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Hello, it's Matt. Welcome to Collaboration Coach.
In this video I'm going to give you some ideas on how to organise your tasks in Planner.
I'm going to show you how to set up a plan from scratch,
give you some examples of how other people have used it,
and also show you how we use it at Collaboration Coach to organise our YouTube and our online course videos.
But before we get started,
if you like the video then please subscribe to the channel
because we're posting every week and we don't want you to miss anything.
Before we start I'm just going to give you a quick overview of what options we have...
...when it comes to organising tasks in Planner.
You can see here I have a new plan called "store upgrade".
And new plans start out like this.
They have one column on the far left hand side called "to do", and then the rest is blank.
That column is called a "bucket" in Planner and buckets are where you store all your tasks.
I can add a task to the "To do" bucket just by pressing on that task and typing the name of the task.
To extend the plan I can add new buckets,
so if I want to add a bucket I just click on the link here and then I name the bucket.
Tasks can be moved between buckets,
so I can just drag this "set up meeting" task into my "London" bucket and drop it there.
Now let's create some new buckets of tasks.
I've created a number of different buckets -Liverpool, London and Manchester
and I've also created tasks within each of those buckets.
Now obviously I can move tasks between buckets
so I can drag and drop them as I like.
I can also copy them if I go ellipsis and "copy tasks" and then choose another bucket to move it to,
so if I just choose "London", it will move that task to London,
then I can also move the buckets around, so I can change the position in the plan if I want to,
to make it easier to work with
and I can also remove buckets as well,
so if I just come to the ellipsis of this "To do" bucket and choose "delete",
it will remove the bucket for me.
So that's an example of how you could set up your plan.
Next I'm going to give you some more examples of how other project managers have organised their buckets.
So I have a couple of examples to show you here...
...to give you an idea of how you could use buckets to divide up your project.
The first one here is "Mark 8 Project Plan",
and you can see this project's been divided up into four buckets -
Engineering, Manufacturing, Marketing and Launch
and notice what the PM's done here - the first three are functions or skill sets,
Engineering, Manufacturing, Marketing.
The last one "Launch" is more like a milestone or an activity.
The PM's decided to have a kind of hybrid approach here
where some of the buckets are linked to skills or teams
and the other one is linked to an activity or a milestone.
But you can see here I can always filter the tasks across the buckets if I want to
so for example, if I wanted to see all the tasks that were running late, they've gone past the due date,
I can always filter by "late",
so I've still got the opportunity to view specific tasks
even though they're in different buckets.
In this next example - the Product Launch Event project.
The PM has taken a different approach.
They have four buckets but they are based around progress or status
so on the far left here you have the "To do" bucket which is like the default one
so that's a catch-all for all new tasks.
Then the next three are all about progress or status
so you've got "on track", "at risk" and "blocked".
That's what's most important to the PM -
they want to see at a glance which tasks are on track at risk and blocked.
That's what's important to them.
Now the PM here has also added some labels.
Labels are another way of categorising but also a way of filtering
so let me give you an example.
Here we've got one called "Finalise Product Imagery".
If I open it up you can see that it has the "Keynote" and the "Event-Planning" label assigned to it.
Take another example here, this one "Keynote Presentation Planning"...
...if I open that up you can see it has the "Marketing" and the "Keynote Presentation" label attached to that.
I can filter what I see by those labels by coming to the filter drop-down,
going to the label section and then choosing which of the labels I want to see
so let's go for "keynote presentation".
Now you can see my buckets are filtered by that particular label
so I'm kind of getting the best of both worlds.
I've got my buckets arranged in the way I want
but I can also filter based on labels.
So now I'm going to give you a quick demonstration of how I use Planner...
...for my YouTube channel and my online school.
Every time we create a video for YouTube we create a task and we add it to Planner
and you can see I've got this YouTube plan here
and I've got a bunch of buckets
and in each bucket we have a task and each task is a video.
On the far-left you can see "To do" and "To do" is like my catch-all
so anything that doesn't have a bucket for it already, I just throw it into "To do".
To the right of that you can see I've got a Planner bucket
and all the videos that I create for Planner will be added to that bucket.
Then you can see I've got Microsoft Lists and it basically follows that pattern.
Buckets usually align to apps or technologies or collabs.
This one here - "Keep Productive" - this bucket is for the collabs I do with the Keep Productive channel
which is another YouTube channel.
Even though these can be across many different technologies, I keep them all together
because it just makes more sense -
- they don't have the same workflow as a YouTube video that we publish to our channel.
I've got another example here.
This one is called Teams Champion and this is one of our online courses.
Now you can see I've kept the "To do" bucket there,
but this plan is actually divided up into the different sections of the course.
I've got "Get Started", "Team Basics", "Chat" and so on.
Each of these sections has a bunch of videos that we create for the section
and each of these tasks you can see here like "Welcome to the Course" and so on,
they are all videos that get added to my course in that particular section.
So as you can see, there's no one right way of organising your tasks in Planner.
There's a number of different ways
and you've got to figure out what's best for you and your project.
I've given you two or three ideas here and I hope that helps.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
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