How successful recurring task management can increase productivity

The modern workplace can be one of innovation and constantly pushing boundaries. Across industries, fresh thinking and creative impetus are transforming services, products, and even the nature of work itself. But successfully translating good ideas into reality requires an effective strategy to streamline workflows and organize tasks in a smart and thoughtful manner. One of the most critical components of this is the management of recurring tasks.

Recurring task management doesn’t just mean checking off a daily to-do list. Rather, it’s about giving you and your team regular reminders that instill good habits, create clarity, and ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Whether used to guide day-to-day processes or as part of long-term projects, excellent recurring task management creates routines that enhance the work process and increase productivity.

The challenges of recurring tasks

Recurring tasks are an inherent part of any workplace. In fact, they’re often so vital that with no tool in place to manage them, it’s difficult to keep things running smoothly—or running at all. Frequently recurring tasks can become so mundane that their importance is overlooked, and workers become careless in their execution.

In other cases, the valuable recurring processes get lost in the hectic environment of competing priorities and tight deadlines. Meanwhile, infrequent recurring tasks often leave teams scrambling at the last minute or are simply forgotten.

Regardless of the exact nature of the issues, recurring tasks present challenges that can compromise productivity if not managed correctly.

The advantages of customizable recurring task management

Well-designed recurring task management provides a simple yet powerful way of organizing and automating tasks, whether they occur once a day or once a year—or every other month on a Tuesday. 

On the most basic level, platforms designed to manage repetitive tasks typically allow you to enter a start date and set an interval of repetition. When the task is completed, the next occurrence will automatically populate. With this system, each task must only be manually created once and remains visible in a team or individual’s project at all times.

However, all work and workers are unique. As such, the best recurring task management systems are customizable, providing the flexibility you need to optimize repeat tasks for you, your team, and your organization. This can include:

• Setting expiry dates to indicate when you want the task to stop repeating
• Setting repetition for any dates and frequency you want rather than being limited to daily/weekly/monthly options
• Select how many times you want the task to repeat
• Editing the task and choosing to apply these changes to only the current copy of the task or all future repeating copies
• Pausing and resuming tasks
• Viewing other copies of your repeating tasks
• Duplicating tasks with templates

These options give team members the ability to use repeat tasks in ways that make sense for them individually and collectively. 

How recurring task management increases productivity

Thoughtful recurring task management designed around your needs can have significant advantages in managing work better. These benefits include:

• Helping to identify critical processes and disciplines, and ensuring they’re not missed
• Setting up and reinforcing good habits
• Creating a sense of routine
• Enhancing accountability
• Reducing cognitive workload
• Turning the focus to high-level information versus granular details

These can all be meaningful advantages for teams and individuals by providing clarity and direction while helping them manage their time and attention. Priorities and expectations are clearly laid out, a rhythm is established, and distractions are eliminated. All of these can translate into improved focus and more fruitful collaborations — and, ultimately, increased productivity.

Choosing the right platform

Recurring task management is an invaluable tool to improve the way you work. It can help you and your team see the big picture without forgetting the little things. However, realizing its full potential requires choosing the right platform. This means not only selecting a platform that offers customizable repeating task features that help your business run like a well-oiled machine but also one that offers more than recurring task management alone.

An all-in-one productivity platform that includes user-friendly recurring task management offers your team a complete online workspace designed to streamline workflow. With Flow, your team will have everything it needs to move projects from concept to completion with features that support better organization, prioritization, and communication.

Flow’s power is making project and task management simple. Whether it’s creating a weekly reminder to send deliverables or tools to remind about regular tasks, Flow makes it easy.

To learn how Flow can help unlock your team’s full potential, start your free trial today!