Task management is an essential aspect of time management in any business. Effective task management can save time and make delivering quality work extremely effortless.

Over time, business owners and stakeholders have come up with various ways to manage and track their tasks. Among the various methods, a few have proven to be more effective than others. One of the popular options is the Gantt Chart.

Gantt Charts

The Gantt Chart, designed by Henry Gantt around 1910-1915, has been a popular method of task management among corporations and businesses.

Roughly six steps are necessary to starting a new Gantt Chart for a project, those being:

1. Define the starting and ending dates of the project timeline
2. List out tasks in a specific fashion
3. Include the starting and ending dates with their according tasks
4. Define task dependencies (define which tasks lead to which tasks, usually related tasks are connected with lines on the chart)
5. Add the tasks to the Gantt Chart
6. Assign tasks to your team members and make sure they are aware of the tasks.

As mentioned, since Gantt Chart’s invention, the task management method has been gaining popularity. The growth in Gantt Chart's popularity has several critical reasons:

Ease of Use

The Gantt Chart is a beginner-friendly method of management. Using the Gantt Chart is fairly simple, and requires almost zero professional knowledge. Any person on a team can create a Gantt Chart as long as they are familiar with the project and know the basics of Gantt Charts.

Shows Overlap and Dependencies

One of the most mentioned strengths of the Gantt Chart is its ability to show overlaps and dependencies between tasks.

As one construction project includes numerous tasks, it is common to start other tasks while another group of tradespeople are still working on a previous one. Showing tasks overlaps allows every member of the team to understand the overall state of the team. Other than this, it also leads to better management of manpower, and boosts team coordination, leading to increased productivity.

Another aspect is the dependencies between tasks. As buildings are built layer by layer, some tasks have prerequisites to them: meaning some other tasks must be done before they start. Similar to the advantages of show task overlaps, being clear about tasks dependencies lets managers and contractors make informed decisions that leads to an increase in overall team efficiency.

Turns Complex to Simple

The way Gantt Charts present project schedules and tasks is more visually straightforward, the same way a calendar view is. One can easily distinguish the difference between a long-term task and a short-term task.

Gantt Charts help contractors and managers achieve “saying more with less.” Providing information and schedules through a simple, visually-friendly medium often helps boost productivity and prevents feelings of frustration and overwhelmedness among team members.

Kanban Boards

Kanban Board is another popular way of managing tasks within a team. The Kanban Board features several different “boards” that represent various stages of a task. Usually the stages are arranged from left to right, from unstarted to finished.

The “managing” comes from making tasks as “cards” that start from the left-most column. The Kanban Board method adopts what is called the “task pulling” system. Rather than management assigning tasks to teams, the teams would “pull” and actively take tasks from the board. As the team makes progress on the task, the card that represents the task will slowly be moved towards the right.