Knowing how to visualise all commitments/projects in one spot is something that has stressed project managers and so many other professionals for years. Some companies are lucky enough to have project managers and entire teams dedicated to handle this, but many other smaller organisations don’t have this luxury. Not being able to visualise everything in one spot makes it much more difficult to manage and plan for. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools and resources available now that can help not just to show you how to visualise all commitments/projects in one spot, but can actually create this for you.
As we mentioned, there are plenty of tools and resources available, and which ones you use will largely depend on how many projects you have and what is involved in these projects. Other factors might include the ability to share and collaborate on the same projects with other members of the team.
In this post, we will give you three ideas on how to visualise all commitments/projects in one spot. These are methods that can be applied to projects of all sizes and kinds.
1. Kanban Boards
The human brain is capable of processing visual information 60,000 faster than text, which is why visual boards are a fantastic method for anyone who has large or lots of projects in the pipeline. With Kanban boards, each project is assigned a card and each card has three lists.
- To-Do List
- Doing List
- Done List
Having three lists like this, displayed in an aesthetic way, makes the whole project seem less overwhelming and much more manageable. You can easily see exactly where you are in each process of the project, and as you can see what is left to do, you’re better able to manage your time.
You can learn all about Kanban in our guide to Kanban
2. Gantt Charts
This useful tool shows tasks/activities/events against time spent on the projects using a chart.
On the left-hand side of a chart is a list of the tasks and across the top of the chart is a suitable time scale. Each of the tasks is represented by a bar. The length of the bar and the position of it reflects the date and duration, as well as the end date of each task. There are a variety of tools you can use to create Gantt Charts, the one we found useful is Zenkit
3. Big Mood Board
Another method you can apply is to use a big mood board. You can go the old-fashioned, analogue route of using a large A3 piece of paper, or a digital version. We have found that Miro is a good tool for creating a mood board, and their free plan is very generous. If you want to share your mood board with other people, you would need to use a digital version of a mood board. However, if your project is in an area such as fashion, having a visual board with textures might be better.