A New Year! Many of us start with a list of things we want to accomplish in the year, and then many of these are forgotten over time.
A popular New Year’s resolution is to get yourself more organised the following year. What a perfect time to start using the Planner and to organise your Projects and/or Teams.
Customers who have adopted the Planner way of working have not looked back. It is an easy-to-manage, integrated and intuitive way of working. Information about the task will also get emailed to you with specific updates and if you pay for another planner tool, you can reduce costs by using the Planner which is part of the Business Licence for Microsoft.
What is the Planner?
The Planner is a great online Microsoft tool to help you keep track of your tasks, organise your projects and manage your workload. Within the Planner, you can set up many different ‘Planners’, allowing you to split your workload into different groups, for example, you may create Planners for different projects, organisational teams or daily tasks. At 365 Training we have a Planner for our Marketing Activity, Sales Activity, Training Activity and Admin Activity. Each of those Planners are linked to different Teams. You can set up individual Planners, but it is also very effective to set up a Planner as part of a Team and assign tasks to different members. A great benefit to using the Planner is that tasks can be assigned to people outside of your organisation, and you can have as many Planners as you wish.
How do I use the Planner?
The default view when using Planner is the Board View with the tasks separated into “Buckets”. You can title these Buckets whatever you’d like, to help you organise your tasks in a way that makes sense to you.
Tasks can be set up with checklists of subtasks, and you can add additional information within each task such as deadlines, progress status and priority level. You can even add notes within tasks for other Team members for reference, and link in documents that are relevant to the job.
The Planner will also email you specific updates on your tasks, helping you stay on top of your workload and aware of any new tasks assigned by other Team members.
The Planner integrates with other Microsoft 365 applications such as Outlook, Teams and To Do, helping you manage your projects using a cohesive system.
What next?
If you’ve mastered the basics of the Planner and are intrigued to find out more about how the Planner and the whole of Microsoft 365 can benefit your business, get in touch so we can discuss a plan and the bespoke next steps for you.
