I recently started to use Smartsheet for helping to manage my tasks, duties, and projects. I found an existing template from them and am using it pretty much as-is. Our college has been using Smartsheet for a couple of years now and it’s been very good overall.
My template features a pretty standard array of fields:
- Task
- Category
- Status
- WBS No.
- Assigned to
- Start Date
- End Date
- Duration
- % Done
- Comments
- Predecessors
- and the standard Smartsheets Conversations (comments), Attachments, etc.
This tool replaces what I had been doing previously. Not long after the start of COVID, I was overwhelmed with work. I don’t mind juggling, but I didn’t even know what I was juggling at that point. My previous system wasn’t working for me so I switched to using hidden, free blocks on an alternate, private Outlook calendar. This helped me to block off time for what I needed to do without cluttering up my main calendar which is shared.
Back to Smartsheet, I’m still able to get a good view of what I need to do and manage everything decently. I’m a visual person, so I’m mostly missing out on the graphical view of a calendar with blocks for time to work on projects. That’s been OK so far. I do have the Gantt feature for larger projects, but I still don’t use that view much. It’s mostly useful for the dates.