Most organizations have tasks that are “stuff we do all the time” and these deserve a bit of special treatment.

For routine daily tasks, the first thing to think about is where those tasks should live in your plan structure. It might make sense to create structure under clients or projects if you want to include this stuff with your client/project billing exports. Alternatively you might want to break this work out into a folder that is outside of your client/project structure.

I’ll use our structure for demo purposes; there are many ways you can do this:

In our space, we’ve created our catch-all tasks in a folder called Ongoing as well as a low-priority task-list for these tasks also called ONGOING.

A low priority tasklist you say? How can that be – isn’t this important work? Well it is, but we don’t put estimates on these tasks, we only track against them.

We still account for the anticipated workload in the schedule. We adjust our availability downward to account for the typical time spent on admin tasks per day (ie. we set our availability to be 2 hours a day less than we actually work). That stretches out our other tasks a bit but that’s reality.

So far so good, we have a place to log time, but these tasks are not going to show up on the timesheet because they are so far in the future.

The trick is that people need to add the task to their timesheet when it is time to log work. You can do this with the add task button at the bottom of the timesheet or in the plan itself, you can right click on the task, go to tracking options, and then click Log progess on my timesheet.

The task will stick around on your timesheet for that week and into the next then it will fade off if you don’t log anymore time to it.

Here’s the good part; you can do this with any task even if you don’t own it. Helping your manager with his work? Find his task, add it to your timesheet, and track a couple of hours. Everything will show up correctly on the time tracking report.

An even better example is a standing meeting. The coordinator probably owns it, 20 people can log time to it. They can even log time to it with different activity codes if they want. For example: Meeting-Prep, Meeting-Attendance, and Meeting-Follow-up.

One benefit of this approach is that your dashboard tasklist is not cluttered with routine stuff you know you are doing anyway, yet you can still easily log time to the admin tasks. If you want the admin tasks in your face, create one for each person and put them in a tasklist near the top of your prioritized tasklists. If you do this you can consider estimating it if you want, but we recommend the availability method as more realistic.

One thing we don’t do is automatically create new instances of a recurring task like you can do in a calendaring program with meetings. Maybe someday, but not anytime soon.