5 Steps to Manage Tasks for Your Brick and Mortar Store with SmartSuite

The other week I was talking with my family who has a physical establishment. They do some manufacturing work in a small little shop and something that they really struggled with was task management in their physical storefront for their business. And I was thinking, you know, a lot of people probably relate to this. You have a physical storefront, not all of your staff is on a computer or even using mobile device. And you're trying to keep everyone on the same page, but everyone is all over your shop, all over the warehouse and, and you want to try all these fancy task management tools. Maybe one like SmartSuite, the sponsor of today's video. But you're not quite sure how to implement task management for a physical business when so many of us here on YouTube are working on a computer. Like, how does that work? So what I thought would be kind of fun is I'm going to break down the five steps I shared with this family member as to how to manage tasks in a physical storefront. As someone who is kind of a project management software expert, I think I kind of earned that title by now. And I want to share these five steps in the hopes that you can implement them in your physical storefront warehouse, whatever facilities you're trying to manage, and hope that it helps you take a few steps in the direction of systemization. Because really, before we can systemize a business or automate it, or do any kind of fancy delegation, we need to have this basic task management down. At least that's what I was telling my family member. And by the end of this video, I hope you and my family member both are on the same page and able to accomplish this first prerequisite to build build your process driven foundation down the line. Step one of managing tasks for any business, whether it's remote or in person, is going to be finding a spot to put those tasks. I know, sounds kind of basic, right? But we need to decide on our choice. And the most common one people will start with is what you see right here. It's a whiteboard. Being able to have that's surprisingly hard to get off having this list right here that you can interact with. Assuming you're right handed and not left handed like me. This allows you a nice place to start getting all of the things you need to do out of your head. But for a lot of folks, physical whiteboards aren't always the best option because it's really easy to accidentally whoops, wipe them off, to not know who did what, to not be able to add things to them when you're out on the go and thinking about things in the shower, the grocery store, wherever. So while whiteboards are an option and one that many people might find useful, what we really want to think about here is something that's more towards the digital side of the spectrum that we can say this. This is our go to spot for organizing our tasks. Now, just to go a little digital here, when we are thinking about remote teams, remote environments, we typically are a little bit ahead of the curve on this. There's a lot of disadvantages to remote work, but one of the good things is that all of your workers tend to have some kind of electronic device here. Pretend this is a computer screen I can't draw clearly, and we connect these people together through some kind of task list. This task list is what keeps everyone on the same page and allows people to know what does or does not need to be done in a given day. In these kinds of remote environments, if we don't have that system, we pretty much don't have any communication. We can't get any work done because we don't know what it is we need to do. However, when you have staff all working under the same roof, whether that's you and yourself on Friday or other actual human beings, this gets a little bit more casual. Because you're already working kind of arm in arm on the given thing, you tend to be having more of your task conversations via actual conversations like hi, what are you working on today? All that kind of stuff tend to communicate the task list plus, in addition to communication, you can usually see the work you need to do. The counter is dirty, we should wipe it. The orders have been printed, we should pack them. Because work in physical workspaces tends to be more real in so many ways, this kind of task management with a whiteboard or via this kind of virtual breakdown here tends to be a lot more casual and procrastinated for far longer than the remote counterparts. However, to plan for the future, it's important that we do pick one centralized spot where we can put all of our tasks that we are going to organize and preferably have them in a digital format that allows us to add things on the go. By having things digital, we can easily get things out of our head when we're out of the office, at the dentist, at the grocery store, running errands. So that way those tasks can get all into one trusted venue where we can find what needs to be done and we can train all of our people to always trust and look at that given task list when they're trying to decide what should I do in a given day. Those are supposed to be eyeballs, by the way. They don't really look like eyeballs, they're kind of creepy. There we go. That's somehow even creepier. All right, I don't know what's happening there. So the natural next question is all right, which spot do I actually need to use? Should it be something like a whiteboard? Should it be something like a task management tool? Should I use my Apple Notes? Should I use email? What should I use? Well, if you're stuck on where to start, I'd probably look at a tool like SmartSuite. In fact, that's what I told my family member to do when they asked last week. SmartSuite is a nice balance for physical stores in the fact that it has really strong task management properties, which is what we're talking about today. And it's free for up to three users, which is also really great for those small storefronts, usually with small staff, and it allows us to organize data. Now, we're not going to talk a whole lot about data in this given video that's kind of outside of our scope, but as a physical store you tend to have a lot of things to keep track of, a lot of numbers, skus products, inventory, and so on. And while there are so many great task managers out there that I would recommend, the reason I think SmartSuite has a bit of an advantage for physical storefronts with lots of data is because when inevitably you want to start tracking some of that data in a tool, SmartSuite can work well for that as well. So despite starting off as very low cost, it kind of future proofs you a bit versus some of the other more task and project centric platforms which tend to not scale as well for these kinds of data intensive spaces like the one that you're in. Or at least again, that's what I told my family to learn more about why SmartSuite you can watch the video up at the top where we kind of break down some of the methods and how the tool actually works. But if you're willing to take my word for it and save a little time here, you can use our affiliate link found in the description area below to to actually sign up for SmartSuite for free, get on one of their fancy trials again for free and explore this with us. If you follow along for the rest of this video using that account you create through the affiliate link, you can actually have your whole task management structure set up by the time you finish this video, which is pretty cool and definitely something I'd recommend. All right, so step two of our journey, now that we have our spot, is we actually need to have a spot in the spot spot to put the actual work. If you are doing this on pen and paper, that most likely means a piece of paper. If you're on a whiteboard, it's a section of the whiteboard. But what I'm talking about here is your to do list area, your spot where you're actually going to be putting these tasks so that everyone in your organization knows, hey, if I need to do something, here's where I put it. Or if I need you help with things, here's where I go to find that task. If you followed my tip from step one and you built out your free account with SmartSuite using our affiliate link and head into your account, you'll see a Add a new solution button that looks something like this. For folks going this path, you can make your life super easy by choosing the Start with Template option and choosing either this Task management template, this is what I would recommend for most people, or the template called Project Management. You can find that by searching up at the top. This is why I would recommend only for more advanced teams that are already pretty comfortable managing projects but just need to centralize things. The key difference between these two areas is that Project management helps you think of things in chunks and and milestones and a bunch of little pieces. Whereas our Task Manager template, the one I recommend for most people, is going to be more of a traditional to do list that is very simple and easy to start using. Because I consider myself like most people, I'm going to go ahead with the Task Manager and click Use Template to load this into my account. The advantage of using this template is that as soon as you click that Use Template button, it's pretty much ready to go. All you need to do is give a peek inside one of these records, AKA like tasks. Open that up and you can see a bunch of information in here. If there's anything I don't need to have something I don't need to use, such as dependencies. Maybe I don't use those because I don't quite know what that means yet. I can go ahead and delete those fields, essentially those columns from the last view. For example, I know for my use case here I don't think I want to start using any kind of tags where I categorize things by project. Maybe down the line I'll want to categorize things, but for Now I want to keep it very simple, so. So I'm going to go ahead and remove those tags. Beyond that, I'm going to keep things just as is. Click Save and I'll know that those changes have applied to this entire spreadsheet database thing, which is called an app in SmartSuite. The last thing I'm going to do is go up to the top, click on this top area here and rename this. Something that makes sense for my team, such as store tasks. And I can change the color and icon if I want to, just for fun. And I'm going to go down and click on Delete Template Demo Data. This is going to delete all this kind of placeholder stuff and basically wipe the slate clean so I can add my own tasks without having that clutter. Once I've removed that demo data, I have a task area ready for me to start using. And I can add new tasks into this by clicking up here in the top right or clicking right here, whatever I prefer, and typing in tasks as I go. There are a lot of fancy features baked into SmartSuite in this template to help us organize things a bit better if we want to see things by categories or so on. But we don't need to worry about those views or fancy automations or filters or groups. We don't need to worry about any, any of that yet. For now, all we want to do and accomplish in this step is have one go to list in whatever your tool is of choice that you can start adding those to DOS to. Our goal by the end of this is that you have a to do list, whether that's an app in SmartSuite, a section on your whiteboard, or something else. Once we've got that though, we are set up perfectly for step number three, which is adding our tasks to our task list. All we're going to do is go into this area that we just created and click New Record or, or just click here, whichever method you prefer, and add some tasks in. Awesome. Once I've added these tasks in, I might want to open them up and just see if there are any notes I want to add. If you're someone who's not used to online task tools, which I don't blame you, they're not for everyone. But if you're new to these, this is kind of an important concept to get a hold of from the beginning. The fact that you can take a task such as clean the storefront and open it up and have almost infinite amounts of extra information, that's a Huge advantage over having a whiteboard or a sticky note. You know, we've all had those moments with sticky notes where we're writing words and we, you know, we have to write so small to fit it all on the box. We don't have to worry about that here. If we want to break down what it means to clean the storefront, maybe with a checklist of all of the stuff that goes into how to clean the storefront, you know, the right way, the way you don't have to redo it later. That's what we can break down here in this kind of subtask tasks checklist. For now, though, let's not worry about any of these extra fields unless you feel so inclined. All I want you to focus on for this step is getting things out of your head. Anything you do in your business. When you are getting the store ready for opening on Monday morning or Sunday morning, or whenever you open, or when you're getting ready to close up shop, or when you're getting ready to process orders, or when you're getting ready to train a new team member, what do you do? Whatever those things are, let's get those onto this list. For now. Let's not, you know, censor ourselves by, oh, only things that are normal or only things that are issues. Let's just put everything on here so that way we don't have that mental load of needing to remember. Besides the safety and peace of mind that comes from not having to memorize your entire to do list, once you have this written down, we can start talking about how we can get other people or things to do it. We're not going to talk about it in the scope of this video, but leave it to say SmartSuite can automate things for you. It can also help you delegate, which Speaking of delegation, let's cover that in the next step. For our fourth step of building out our task list, we want to set some some assignees. Now, if you are like most small storefront managers, business owners, realtors, dentists, hairdressers, whatever it is you do in your physical brick and mortar store, many of these tasks are probably things that you need to be responsible for. Because of that, all you need to do here is click on the dropdown in SmartSuite and assign things to yourself. This will ensure when you go to start your day every morning, SmartSuite is going to be smart enough to know, hey, you're assigned this task. Let me remind you about it up in your My Work Summary. We'll talk more about this Starting your day stuff in SmartSuite later on, but leave it to say, if you're going to be doing the task, put yourself as an assignee. If you have other people on your team who are going to log into SmartSuite and use it with you, you could also assign things to them. If you're not quite sure whether people are going to be in SmartSuite or not at this point in the game, you can also just assign them to yourself and change it later on. At this point, we also want to take a moment to add deadlines or due dates to these tasks. We want to keep track of when activities need to happen. So while you're assigning things out, also take a moment to add a deadline to each of these. This is when the thing needs to be done. Not started, not thought about, but finished by this due date. If you're using a physical piece of paper, you might just be writing this in a column or putting this on your calendar. But if you're using a software like SmartSuite, one nice thing is, is that once we have these dates in here, we can report on them. We could change this to say, a calendar view to show us all of our tasks by day, by week, by hour. However, we want to zoom things in and we also have the ability to see a summary of all of our tasks up in the My Work section, which will show us all of the tasks we have by date. Now, I'm still playing around with mine a little bit here. As you can see, I've got quite a few overdos, but yours will show you a concentrated task list of just your work. That means you can have one area such as this to show all of the tasks done by the entire team. And up here you can see just your section of the task list. And this is all in one easy one click destination that doesn't require any setup for you to use. For now, I'm going to convert my view, my layout back to that spreadsheet grid view, because that's just what I prefer to see. And I'm going to continue to add assignments and due dates to all of these until all of the tasks I know I need to do are filled out. The only rule I want you to keep in mind when it comes to this kind of assignment stuff is, is in smartsuite and in life, you have a lot of options as to who you can assign to. You can assign to various people on your team, and depending on the settings you have for your overall assignment field, you might even allow yourself to have multiple people or even teams enabled to be assigned tasks. That means multiple people could say, hey, John and Sally are responsible for doing inventory. While that sounds like a great idea, what I just want to caution everyone about is that when you have multiple assignees, sometimes you can get into a bit of a finger pointing situation. You know, like when the parents leave and they say, hey kiddos, you're responsible for cleaning up the house while we're out on date night. Great. But which kid is actually responsible? I think John's going to say it's Sally's job, and Sally's going to say it's John's job. And because of that lack of clarity, when multiple people are assigned something, oftentimes nobody really takes charge of it. And sometimes things don't actually get done. So if you're just getting started with task management, I would suggest having just one single assignee per task. If you're in a situation where you want to assign all of the kids chores, rather than just assigning chores to all of the kids, break it out piece by piece. And same with your business or your storefront here. Make sure you're breaking out all of the pieces. So you've got one singular owner. The nice thing we have about this default template, if you followed us along in step two, is that it already comes pre set up like that. You don't even have to worry about it. But if you're going the analog method, definitely keep an eye out for that. Now this is pretty good, right? We've got this pretty little spreadsheet thing thingy, and the consultant in me wants to say, yes, we're done. But in reality, are we really done? Not unless we actually use this beautiful thing. Okay, so we are back here. Oop. Okay. Not a big enough office for all this. Play. Our last step of this process is to make this a ritual. Not like the creepy cult kind, but maybe if you want to, that'll work too. Our whole goal here is just establish some kind of repeating cadence for actually using what you've built. Because if you build something pretty and you've got it on your computer screen and no one logs into a computer, who cares? It doesn't help us at all. To create your ritual, we just need three components. We need a what, we need a when, and we need a who. We need a defined action. We're going to be taking what we're going to be doing, in this case, checking our task list. We need to have a set rhythm for when we do that so it can become a habit that might be the beginning of every day, the end of every day, during a lunch break, whatever. And then we need a who. We need to know who is responsible for making sure everyone does it, and who is everyone that needs to do it. Is it just the office staff? Is it everybody? Is it the folks in the warehouse? If so, how often? The answer to this who question can sometimes result in you having multiple rituals, different ones for different types of people. But your goal here is just to have it be normal. You want it to be part of people's routine to check this information and, you know, use this information. Now, if I just move this on out of the way. See one of the advantages of digital versus actual whiteboards. I do want to go through some common ways to establish this ritual, some little hacks to make it easier. Because when it comes to physical stores and when I was chatting with my family, I know there are challenges of making this kind of stuff a habit, particularly when you've got folks who might not all be working at the same time, in the same place or with the same equipment. Now, to make this a ritual, you might need to take a slightly different approach, depending on who you are working with, who you're talking to, who your people are. So I'm going to go through some common scenarios that are relevant for my family member, and I hope that it helps you establish your rituals. So our first category of person, which I have conveniently just moved off the side of the page. Let's just move you in a little bit. Our first category here is someone who uses a electronic device. Now, this is what we're going to call the easy person, because we are dealing with technology, tech tools. If you have someone who has tech equipment because they have a iPad for work, or they have a smartphone, or they have a computer that they go to each day, your life's super easy to establish a ritual for these folks. Here's what you want to do. You want to make sure that you go into their device of choice and set a default tab. This is a setting you can do inside their browser of choice and make sure that every time they open their browser, the default tab is the tool you're trying to get them to use. For example, if I go inside Chrome and I go to Settings, I can scroll down or search for the word tab, and I will find the selection of pages that people open up to when they open Chrome. If I wanted to make sure that my Chrome users on their computer were going to always go into SmartSuite, I'd set that as a default right there and kind of force them into it. That would be a really easy step. I'd then make that part of their AM and pm, kind of start of the day, end of the day routine. Now, I know I used a computer as example here, but if someone is also using a phone, you can follow the same advice here and just have them go through that app, set it up as a default thing, and even turn on notifications on their phone. So it's really, really hard to miss phone or computer. Same kind of deal. Now, if you don't have folks on your team who have electronics, maybe they're just coming in to pick orders or to pack things or to run the embroidery machines. Number two is for them. So if you have an offline team, what you can do is get one centralized device. Now, this may add a little bit of cost to your infrastructure, but doesn't have to be anything crazy. All I'm talking About here is one old TV, one old computer, one iPad, one device that you can have in a centralized location, such as on the front desk in the break room, in the back of the shop, on the side of the warehouse, where on that device you have your tool open, in this case, your SmartSuite area, have that open on your little screen and have that tucked against the side of the break room in this case. Depending on how you have this set up, this shared kind of screen can be interactive or view only. But most importantly, this will allow folks to see what they need to do in close proximity to where they're actually doing the work. So for example, if we had this as some kind of iPad or something sitting back by where we pack all of our boxes and our orders and we have our boxes here, well, that would be really convenient because then as I'm going to pack my next box. Oh, I can look. Oh, here's the box. What does the spreadsheet say over here? What does the spreadsheet say I need to actually put in this box? These two things would be easy to reference side by side. And that's one of the advantage of this kind of central device approach. Different clients of mine have set up one of these tablets for their entire team. One per area, one per crew, one per person. Up to you. But that is a nice option for your offline team as well. It kind of gets you more of an in between between option one and option two. However, option two only works if you have a place to put that iPad or whatever. Let's say you've got a team that is Offline, but also decentralized, meaning they're kind of all over the place. There's one person over here roasting coffee. There's one person over here packing the orders. There's one person over here doing accounts payable. And all those people in all those different places cannot see that same Chromebook that you have sitting against the wall in the main office. So what do you do in those cases? Well, your third option to make this ritual is to stick with the morning and evening check in, but to do it as a meeting. Now, trust me, I am not a meetings aholic. Although, if you watch this video and you learn more about our meeting rhythm here at ProcessDriven, maybe you'll change your mind. However, sometimes meetings are the best way to get everyone focused on the same thing at the same time. Time. What this would look like is having one device, once again, whether that's the computer you already have, your phone, something, one device that has your task list on it, the one that we created previously, then on a set and recurring schedule that you treat as like church on Sunday, you don't skip it. Mr. You are going to have a recurring event to meet with your team, say every single day at 8am for 10 minutes. And all you're going to do during that meeting here is have everyone together in a little physical space here, kind of sitting on my desk, these little minion people, and you are going to look at that task list and say who is doing what? Someone, maybe you, is going to click the screen and change things to reflect. You know, what's done, what's not done, who's doing what, but everyone else is just participating in the meeting with for about 10 minutes. Doesn't have to be crazy to discuss what they're going to be doing. Some sample questions you could use could be default scrum questions such as what did you work on yesterday? What are you doing today? And is there anything in your way? Those basic questions can be perfect and with a team of 10, you can accomplish that in less than 10 minutes. Update your centralized task list from there so it's always the source of truth and repeat either every day or twice a day for everybody that is in the office at that time. The key thing to remember is making it indeed a ritual by doing it consistently, getting everyone beating on the same drum, doing things with the same rhythm. And to do that, you want to do these practices morning and night, beginning in middle of the day, whatever the cadence is consistently. And this final step of making it a ritual is really the last step you need to do in order to take your tasks, get them out of your head and manage them in a centralized, organized place for your team. Now some concluding thoughts. Because it is YouTube, so that is how you can go ahead and manage tasks for your brick and mortar or physical storefront or physical business of any kind inside one centralized system. Whether you're like many of my clients and feel like SmartSuite might be the best choice for you, or maybe you wanna go with something a little bit more analog, the important thing is that you find something, stick with it, and work that system so it can actually help your team and you literally and figuratively stay on the same page. If you'd like to work with me and my team on that journey of getting everybody on the same page and hey, not just getting them to do tasks, but also systemizing and delegating and maybe even automating, check out the description below for more information about how you can work with us at ProcessDriven to actually master your tool of choice and build out your foundation for processes. Or if that's not quite your pace yet, check out this video because we're going to go over how to use the SmartSuite mobile app for a general user in SmartSuite. While the example I use is kind of a general contracting use case, it has a lot in common with physical storefronts. And if you are someone who has people on your team who maybe don't love sitting at a computer all day, you might find that a helpful tutorial to help you assess whether SmartSuite's the right choice for you. For more information about all of this, check out the description below and get our affiliate link for SmartSuite. SmartSuite. Thank you so much for sponsoring this video and until next time everybody, enjoy the process.