Efficient task management is crucial for any business to run effectively - especially one which is based over the internet, as you’re rarely there in person with your colleagues to go over project management progress or discuss daily reports.

When managing significant numbers of tasks and projects, a high level of structure and organisation is essential to complete them efficiently. A process or procedure should be in place for dealing with large projects, small tasks and regular tasks. This is a much more substantial subject in itself, so let’s take a look at a really easy method of prioritising which is a necessary piece of the task management process. First you need to take all of your tasks and put them on a list. You are then going to sort these tasks into 3 smaller lists.

List A is made up of 2 types of tasks - those which are essential or time-sensitive, and those which, if completed, are going to have an immediate impact upon your business. This means anything that you can work on at this moment which will have a strong impact, whether this be creating income or improving your business in an essential way, and of course, anything which has a due date.

List B is made up of the things which must be done, but are not time sensitive. An example of this may be tasks like filing.

List C is made up of projects and tasks which you want to complete, but which don’t have any real impact on your current business, and therefore, they can be scheduled in when there is nothing else pending.

Once you have your lists completed, you will be able to easily prioritise these individual tasks into a detailed schedule. First of all, think carefully about these two points:

1. What tasks on your list could you automate?

2. What tasks on your list could you place in the hands of a professional virtual assistant?

Put these on a separate list, and deal with them first. The more quickly you’re able to do this for your A & B tasks, the sooner you can begin to decrease the contents of these lists on a weekly or monthly basis, with the final outcome of creating quite a bit more time for yourself.

For those tasks which you haven’t automated or outsourced to an experienced virtual assistant, you will need to organise these into jobs for yourself. Each job you’re going to do should be broken up into tasks, and each task should be considered as a ‘Milestone’, and each milestone would have a checklist of smaller tasks, which once all checked off, will enable the milestone to be completed.

To begin with, take each of the milestones in your A list, and then break the milestones down into checklists of jobs which need to be done in order to complete the milestone. For this process, I highly recommend that you use online project management software to organise this endeavour - especially if you work with a VA, as most of these things could potentially be outsourced in the future. Most online collaboration software will let you develop multiple projects so you can manage comprehensive milestones and tasks.

Once you have done that for List A - do the same for list B, and if you have time, you may want to do this for list C too, but usually the C list is set to one side for when A and B are both entirely complete.

This will of course need to be scheduled into a daily plan, and this plan must be tailored according to the amount of tasks you have and the volume of time which is available to you - but as a general rule, your work should progress steadily and everything should get done.

To plan your schedule, take twenty minutes to designate your tasks before you start each day, as this will give you specific direction to move forward and help you to have a greater feeling of achievement upon the completion of your working day.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an Executive Virtual Assistant who assists businesses and individuals with achieving their professional goals. Want to find out more about online business building success strategies? Support the Campaign for FREE Virtual Assistance today!

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