Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Moni Talks Tech (and other things) is a show hosted by Monika Rabensteiner, a weird Austrian lady, who went on the journey to start her own business and is now here to tell the tale. But not only that: she will be caressing your earbuds with tips and tricks around tech tools and design - everything you need to make your online business work smarter not harder - and look better in the process.
Welcome to Moni Talks Tech and Other Things, the podcast where service based business owners and coaches like you can walk away with simple tips and tricks to level up your business and defeat the ultimate end boss, your dreaded tech set up. Are you ready for this then? Let's go.
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to another episode of Moni Talks Tech. And today we are talking about project management tools because especially if you do have a team, you will need and want a good project management tool that will be the core and the basis of your entire company. And you want this to be organised and great because otherwise, how are you gonna tell your team what you want from them? And if you tell me now that you organise everything via email let me tell you, you are not paying your team enough because it's really annoying and the chance of you losing things and wasting time on just communication is mind-blowing.
And stop doing this immediately. That's what project management tools are for. And I've been working online now for six years this year, hello anniversary or something, and I have tried a lot of them and I've used a lot of them with different clients because obviously as a service provider you accommodate what your client is already using. So you get to use a lot of different ones. And the ones that I mainly used in recent years have been Trello and Asana. I've also had a look into MeisterTask, which is probably made by a German company considering it's called MeisterTask, and also Zoho. And I know that everybody has their favorite and the favorite way of doing things. And a lot of people love Trello because of their Kanban view and because especially in IT, a lot of people use like Scrum and I don't even know an agile , I don't even know how it's pronounced.
I just read it. And in my German, not English native speaking brain, I am saying ' agil' all the time, but I don't think that's right. And now that I have to say it out loud, it's one of those things where, you know, , you've only ever read a word but never heard it. So maybe it's 'agil', maybe it's Agile, I don't know. And uh, scrum it, all these things. So those are all very fond of Kanban view and that's why a lot of people often really enjoy, Trello as well in, in these situations. And a lot of people think Asana is too complicated. I personally really enjoy Asana because of the to-do list taking off situation that is going on there. It also has different kinds of views where you can switch between a Kanban view and a board view, but the regular view and the view of your tasks is obviously mostly like a checklist of things, which is really satisfying if you can take something off, which is not necessarily something that you can do in Trello unless you drag it into a done column, for example.
MeisterTask. I really, really enjoyed the UI from, because I am a sucker for an I UI that looks modern and makes me feel like I'm kind of using a spaceship, which is not a spaceship and it's not as complicated as a spaceship, but at the same time it just looks nice, it has nice icons, it's very colorful and it looks modern and that just makes me happy and , um, sometimes that's what I just really enjoy it having a look at that, but I never got to use it to its core and test it a lot. So it was just me figuring it out and it was really enjoyable, but I don't know how it works when you actually get to the bones of it.
Zoho on the other hand, can be really overwhelming because there's so much going on. They're redeveloping something, developing something new, recreating things and they,have one great idea and then immediately creates a tool for it so that there's a lot going on. But if you know where you find things after months or months of using it, then, Zoho can also be decent enough and okay. But you need somebody who really kind of needs to know what's going on for this to, to even be set up in a way that is efficient for you. And I also think is a small business owner. It's too big of a thing. It's as if you would shoot with Cannons, a tiny little bird. It's not really necessary to have a massive tool like Zoho in the back of your business. And now we are about five minutes into the episode and never once did I mention the tool that I actually want to talk to you about today and this tool is ClickUp and my old colleague will probably hopefully jump up in with big joy right now because, because of her I even got to work in ClickUp.
Um, so hi Rachel, I hope you're happy. and ClickUp really changed the way I work and the way I see my work and part of it and a lot of it I'm very aware is due to the fact that Rachel, who was the online business manager with one of my previous clients and is an absolute legend, I will put her contacts in the show notes because you really need to check her out. She has a lot of amazing templates that you can use and get from her and she's just incredible. And a lot of it is due to how Rachel set up the company in the back because previously I was constantly wondering why the fuck am I doing so much work? I only have a few, so few tasks, it takes me so such a long time. And I kept wondering if I am the issue , like if I am the issue that I feel so overwhelmed and maybe I wasn't cut out for this type of job, right?
But once Rachel joined the company and granularly said a word really split up my tasks into all the sub-tasks that are coming with this task, it all of a sudden gave me visibility about what about the work that I'm doing that I wasn't even fully aware of. And it was just really life changing for me in that moment and mind blowing at the same time. And part of it, and a lot of it is due to Rachel because she's incredible and epic, but also because ClickUp just made this all possible. And after working a couple of years with this tool, I can really say that this is one of my favorite project management tools out there. And I think even though it looks scary at the beginning, everybody who switches to it will in the end not regret having switched to it. And here are a couple of reasons why.
First of all, you can set up dependencies and block tasks based on whether somebody else has completed their tasks that is connected to what you're actually doing or not. And I know this is also possible in Asana, but at the same time, the way that this is displayed in ClickUp shows you immediately when you look at your to-dos for the day for example or for whenever you have or however you view it, that there is something that you are blocking or that blocks you without even having to click into the task first. At the same time, it's really easy to navigate between all the projects that you've got going on and there are a lot of additional features that you can use with ClickUp as well. So for example, you can use it to create forms and get all your leads pushed into ClickUp.
You could even use it as a client relationship management tool if you wanted to. You could even collect your leads with it. You set up forms, you embed the form into your website, have people inquire and create a task in a separate project, for example. Super easy to do. You don't even have to pay any other tool to do it for you. You can set that up in ClickUp and boom, there we go. Also something that's really nice with click up and I know that Trello has that as well. For example, our automations Asana just very recently got workflows added to it but only on a business plan, which is kind of an oversight if you ask me. But ClickUp already comes with automations enabled. You can automatically assign somebody a task if a task is automatically created in a certain project.
Let's say you set up this lead capture form for your website and you have a person who is doing your client outreach or your client customer relationship and manages your inbox or whatever, then you can automatically tag this person in the lead task as soon as the task is created automatically as soon as people fill out the form. So that takes already takes away a bunch of your time, during your regular workflows where you need to go in and check and you will not be able to create the bottleneck like that and just things can happen automatically without you even moving your finger basically. And then there are just general things that ClickUp those really well usability wise. Let's say if you, which is something that I do because I really enjoy seeing everything I need to do in one list, like, as I mentioned the person who loves to tick off to dos, this is why I sometimes move over to having paper to-do list because it turns out that this is the easiest way for me to get shit done is sometimes by having it visually in front of me and ticking it off.
But, what you can do as well is have one of these lists in all of your tools, like especially in Asana and in ClickUp you can do that. ClickUp has this everything tag, which shows you everything in all the projects and when it is due and sorted and have it only visible for you, for example. And the cool thing about this is that you can just easily get into all the tasks and all the projects that you want to from this everything task, which seems a bit annoying in Asana because you can't really do that the way you potentially want to, but it's sometimes really simple to move between the things and to view also sub-tasks that are connected to a bigger task, for example, because you can group them based on the top task, which just makes the overview way better on what belongs to what and just structures the brain in a really nice way, or at least it does with mine.
And once again, I'm very aware that everybody has their own tastes and things they like and things they don't like. And it really also depends on how you would even be able to set all that up for yourself and how structured your own brain is. Because while my brain is a problem solving brain and logical, most of the time it's not very structured like it, there is still a lot of chaos going on and organisationally, sometimes that's a real mess. That doesn't mean that I can't solve any problems. Those are two different things in the brain . So both logical but chaotic as well. So sometimes you need help or templates from people that help you create something that really works for you. And as I mentioned, Rachel has a lot of them and you can always find them somewhere online as well to find something that works for you, maybe test a bunch of of templates whether or not they work for you and you really need to find the thing that elevates you and your business.
And while I still would suggest that you go with ClickUp because for me personally, as I mentioned, it was life-changing and it's an incredible tool. I know that you might really not get on with it very well and might really love Trello on the other hand to each their own. But if you take anything from this episode then maybe just give, ClickUp a try, have a look at it, maybe you'll find some nice tutorials. Again, check out rachelgunn@rachelgunn.com or @RachelGun_OBM on Instagram. I will put those in the show notes because otherwise you will probably not spell the name right and maybe you will find click up just as life changing as I did. And you will have a new tech love or project management love. If you want to find me, you can catch me on Instagram @MoniRocksYourSocks, so you can check out my website monirocksyoursocks.com. Thank you for tuning in again this week and we'll hear each other again next week for another incredible episode. I just say that as if that's always the case. Maybe you're bored of out of your mind. I hope not. I hope it's helpful. And if you want more helpful tips and tricks and things to hear about tech and other, shit then tune back in next week. See you. Well hear you I guess. Bye.