Today I want to talk about an amazing tool that we use to really run the beating heart
of our business.
This is a collaboration task management, project management tool called Podio.
There's plenty of them out there.
This one I really liked because it has a great way of reporting on the completion of projects
that we can screenshot and send them to our clients really easily.
They're going to tell you a whole mess of interesting sales stuff on this homepage,
what are the feature they've got going on.
We're going to skip right into the middle of doing this thing.
But before I do, let's have a look at the pricing because this is one of the things
I really like.
Certainly they have a bunch of plans they want you to buy - your Basic, your Plus, your
Premium.
Those might change over time.
But if you're not sure and you just want to check it out, make sure you scroll down and
do this Try Podio Free option which is what we're going to do right now.
We need to setup a test account.
A test account, which I'll put my name on it, and we'll figure out a password.
What's a neat password?
Figure out a password here.
There we go, that's better one.
And we will go ahead and sign up.
It's going to send me an email.
Let me just sneak off and grab that email.
I'm going to hit confirm and then it's going to log us straight in.
Once I hit confirm, it's going to ask me to do a whole mess of interesting stuff.
Goodness gracious, what kind of company are we?
I guess we'll out ourselves down as marketing.
How do I intend to use this task management for sure and phone number, let's skip that
one.
What it does is bring us to all these training, skip all of that.
Eventually it brings you to this page here and it's trying to give me some helper on
the right-hand side telling me how to do things.
Requesting a call to talk to someone.
I'm going to whip passed all of that and just do my own thing.
So, what is Podio all about?
The basic unit of Podio is a Task.
And if I click on T, it allows me to create a new task.
Every task has the detail of the task, who is actually doing the task and you can see
my name because I'm the only guy enroll in here so far, what the due date is and the
time of that day if you want.
And this is the really important one, what project or workspace it's going to be associated
with.
There's nothing there right now, and so just associate it with the empty idea of project.
And you can put in more details, attach files, labels and so on.
Tasks are everything and they group by projects, which you can see up here all deliverables.
Now, you can hit this button that says Add App.
Then you can go to the App Market and find huge numbers of free apps that you can actually
install, but I urge to not get too excited about that.
Because really all they are, is different wrapping on the same basic idea of grouping
tasks.
So I'm not going to do that, I'm going to come back to clicking on Podio.
When you click on Podio, what it does is it give you this play by play page which is designed
to summarize everything.
This is the activity stream, what everyone's been up to.
Now it's done all of this things for me, it has joined me on all of these groups.
But normally, its got stuff like who's doing what task, when and how it's going.
Over here at projects there aren't any but normally lists them everyone.
Over here is who's on the system, which right is just me; and favorite apps and so on.
And this whole thing is configurable and that's excellent because you're going to want to
change that around.
Let's start off by the idea of workspaces.
Again, tasks are the essential item grouped in projects, grouped in workspaces.
If I click on this Workspace thing, it sets up some automatic ones for me.
But I'm just going to go ahead and start one from scratch to get the idea.
I'm going to call it My Projects.
I'm going to make it open which means that everybody who is in my network can actually
see it.
As soon as I create a project, it wants to know who is in it.
For example, I might put myself I in it, which makes sense, or I might invite my assistant,
Andrea, to it as well.
And she might become part of this too.
And it goes ahead and sends out an email to all of those people.
But again, I'm in the free version so I want keep that to under five people for now.
If I want to invite more people, I can click on Invite from the workspace.
Right now, all I got in this workspace is nothing.
I've got this activity app which just shows me these stuff.
So I am going to want to start from scratch and grab app from the market.
I've found that there's only one or two apps that I really want.
And this Project App is one of them.
So I click on Projects, I click on next and it installs it.
Thanks for coming in my workspace.
If I go back to that workspace now, there it is there under My Projects on the left.
I'm going to find there's Andrea who now joined.
And going to find the projects icon.
This is where it gets interesting because now I can crate my own projects, fantastic.
I might create a project called Website which might be building a website.
I pick a manager, probably me.
I can put start and finish dates all of these kind of stuff, like I'm planning it or whatever
else.
And save it.
Then I can come back and I can create another new project.
Let's do that.
The next one might be Social Media.
You might get a sense now that we in the business of web stuff and social media is part of that.
Maybe I'd do one more project which could be a YouTube Channel.
Right now, all I have is these projects and a manager for each, which is defining how
I'm going to do all of these stuff.
If I go back one step.
I can list all of my projects at once and I can see this box layout.
What's neat is if I want to do other layouts, I hit Switch Layout, and I can go to a table
or a list.
All of those are very helpful.
Or I can make it calendar-based.
What's cool about this is, because this is a database, I can change this.
If I think, you know what, I really don't want goals and metrics.
I hit Modify Template up here I can just burn that, gone.
Let's say I wanted to add one of those progress ideas.
What I can do is I can drag in a progress field and suddenly that's everywhere.
Or maybe I'd do flag priorities.
I pull that category fields called a Priority and just give each option that I want, in
this case, 1 2 3 4 5.
When I hit done, all of my projects now inside this workspace have those options.
I can prioritize this one and give it a completion of 38%.
Beautiful.
Now, here in the front I'm going to start to see the priority.
Social Media might be second rating and it's 58% done.
You see how this works.
Here the Websites might be a fourth rating and its nearly done, and so on.
Now, I've got my projects set up which is absolutely gorgeous.
How do I create specific tasks for different people?
This is the beauty of this thing.
If I click into My Project, and then I click on T which stands for task, it's going to
automatically associate this task wit that project.
So I might have, Start making videos.
Then all I have to do is assign it a person, I'll assign it to my assistant because she
likes doing those stuff.
Give it a due date, next Monday and I'm done.
I've got a task which now lists down here.
If I want a second task, Edit videos.
Again, I'm going to give that to my lovely assistant Andrea and a due date of next week,
or maybe a custom date of a week after that and I'm away.
What's cool is if I'm not inside of that project, and now I've clicked myself right back out
the front.
If I'm at the very top of Podio, which you get to by clicking on the Podio button, you
can see right now, this is the activity stream, I've created some tasks.
These are the reason items that I've played with which happens to be projects, these are
the people who are involved, me and my assistant, the apps that I've been using and so on.
What's cool here is if I click T, I can still create a task but notice because I'm way back
here, it's not associated with any project space.
For example, Write a blog post.
And I associate that with myself, Tim.
It's not associated with any project space.
So I click on this and it lists all of my project spaces.
If I want it to be associated with that YouTube one, I'll type in the word You and it finds
the project and it assigns it for me which is fantastic.
We have found that this is an amazingly good way to organize all of our tasks, and all
of our projects, and all of our workspaces.
And we have a workspace for each different client.
But here is the last thing.
This tick box up here is my favorite friend.
What it does is, it lists out all of my tasks and that's my Write a blog one.
But where are the others?
This is the beauty.
When I click on My delegated tasks, it groups them by staff member.
So I could have Andrea, I could have all the other people in my team with 50 tasks.
And when it comes to a team meeting, which we do every Monday, we can simply walk through
this task list and see what everybody is up to.
The other cool thing about this and that alone would be enough for me to be very happy, is
that you can actually do the work inside the task.
For example you can add comments.
You can say I'm doing well, or How are you doing? or This is just a test because right
now she's probably confused because that comment gets mailed to her inbox.
She's probably thinking, What is Tim doing?
Why is he sending me all these rubbish?
That's where I could explain that.
If I need to attach a file or a link - all of those things can be associated with a task.
Then I've got all the tasks I've completed, none yet, but the moment we complete the task,
click on there, and now it goes into my completed tasks.
Just mine or completed tasks for everyone in the business.
So one way or another, I find and we find podio to be phenomenally good way for us to
organize our tasks, our projects, or workspaces, and do something in a way that we can manage
all of internal projects that we have, all of the client projects that we have.
And we can even arrange access to the different workspaces to different people so all the
different workspaces have their own separate access to.
It's a great system, I highly recommend it.
It's at the heart of my business now.
My business has more than doubled this year alone.
And this is still coping with ease, so I do highly recommend Podio.
Enjoy!