Phillip Durban, Director at Hudson Architects – an award winning global architectural practice, explains how he breathed new life into the internal running of his company with a productivity tool that takes on a uniquely visual approach to task management.
At the tail end of the recession back in 2012, Hudson Architects found themselves overwhelmed with new projects which each employee attempted to keep an individual to-do list for, in order to track and action daily responsibilities.
“Until 2 years ago, our normal business practice was to have a full team meeting every Monday where we would go round the room allowing each person to announce what they needed to do most urgently. We would then try to assimilate this information – and within the same meeting, find the best way to achieve and resource the task.
I then stumbled across something called DropTask and it instantly “rocked my boat”… So for the last 2 years we’ve had a principle that if anything is being done in the company it needs to show up somewhere in a DropTask project…”
Hudson Architects now use DropTask, a uniquely visual task management tool that helps them divide their projects into separate groups for general office duties and specific building developments, whilst using custom project templates to quickly repeat similar assignments. Decoding text takes a large amount of mental energy, but with DropTask’s visual display naturally lessening the load, projects become more concise, clear and interesting – which is just what the team needed to remain fully focused on their outputs.
“DropTask’s visual style not only made it very easy to explain to everyone how it worked and why we should have it, but it also made all our staff enthusiastic to start entering their own projects. …[Architects] instinctively respond better to very visual organizational tools – rather than just very long lists! But apart from DropTask’s intuitive visual strengths, there are other essential features which make it very powerful, including the ability to very easily allocate a fully defined task to any person inside or outside of the organization.”
“DropTask has been powerful enough to subtly inspire new ways of working and has given us an intelligent overview of the totality of our workload – when that was otherwise very difficult to achieve!”
For more information on DropTask, visit www.droptask.com
