Time-Saving Project Management Tools for Healers, Coaches, and Therapists
Organized chaos.
This was something I’d always tell my mom when she asked me to clean my room as a kid. Sure, it was a mess, but the chaos totally made sense to me! When it comes to household items, I’m a self-proclaimed professional pile-er. It drives my husband crazy. I have a pile for papers, a pile of clothes, a pile of pens, a pile of knick knacks. But the piles never seem to find a home. They just pile, and pile, and pile. Then I end up with millions of little piles and I can't find anything 🙈 Can you relate?
This can happen in your business too
As visionary healers, there is a lot of incoming information you get confronted with on a daily basis: new ideas, new knowledge, client conversations, collaborations. This information generally gets scattered about in notebooks, spreadsheets, chart notes, google docs, email threads, and Voxer feeds.
When organized chaos reaches capacity
For the most part, it’s fairly easy for you to recall information when you need it. However, you will get to a point when you’ve reached capacity and there is no more room for the piles to pile and you can’t remember where things are. It gets even more challenging when you start to work with a team and they also need to know what’s going on.
Project management tool: a home for all your piles 📚
The solution? A digital task, project, or workspace management tool. These type of tools help you collect, organize, access, prioritize, and share your work with others. At its most basic level, it’s a way to assign a person and time to a task, helping you to prioritize what needs to get done. There is a slight difference between each which I will explain briefly:
Task management: these tools primarily help you organize all of your tasks so you have one single to-do list. Great for solo entrepreneurs who are just dipping their toes into organizational tools. Great options: Todoist, Google Tasks.
Project management: these tools add one more layer where you can organize your tasks by project. These are great tools if you plan a lot of program launches or work with a lot of different collaborative teams. Great options: Asana, Monday, Basecamp, Trello.
Workplace management: these tools take it to another level, not only including project and task management, but also other operational needs like documentation, processes, and automation. What’s slick with these all-in-one type of tools is the relational connections it provides so you can instantly pull info from multiple piles within context. Great options: Notion, ClickUp, SmartSuite.
How does this save me time?
The general basis of these tools is to get all the informational piles out of your head and spreadsheets and into one central tool to organize your thoughts. You’re basically handing over the brainpower that used to be running on overdrive to technology to do the heavy lifting for you. This in turn reduces all the time spent trying to recall information from your brain. Here are a handful of ways these tools can provide you more space in your workday:
Turn ideas into actions. Assign an owner, priority, and due date so your ideas turn into actionable tasks, not a lonely pile taking up space in your head. Getting this information in searchable, digital format cuts down the recall time it takes for you to remember all the bits and pieces of each task.
Communicate with your team more efficiently. Invite your contractors, employees, and collaborators into your tool to streamline communications around a specific task versus ongoing email threads. Your team also gets a bigger context on where their work fits in with the overall vision which can cut down on time-consuming errors based on misled assumptions. They’re not all mind readers 😉
Templatize and automate your processes. If there is a general process you use every time you create a podcast, write a newsletter, launch a course, you can easily create a set of tasks, time estimates and assignees, that you can re-use every time including links to applicable information so you don’t need to spend time looking in your backlogs.
Get a birds-eye view of you and your team’s capacity. Say goodbye to overbooking yourself. A project management tool can help you see what you have on your plate and help you shift schedules for you and your team depending on your capacity at any given moment. Many tools let you add a time estimate for every task helping you get really granular with how much time work is really going to take.
Capture ideas on the go. All of these tools have mobile apps that allow you to view your calendar and collect ideas the instant they come to you which often can happen on a walk or at the grocery store. Attach voice recordings and photos of your napkin notes to keep it all together in its rightful spot.
Visualize your work. Create dashboards to see what you have on your plate, what is bringing in the most revenue, what is planned over the next 6 months.
How to find the right solution for you
If you feel like you’re at a point where you could really use some time savings and organization in your work-life, here is where I would start:
Get clear on your needs and preferences.
Try a couple options out to see what feels great to you. Most have free trials.
Start with a small task list, then build the rest out as get more comfortable with the layout.
Alternatively, if time is of important and you recognize you just don’t have the brainpower to do this, you can sign up for Your Holistic Business Blueprint. In less than a week, I can recommend the exact tool(s) that aligns with your vision, preferences, and a plan to build within your current capacity. We’ll also go deep on your work processes to see where we might be able to identify even more time-saving opportunities so you can get back to your relaxed, happy self again.
