We love a good task manager! In fact I (Frank) really learned how to be a good self-manager by learning how to use a good task application. I was never really good at managing myself in the past. I’m more of a creative, impulsive, idealistic, artist, thinker type. But I love a good application, so that made it fun for me to learn some basic productivity techniques. Now, I can honestly say that I’m a pretty decent manager of my time and attention.

Actually, I’m kind of awesome at it. (Awesome? Yes. Humble? Not so much.) I have a bunch of jobs (by choice), all of which require creativity, frequent production of fresh content, and balancing the urgent vs. important. I fail often. I really do. The key thing is knowing how to get back on track when balls get dropped or a project falls apart. I can usually pull that off.

Becoming an awesome self-manager has two negative side effects.

First, you might make the mistake of taking on too much. When you suddenly become exponentially more productive you need time to test your limits. Not easy at first. I use the GTD approach to self-management. It took me a few months to master it. After that, it took me 6 more months to dig myself out of a lot of over-reaching. Now I coach others to take it slow. The increased productivity at the beginning can be deceptive. You feel like superman and then realize you’re not when you get buried under a mountain of over-commitment.

Second, you might start to get annoyed with the “uninitiated” among us. When you get comfortable in the world of good self-management you start to think everyone else is lame or even crazy. “What? You didn’t write down what you just agreed to do? Can I punch you in the face now?” “Are you going to put that on your calendar?” “What’s our next-action folks? Or are we just going to blow smoke all day?” Obnoxious, I know, but when the best productivity practices become intuitive, the worst practices become more and more unacceptable.

What is a self-management Ninja to do?

First, be gracious, you cocky jerk.  “Wink” implied, but really, be nice.

Second, use Ta’Go Pro to hold people accountable for the things they agreed to do. Let’s face it, if you are into this kind of thing it is because you are looking to encourage better collaboration, communication, and (dare we say it) get control over some of the slackers around you! Some great ways to get started with this in this article.

No one wants to be controlling, but in most situations someone has to have some control. Not only will Ta’Go Pro enable better communications; it will facilitate accountability that no staff meeting could possibly produce. Imagine that key tasks assigned to your work group were easily monitored by the whole team. Imagine being able to easily track where each team member is in a project by simply opening a tab in your browser. Imagine having an easy way to remind a team member that they made a commitment to do something and simply didn’t do it.

Priceless, isn’t it? Yes, but it will actually be pretty affordable. We’ll talk about that another day.

Let me start with a few irritating rhetorical questions that I will then answer.

Have you ever needed something from someone and it just never comes? Of course you have. 

Have you ever confronted that person to find them defensive, forgetful, and in denial about their responsibility for the work? Yep.

Have you ever had a due date arrive to have someone tell you that they would have done something, but you failed to give them what they needed and claimed to ask for? Too often.

This kind of thing makes people grumpy, causes friction in a team, and can lead to someone getting fired when the frustration level comes to a boil. Beyond the obvious issues, there is a more subtle and more dangerous result of this kind of nonsense. This kind of person often leaves others around them unsure about their own role in the failure. “Was it really my fault that they it didn’t get done?” “Did I forget to do that, or did they fail to ask for help?” It creates a kind of haze and confusion in your workflow, and even worse, in your team.

In my other job, where I deal with lots of unpaid volunteers, I’ve had to learn how to deal with this kind of thing while trying to keep the organization emotionally healthy. There are a few simple steps one can take to remove the haze, bring clarity, and, perhaps most important, bring accountability to team members. Here they are:

1. Write down anything and everything that someone asks you to do for them.

The brief conversations you have with a team member can either be a waste of time, or the means by which projects get done faster and more efficiently. Just write down what people ask you to do and make sure that you do it in a timely manner.

You might actually be the one who is causing the problem. You think, if they really needed this or that from me to get it done, why didn’t they remind me? Simple, you provided them with an excuse NOT to do some thing that they already didn’t want to do. Don’t be their excuse!

2. Write down anything and everything that you ask anyone else to do.

If you don’t keep track of the specific tasks that you’ve delegated to other people you are doomed to failure.

So you’re a Ninja of self-management right? You do what you say you will do, but others . . . not really. They don’t write it down, forget, and so on. How can you get them to be like you? You can’t, but you can start tracking what they’ve agreed to do for you That keeps people on their toes (a simple principle from productivity “Yoda” David Allen—read the book!).

Back to me and my volunteers. I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, but I’m relying on people to do what they said they’d do. When they know that I track our “agreements” they expect me to come looking for their work. They are also more likely to simply say, “nope, I failed to do it,” and apologize instead of making some stress-creating excuse or pointing a finger at me or someone else. It makes for less confrontation, and more honest discussion! It just does.

3. Keep talking.

People generally don’t rush to hang with the person they know they have failed to deliver their work to. Don’t let it go too long without checking in on all those agreements you wrote down.

4. Have honest talks about what’s holding them up.

A lot of times a person has some static in their heads about a task that they can’t quite identify. When you start talking about it with them it will often surface (i.e. they need some info they don’t have, or something from you, or they just don’t get what your looking for). These problems are usually easy to solve once they are identified, but they are often identified way too late. Talk about what’s happening and talk early.

5. Be thankful when someone does what they should have done.

But that’s what we pay them for! Count your blessings. A person who actually does what they are paid to do is a treasure. Don’t just feel thankful, express it to them. Most people are extremely under-appreciated. Be that person! Be the person that makes people feel good about their contribution to something larger.

Remember, you will become what you celebrate. Modeling best practices is essential. Praising them is even better. Celebrate people who deliver and you will create more people who deliver. Plus, people who are made to feel confident will tend to become increasingly more competent. They just do, and that makes everything more awesome. Creativity, productivity, collaboration—all of these flow more freely in environments where people are appreciated.

Where does Ta’Go Pro fit into this?

Everywhere. Instead of just writing something down for myself, a team member can use Ta’Go Pro to delegate a simple task to me and vise versa. Now there is no question that we both know who is responsible for what.

Instead of just talking, we can update the whole team with a status, or a question, or a mock-up or whatever. It makes project-specific communication simple. What’s that mean? Instead of tracking endless emails about some project, use Ta’Go Pro to communicate regarding specific projects.

You can even use Ta’Go Pro to give a virtual “you’re awesome” when a person checks a task off as “done”.

In other words, Ta’Go Pro will solve all the world’s problems and make everything awesome!

Ta’Go Pro is still in development, but for us (the creators) it’s alive! We can taste it. On a day-to-day basis we think thing like, “if Ta’Go were done, it would be perfect for solving this problem!” We know what all the crackling and drilling in the lab is going to become and we’re psyched. But what do you care? You don’t know us, and haven’t yet tasted the awesomeness that is our soon-to-be-in-Alpha-testing little web-application. So how can we get you excited?

The story behind Ta’Go Pro might give you a better idea of where we’re going with the product than even future demos! Maybe not, but we thought it might help our potential/future users to get a feel for what Ta’Go Pro will be like if we share a little bit about why we started building it.

There are three key components to Ta’Go Pro. The first component started with a desire for a CRM (Customer Relations Manager) that didn’t make us want to harm ourselves when we tried to use it. If there is anything great out there we either couldn’t find it or couldn’t afford it. Being stubborn and crazy, we decided to design our own!

The second component started with a desire for a great PMS (ahem . . . Project Management System). We tried some decent project managers, but nothing that felt as intuitive and fun as a personal task managers.

The third component of Ta’Go grew out of the fact that we didn’t want to have one application to manage other people and another to manage our own private tasks and projects—a personal task manager. We wanted one interface for both—one place with all our stuff! One place for Customer Relations, managing team-based projects, and all our personal tasks.

So, we’re building a web-based application that would give us a solid CRM, clean and simple PMS, and an accessible personal task manager. But its even better than that. You’ll see. We are making it and we are psyched!

In the end, we hope you use it, but if you don’t we most certainly will and that is worth the trouble!

A good company or work group needs, among other things, 3 things to be productive and effective: 1) Good Self-Management , 2) Team/Project-Management and 3) Customer Management. Ta’Go Pro is a simple, yet powerful web-based application designed to meet these 3 needs.

Manage Yourself: Ta’Go Pro makes it easy for you to capture all your ideas and commitments in one place, organize those ideas into simple actions and lists. It also allows you the freedom to Tag each action so that you can easily customize it to fit your own style. Into GTD? Use the Tags as @contexts. Want to assign priorities? Use Tags to mark an action as “urgent” or “on hold”. It is flexible enough to let you implement whatever eccentric little system makes sense to you!

Collaborate with, Manage & Track Your Team: Ever come out of a meeting excited about all the great ideas you came up with? You feel great about the possibilities and the new direction they are going to take you in.

Usually, that feeling lasts a few minutes at most. Then reality sets in. You’ve felt this way before and it lead to frustration and disappointment.

What seemed unforgettable during the meeting is now a cloudy blob of ideas and unclear expectations. Who’s doing what? Where do we start?

Ta’Go helps you and your team organize your ideas in a simple and intuitive way. Turn ideas into simple actions. Delegate actions to the proper team member. Give an action a start date and/or a due date. We’ve even added some simple social elements to Ta’Go! Nothing gimmicky or overbearing, just some simple tools so that team members can use to easily post comments, status updates, files, and any other info relevant related to what they’re working on—enough to connect, too little to clutter!

Customer Relations Management: Good productivity is about more than managing tasks and teams. We’ve made it simple to keep all of your customer related data straight. Who do I need to call today? Who is did I talk to about this or that project? What is that ongoing joke that I use on that secretary to get her to let me talk to her boss? You get the point.

One Application: Ta’Go Pro keeps it simple, and keeps it together. Ta’Go Pro offers you one clean interface to meet yourself, your team, and your relationships with your customers.

No Software to download: If you’re reading this post on a computer, you have all the equipment you need to use Ta’Go Pro. It doesn’t matter if you’re using a Mac, a PC, Linux, or something your uncle made in his basement. Ta’Go will work from any machine connected to the web. No IT guys. No hardware upgrades. No productivity-killing installation issues. Just sign up, log in, and be awesome!

Coming Soon: After all that you’re psyched, but it’s not done yet! We’re getting closer every day! Sign up to be a Beta tester here.