If it wasn’t obvious from my love letter to the art of tracking, I’m a big fan of using systems for the power of good. To me, “good” means a sweetly balanced life, made possible by efficient, effective, and wise use of my time and energy.

On the work side, I’ve always used automation to simplify the messy things – email templates, recurring events and reminders, checklists and meta-checklists, the whole nine yards. But over time I’ve used automation in bigger and better ways, successfully building up smarter business practices that serve me well. It’s a brave new automated world, folks!

Coordinating an expanding team of Virtual Assistants, my work increasingly involves managing the details of people who work with details. A solid project management tool is one of my fundamental must-haves. I use Teamwork for project management because it’s comprehensive, responsive, and multiple-user friendly. Nothing falls through the cracks and we never miss a beat.

If you’re new to project management tools, you can start as simply as creating individual tasks and moving on to dependent tasks (those tasks that need to happen after a first task is completed).  You’ll quickly learn that investing a bit of time and money into a straightforward process makes your life easier and your business stronger.

Even if you don’t have your own team, project management tools simplify working with your various clients. For example, I use Teamwork with a client who is a copywriter and she in turn has a team of copywriters working on client projects. Here’s the way our system ticks us along:

• Sunday: my client sends her team an outline of the week’s work.
• Monday: I update the tasks and deadlines in Teamwork.
• Tuesday: the team copywriter submits the first draft of round 1.
• Wednesday: my client reviews their work.
• Thursday: the team coypwriter submits the second draft of round 1.
• Friday: my client approves and I send to the copy client.

This system seems straightforward enough, nothing to invest in online tools for – but what happens if the copy client doesn’t send notes on time, there’s a holiday, or we get a new team member?  Through Teamwork we’ve automated our process and it responsively keeps us on task – regardless of disruptions.  And when a new team member joins us, we can easily point them in the right direction, saying “This is how the process goes!”

Automated systems can take time, effort and attention for our non-automated brains. Is it worth it for you to try one out? My short (and unsurprising) answer: yep! Before I had this process in place with my copywriter client, we turned copy around based on when we got notes from the copy clients. And you know what? Our work was just as choppy as our routine!  Now clients know that if we don’t have their notes by Tuesday, we can’t turn around their copy that Friday. Our system actually taught the clients how to work with us and resulted in better output on our end.

I use systems with my family as well, to just as much benefit. My kids thrive in structure even if they don’t always love (or admit) it.  Their morning, after school, and bedtime routines run like clockwork and if something kinks part of their schedule, it inevitably throws off the whole.  It all comes back down to efficient, effective and wise use of time and energy: while our routines might make me seem like a militant mom they actually support the joyful running of our home.

While I don’t have my family on Teamwork (yet!), I do encourage my clients to test out processes for any aspect of life that might benefit from a little automation. Try free trials of different tools, keyboard shortcuts for email, pre-programmed text message responses when you’re busy. I dedicate my time to helping women balance their own time – explore and see where you can start now.

Image thanks to: Liz Marion, flickr creative commons