What Are Project Management Tools?
There’s this thing called project management tools, and here’s why it’s important to learn them and what kind of impact having one can have on your day-to-day life, whether you’re a business owner, an entrepreneur, or a remote worker. Regardless of how many clients you have, one, two, three, four, five, you need to have your own project management tool. Usually you’ll have your personal one, and sometimes your client or their business will have its own as well.
A project management tool is software where you can add all your projects and view them with a team. You can assign team members, assign tasks, and see the status of each task. You can organize everything in a calendar view, a kanban view, a list view, whatever view works for you. This is key for organizing all your tasks and making sure you’re not missing any deadlines.
Note: this article may include affiliate links to some of the tools mentioned below.
Trello (Simple Kanban Tool)
The first project management tool, and the easiest one I was able to use, is Trello. It’s a very simple kanban-view project management tool where you put your list of tasks on the left side, then there are sections like To-Do, then Ongoing, then For Approval, then Done. You just add a card and move it from left to right depending on the status. You can add notes, assign team members, set deadlines, upload files, whatever you need. Very easy. You can add boards, and each board is a project. Everything I’ll talk about here has both free and premium packages.
Airtable (Advanced + Automations)
The second project management tool I learned to use is Airtable. Just like Trello, there’s a kanban view, but it’s more diverse. There’s a calendar view, automations (this one really leans into automations), timeline views, pretty much every view you could want, but it’s still easy to use. What’s good about it is that you can create dashboards at the same time, and you can build forms too. A lot of what you’d need for a business is already built into Airtable‘s automations.
Asana (User-Friendly Hybrid)
The next tool I’ve learned is Asana. Also very easy. It’s like a combination of Trello and Airtable, but easy to use.
Monday.com & ClickUp (CRM + PM Combo)
The next two I’ve learned are Monday.com and ClickUp. Both can work as a project management tool and as a CRM. They’re more complicated because they have the most automations and the most functions. They also come with templates, which is nice, since you can just pick one and go. There’s a free version and a paid version for both.
Notion (Most Powerful & Customizable)
The most complex project management tool I’ve used is Notion. That’s why we’re using it here. It’s very powerful, and I love it. You can do a lot with Notion. It’s like a blank page where you can customize everything you need on one page however you want. That’s how powerful it is. It’s easy if you want things simple, but it’s also capable if you want something more complex, convenient, and powerful. It really depends on what you’re after. These are the basic project management tools worth learning.
How to Choose the Right Tool
You may want to start with Trello since it’s the easiest. But you should try all of these, because some clients will require you to learn a specific project management tool already, since it’s what they’re using. So you adjust to them, not the other way around.
