Project Management: Simple TO-DO List

Whether you’re a web programmer, or graphic designer you know the importance of keeping on task, and knowing the state of all the projects you are currently juggling.Â When you start out this might not be a big issue as maybe you only have 1 or 2 projects going at any one specific time, but as your business grows you will at some point be forced to have some form of a to-do list, time tracker tool, etc…

Today I am going to inform you of some of the most important things you need to keep track of for every project.Â The below list is what I think are the bare essentials:

Description of Project
Company Name
Date Started/ Ended
Estimated Time and Actual Time
Billed?
Paid?

Let’s go through each of these a little more in detail.

Description of Project

A detailed description of what the project entails.Â You don’t want this to be too vague as you want to separate all your different projects.

Company Name

This is self-explanatory for the most part, but down the company you will be billing.Â If desired, you can put contact information such as address, phone number, and email.Â I usually don’t put this in this TO-DO document as it can get too bloated, but you should have this information somewhere.

Date Started / Ended

Mark the day the project was started and finished so that later on you can see what the turnaround time was for that particular project.Â Then in the near future you get a similar job; you can look back and see “oh, that took me 6 weeks last time”.

Estimated Time and Actual Time

The time is even more crucial than the date started / ended section above.Â If you are like me; you make your quotes on a rough estimate of how much time the project is going to take you.Â For example, if I figure a project will take me 60 hours I will times this by my predetermined rate.Â Now if I record that the estimated time was 60 hours, and really it took me 90; I can look back on similar projects down the road and make sure I charge for the 90 hours instead of the 60 I did on the first quote.Â It is definitely a chore estimated your time when you start, but as you do it more and more you get a good idea of your actual time needed.

Billed?

A simple X in this field can assure you that you have invoiced this client, and are waiting to receive a cheque in the mail!Â Once you do full-time work, you sometimes forget what you have invoiced and what you haven’t.Â Not something you want to forget about!

Paid?

Lastly, when you receive that cheque; mark an X in this column to record that you have in fact been paid for this work, and you don’t need to leave nasty phone calls!Â Luckily I haven’t had to do that much yet.