How do I use LeaderTask in my everyday life?

Business

New projects
Creating and developing a new project requires attention and
preciseness. There are no trifles in it. Any detail may turn into a
drawback and a drawback may be fatal for the project. New trends
appearing regularly are a peculiarity of my job. Something is dropped
later, something turns into working schemes. Any project starts from
creating a scheme. A scheme is a mind map. (I will not dwell on the
convenience and techniques of using mind maps in this article, if you
get interested, you can always find more information on the Internet.)
A ready mind map is easily entered into LT with its tree-like
structure of tasks. Then you only have to determine specific deadlines
and assign responsible persons. Determine checkpoints. (A checkpoint
is a point on a timeline corresponding to the time when the progress
is checked in this or that project. The current progress of the
project is checked, which makes it possible to track the dynamics and
make amendments, if necessary.) After that you can use the obtained
information to make a decision what to do next: - continue it; - stop
it; - modify the direction of the project.

Development program implementation
Any enterprise has a program of its strategic development. It includes
searching for new partners, enlarging the assortment of products,
finding new markets and so on and so forth. Of course, every
enterprise has its trends and priorities. However, there is a certain
sequence of actions that should be followed by particular people in
order to implement this program. That is when an organizer comes in -
it is LT in my case, of course. It helps to monitor the market and
thus get up-to-date information about it. Not to miss meetings with
clients and partners. Plan and monitor the implementation of plans.

Advertising
Advertising a company is a complicated and long process. It already
starts when you just decide to create this or that structure. Choosing
a name is the starting point. Quite a lot might be said about the name
and how it affects business, but we are here for a different thing. It
is enough just to understand that advertising starts at the very
moment when the business emerges. Then the main advertising formula
comes in: AIDA. Those who are in the advertising industry know what
I'm saying :) and I recommend that the rest of you who are interested
search for more information because I will not explain it better than
professionals while the understanding of this formula may dramatically
change your view on advertising. Advertising is a complex and
multipronged project and this project is quite dynamic. If you delay
anything in its implementation, it seriously affects the sales
statistics (that is, profit). Organizing and planning an advertising
campaign for a company is an eternal and constantly changing project,
being one of the most key ones as well. The way LT is used in
advertising is not basically different from the way it is used in
implementing the development program.

Sales
Using LT for sales purposes is a bit different from the above. In this
case it comes down mainly to monitoring the supply deadlines and the
terms of agreements in order to extend or re-sign them in time. Kind
of a advanced reminder, BUT do not forget that after I left this issue
to LT, I freed my mind and time for something else and at the same
time I do not lose clients and keep up with shipment deadlines.
Besides, I have an idea to link sales to production, i.e. plan
production and supplies for it according to processed orders, but this
scheme is in the state of development and testing yet.

Home

Payments
It is one of the primary home tasks for LT - monitor payments. Paying
for public utilities, intercom, insurance. All in all, everything that
is to be paid for goes through LT. It allows you not to remember what
and when you should pay. In fact, it is an indispensable assistant in
your everyday routine.

Credit
Credit is actually a payment that is stretched in time. However, it is
different from other payments because you will suffer worse
consequences if the payment is overdue no matter whether for you
personally or for your business. By the way, I do not deal with lease
and credit payments myself at work, but I have them all marked and I
do not forget to remind the CEO to make sure everything is alright
with them. Anyone may have sudden "sclerosis", someone may fall ill,
someone may have force majeure at home, but the business must not
suffer from it.

Purchases
Purchases are different. LT allows me to save money! :) How? Well, as
most people out there, after I get my salary, I go shopping in search
of essentials, however, "store - money - no shopping list" is a great
combination, BUT for the store, not for you. When you come home after
this kind of shopping, you find lots of things in your bags, BUT you
have forgotten to buy feed for your favorite cat and bought another
tie, a "nice" addition to those that are already in your closet. After
another situation like this, I used ALEXA's advice about the dictating
machine. I recorded everything that came to my mind about purchases
and then I easily added to the list what I actually needed (by the
way, I liked the method so much that now I can barely imagine what I
would do without the dictating machine and my employees notice that my
memory is now much better. Now once I receive my salary, I first start
LT and look through what I'm going to buy and the printer prints me
this list in 5 seconds. The list with nothing unnecessary in it and
nothing essential left out. As a result, I optimize my expenses. (I
thought about suppliers while I was writing this... it feels like they
are going to get reorganized. ;) ).

Duties
All those home duties... well, that's easy. Wash my wife, refuel my
son and buy something for my car's birthday. Oh my God!!! There are
always so many of those duties that you are sure to confuse or forget
something and what about business, social activities and things to
deal with in court... Anyway, I could go on and on about it, but I
think you know it all without me. So, it our favorite LT that is to
deal with these heaps of duties. As a result, nothing is neglected or
forgotten, everything is done quickly and in no rush. The car tank is
full, the son is clean and the wife is happy. :)

Vacation
It is my first vacation planned with the help of such methods. I
cannot share my vacation experience with you so far because it's only
ahead, BUT I guess I will not forget anything. We will visit as many
beautiful sights as we wish (the list of possible sights is compiled
and combined by two parameters. The opinions of those who have been
there and the geographical location.) I hope the trip will be just fine.

How does LeaderTask help me?

Never forget
Memory is a wonderful thing, you can remember every detail of what
they showed on television 30 years ago because you had just then
bought a new color television set (it was a big event back in the
days)... and completely forget what was SO IMPORTANT that the director
general told you a minute ago. That is why I really appreciate the
ability to remember and not to forget anything under any
circumstances. I don't even mention that a timely reminder can be
simply invaluable.

Keep everything in order
Order. I do not think I have to explain what order is and how
important it is. And I think order in one's activities leads life to
success and the person to self-realization. You have to have a clear
idea about your activities in order to effectively control them. WHAT?
WHERE? WHEN? Here are three questions that keep our activities in
order. But it is not enough to know the answers, you have to combine
different activities from different projects throughout the day and
that's when LT becomes an indispensable assistant. A well thought-out
sequence of actions allows you to simultaneously manage several
projects or trends without losing the quality of control. LT allows
you to remember everything and precisely define the priority of this
or that action having your finger on the pulse of what is going on.

Closely follow the sequence
There are actions in life that must go one after another. For example,
developing a business plan requires a completely precise set of
actions performed in a certain sequence. Breaking the sequence often
results in having to go back in order to complete something or even
revise all actions that follow.

Why is my life better now?

More spare time
Time is the only irreplaceable resource in our lives that is always
trying to sneak so that we do not notice it among the routine of
everyday activities. Irreplaceable means invaluable for me. That is
why I try to complete as much as possible within every single minute.
Life is short, but you want to complete, see, try and experience so
much. LT helps to save time and spend it sensibly. It serves as a kind
of "routine vise" that compresses it, or rather the time spent on
them. Of course, you do not have more time, but it allows you to
complete more during this short life.

More efficient work
The word EFFICIENCY means a lot for people who value time. It
determines a lot in their lives, it regulates lives taking control
over them. What is efficiency?
Economic efficiency is a key consideration when you make a decision
about production. In simple words, efficiency means that manufacturing
is carried out with minimum expenses, effort and losses. Economists
use a more precise definition. The term of economic efficiency means
such a situation when it is impossible to make a single change that
would make one person better off without making another person worse
off. Efficiency defined in theses terms is sometimes called Pareto
efficiency after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist.
Personal efficacy or self-efficacy means belief in the effect of one's
own actions and the belief that you have the capability to attain your
goals. It is one of the key terms in the social cognitive theory of
Albert Bandura. The overall self-efficacy consists of particular
self-efficacies existing in various fields of human activity. In some
of its research Bandura showed that one more cause of changes in
behavior may be the absence of belief in the efficacy of one's own
efforts. This discovery of Bandura is often referred to as the
self-efficacy theory. Self-efficacy or self-efficacy belief means that
a person is sure that he will be able to behave successfully in a
complicated situation. That is, efficacy belief means the evaluations
of one's very specifically defined behavioral competence. (There is a
very interesting article in Wiki about self-efficacy at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-efficacy. I took the definitions of
efficiency and efficacy from Wiki.)
I think these definitions quite precisely reflect the essence of how
my life has improved with LT.

Project implementation time
The increase in efficiency naturally speeds up the implementation of
projects and plans. Planning and the precise and objective assessment
of the situation allow me to correctly distribute my resources and my
staff's resources to achieve the maximum productivity.

Control over situation
I have never had my activities in such an order and visualization. It
is really great that you may forget about anything you have planned
until the due time and you do not have to worry about missing the
moment at all. Any project is clearly visible by both time and people.
It is easy to track personal responsibility. Visualization allows you
to optimize the situation and correctly distribute resources. All that
allows you to feel confident and persistently pursue your goals.

What have I achieved?

Creating a company
Creating a new company, structure or department is a very tense period
of time, but on the other hand it is just the tip of the iceberg of
information that you have to process before you come down to taking
action. As to actions, they have to follow a clear and ordered plan.
All that is quite a tense work and involves several parallel
processes. I'm glad that all that is already behind and that my
estimates were pretty accurate and now we are where we planned to be.

Organizing the production
I will never forget it. Probably because I had never come across
organizing production before that. God, that' whole lot of thing. The
project was growing as an avalanche and sometimes it seemed like this
avalanche would bury us under the abundance of what was to be done,
but anyway, as they say, "you may fear it, but still do it". I have to
say that the resolute position of the director general was of great
help. In case of any doubts he would only say, "I'm sure you will cope
with it!" – and we did cope. I don't even know if I'll ever dare to go
through it again. And to be honest, if I had known what it was, I
would have gotten myself into it.

Implementing the marketing policy
The decision to change the marketing policy was not an easy one to
make. Indeed, why would you change anything that works well? But the
request to increase profitability led to enlarging the assortment of
products and changes in the target audience, which, in its turn,
resulted in rebranding and completely revising the marketing policy of
the company. It was the first time I was into rebranding, but since
the promotion of a company does not differ much from rebranding, there
was almost nothing new for me in it.

Good advertising campaign
Pushing a new product onto the market is always an interesting and
important moment. As a rule, a good start is a good advertising
campaign. And you can tell how well the campaign is only after you
evaluate the decrease in sales after it is over. There is always a
decrease, but it varies a lot and everything depends on the success of
the advertising campaign and, in my opinion, on how accurately you
reached your target audience.

What did LeaderTask change in my life?

Attitude to time

I realized that you can effectively manage your time
I had tried to make plans many times before that. I used to make use
of phones with their poor imitation of an organizer, thick diaries and
software products of this type. So why hadn't my attitude to time
changed before I started using LT? First, none of the previously used
solutions (to make it clear, I have never used Outlook from Microsoft)
provided this kind of visual representation of the situation. Of
course, visualization makes it much easier to perceive things and,
consequently, manage them more effectively. Second, it is through the
LT forum that I discovered time management, which resulted in revising
a lot of things first at work and then at home. Step by step, I
started to realize how much time I had been just wasting on
unnecessary things. The pace of work changed, no more rush and it
occurs to me that it has been two months already since we forgot
anything and had to do it in a hurry. And it is all despite the fact
that there has been quite a lot of events in the recent month. Time is
no longer our enemy we have to fight against, now at last I am in
control of my time.

Business relations

Top management attitude
I don't think I have to explain anyone the management attitude towards
an employee who does not forget anything, does all current work in
time and is efficient in all fields he deals with. What I would like
to explain is that I'm neither a genius nor a workaholic, I like days
off and holidays the same as you. It is just that I realized once that
life could be different and LT offered me a great help in this
realization by allowing me to turn my ideas into actual activities.

Subordinates' attitude
We are all PEOPLE, we are all subordinates and chiefs and we all
differentiate between good and bad chiefs. A good chief for me is an
objective one. He has to understand, help, ask about the results. He
has to both award and punish. A chief has to be both an inspirer and
an idea accumulator. He stimulates activity, my activity. How? With a
good word, useful advice, a penalty or an award. He helps me to grow,
he both guards me and makes me go all out changing my self-esteem. I
was lucky to have a REALLY GOOD CHIEF so now I have a role model. I
try to be a good chief as far as I understand it. I try to stick to
one basic principle suggested by a person who I really respect: "You
should be kind, but you must not be soft-hearted". A lot has changed
after I realized the difference. I think you have to ask my
subordinates about how they feel about me. I can only point out that
almost everyone who worked for more than 6 months with me maintain a
good relationship with me even after they quit, we call each other and
meet. One of my current partners used to be my subordinate and that's
what she said after she got some good luck and received a certain sum
of money, "I did not even think what to do, just found your number".
You just have to remember that a chief who does not know what his
subordinates do cannot be a good chief. And here LT comes in again
with its perfect list of who is doing what. It turns meetings with
subordinates into very constructive communication. In its turn, it
leads to personal growth and efficiency.

How more efficient have I become?

More efficient, much more

Now I have time for self-development
Now I have time that I have lacked for the last 4 years. Now I can
read books not only on economics, but just books, classic books. Now I
have time to go in for sport. No more rush in my life, now I feel
confident and safe. I'm no longer afraid to forget anything. So many
changes have come for this month and a half.

Many things that seemed to be delayed forever are now in progress
I think that anyone has such things in life that are left in a closet
for some future because there is never time to spend on them. I used
to have this kind of closet. But on some nice day I realized that it
was the day when I could afford it. I can afford to spend my time on
it without being afraid that it will negatively affect my business.
How do I feel about it? It is like a long-awaited meeting with an old
friend.

Acknowledgements

Developers
Thank YOU A LOT for this product. For its fast development. For a
completely unique forum with its unique atmosphere.
Thank you also for this [Contest] What did LeaderTask give me?
I give you my word, before I got down to writing it (because of the
licenses so generously offered :) and it's not that I don't have
money, but I consider this offer as an opportunity to earn software by
spending a bit of time), I had not realized how much changed in my
life, how I changed after LT appeared in my life and people it
attracted. As to forum, honestly I have never come across such
friendly and efficient communication. By the way, writing this
material has already taken two days :) . So may ideas come to my mind.
Understanding and surprise about how a simple software program created
with LOVE can change the life of those who gets to work with it and I
have no doubts that the developers love their creation.
Thank you for provoking me into writing this material with your
generosity.
GOD BLESS YOUR LIFE.

Alexxa
Thank you for "recording thoughts on the dictating machine SE k750i"
and later putting them into "XXXXX Organizer"
It really changed my life.

Vates
Thank you for the technique of writing books with the help of mind maps.
I have never managed to complete a job like this in such an easy and
pleasant way.

All active LT forum participants
Thanks to everyone who visits the forum, who posts their messages
there, who helps to develop our favorite LT with their ideas. Thank
you for being there!

WWW: www.leadertask.com
Forum: www.todoforum.com
Download: http://www.leadertask.com/download/leader.exe