Read an interesting article over at zenhabits.net titled - ‘The best goal is no goal’

Unfortunately, it never, ever works out this neatly. You all know this. You know you need to work on an action step, and you try to keep the end goal in mind to motivate yourself. But this action step might be something you dread, and so you procrastinate. You do other work, or you check email or Facebook, or you goof off.

And so your weekly goals and monthly goals get pushed back or side-tracked, and you get discouraged because you have no discipline. And goals are too hard to achieve. So now what? Well, you review your goals and reset them. You create a new set of sub-goals and action plans. You know where you’re going, because you have goals!

I do have very high level goals (business as well as personal) that helps me make decisions and motivates me to do better. The key here is not to obsessively track and make gantt charts out of your goals but to be aware of them and work on the stuff that make you happy each day.

Does the same work for you?

Check out the following 2 options:

Option A:

Hey Jim,
Can you please take a look at the fonts, banners and the formatting of the ‘About Us’ page so that we can get the website up and running by the end of the day? Also, make sure that the website renders on the iPhone, Android and Blackberry.

Option B:

Hey Jim,
A few things have come up with the site and I am hoping you can take a look at them by the end of the day so we can take the site live:

*About Us Page*
- Fonts: Are we using standard fonts?
- Banners: Check it out and if it needs more work, then please contact the designer again.
- Formatting: Should look perfect on all modern browsers

*Mobile*
The website should work on the following mobile platforms:
- iPhone
- Android
- Blackberry

Option 2, which might take some time to write (it shows that you have put in thought and are not just dumping work) is much more effective than option 1. The points give clarity and become an automatic task list to the person executing this on your behalf.

Are there other ways you have found delegation to simplify work?

If you work in the service business it is most likely that your inbox is flooded with ‘to-dos’ from clients. You need to get these emails off your back but you also want them to be delegated well so that you can track progress from anywhere, anytime. We call it ‘feeling free’ and ‘in control’.

Here are couple of ways to simplify your inbox using DeskMail - a feature that lets you email stuff to your DeskAway account so tasks and issues are created automatically.

You can forward client emails from your inbox to your DeskAway account. You can also forward the email to your team member and CC the email to your DeskAway account so that a task is created and assigned to that team member. You need to make sure that the team member is a user within DeskAway and active within that project.

Even better…

Let your clients email tasks to their project within DeskAway (also make sure they are a part of the project within DeskAway). When you login to the system, you will see what needs to be done.

Once you nicely have those tasks off your inbox, you can focus on bigger and better things!

We are glad to introduce some small features today. We hope these will help your team to simplify work and help you manage your projects better.

Make this page my starting page:

Now you can make any page within DeskAway your starting page. Working a lot on one of your projects? Simply set that page as your starting page so that you are directly taken to the project overview section whenever you log in. Scroll down to the bottom of your DeskAway account (the footer section) to set your starting pages.

Sort Tasks:

Earlier we could only sort tasks manually from the task re-order page. Now you can automatically sort your task by Deadlines or by Priority.

To make it easy to sort through the team members with in a project we have added new filters on the project team page. The default ‘Team’ view within a project only shows active people. Earlier, it listed everyone that were in your DeskAway account.

Add time on task details page:

Previously you could only add time to a task from the Task List page. Now the time spent can be also added from the Task details page. We hope this improves your work-flow without clicking the ‘back’ button everytime you want to add time to a task from the task details page.

Manage this team link:

A tiny enhancement. We have added a new link called “Manage this team” on the Project Overview page below the list of current team members within the project.

Hope you enjoy these features!

A quick video showing how you can see all of your completed tasks and delete them if you don’t really want them sitting around…