress of things. If you have those 5 elements, regardless of the tools you use, you're going to make sure you're minimizing the time it actually takes you to manage it all and spend more time getting stuff done. So if that's helpful, let me know. Give it a like, give it a comment, and yeah, thanks for watching.