Why are lists so addictive?

Many people love lists. Lists are easy. And it's very satisfying to just cross that item you just completed. It's pretty addictive.

Classic project management is too complicated for many people who are simply trying to get things done. The simplicity and ease of lists is very appealing in comparison. It's easy to try to manage projects with a to-do list and other type of lists.

However lists have their limits especially when you are trying to manage several projects at once. This limit is compounded when many people need to coordinate on these different projects. What if you could have both ease of use and performance?

It’s a fact, people love lists and there are all kind of lists

• Grocery list
• Christmas shopping list
• Check list
• To do lists
• Lists of clients
• Lists of projects
• Lists of lists

There are even memes out there about lists and about that feeling you get when the list is DONE. Or the feeling of having everything organized in a list and out of your mind is great too.

Lists can be a good way to organize yourself and your projects. A to-do list for example can give you a sense of clarity on what needs to get done.

Other advantages of list are:

• You won’t worry about forgetting one of your tasks.
• You can categorize them.
• You can prioritize them
• You can estimate and allocate time for them.
• It’s easy to know what is left to do.

As a matter of fact, in many companies where I worked people would manage and track their projects with all kind of lists. They would have project trackers, to do lists, check list and naturally organized people could be quite efficient using them. In other words, It is possible to be organized this way but this kind of system had many failings.

One issue with lists is that they are hard to transfer or use by more than one person.
These lists would be located in different places mostly on excel spread sheets, on desktop calendar, or on a bunch of post-it pasted on peoples monitors.
Often, the location of the lists or how they worked was usually in one person’s head. So, if someone needed to take over someone else’s job because they called in sick or worse left the company, that would be an issue. A lot of time would be lost just tracking down where that person’s lists were.
This limitation was even more obvious when these lists needed to be shared between more than one person. For example, when many people use a same project tracker. This is a case where there is the risk to erase or overwrite some of the information on that list, not to mention deleting the list completely by accident.
As a result not being able to share lists efficiently, would limit our ability to be flexible and to adapt quickly to changes.

Another issue is that lists are uni-dimensional
For a project manager or naturally organized person, manage multiple projects simultaneously is not an issue. But this can be a daunting prospect for the rest of us, humans. It feels like herding cats.
Lists become particularly inefficient when you need to deal with priorities across more than one to do list. When you’re working on several complex projects simultaneously, for example.

You can probably manage to do this manually by looking at all your project’s todo lists, and select the ones you’re planning to work on today or for the next period of time and create a Today’s todos list.  It’s possible, but it’s time consuming and error prone.

Now, picture doing this same exercise with more than one person. You will soon either end up spending so much time trying to do this correctly that you will probably stop doing it. Or you will make mistakes and overlook some important things.

In order to do this properly you would typically need to resort to Gantt charts and classic project management. But this comes with its own set of problems. Project management is not something everybody is familiar or good at doing.

The good news is this is one of the many talent and expertise of SAM9000 smart assistant. You keep the simplicity and ease of use of lists and the software takes care of the difficult part: scheduling for everybody in the team.
Basically, all you need to do is as simple as creating lists

• Create projects
• Add tasks to each of your projects.
• Attach documents to your projects.
• Attach emails to your projects.

Then you simply input the following indications

• Time estimation for the tasks (this is optional)
• Assign the task, by default it is assigned to you or someone in the team.
• Select a priority for the task (this is optional)
• Assign priorities for the different projects.

Based on these very simple indications Sam will provide the scheduling of “My Tasks Today” that will appear in each team member’s dashboard. It’s really that easy!

Also multiple people in a team can work simultaneously on multiple projects. Any team member can create a new project and everybody else in the team will have access to it. No Need to constantly update people on what is going on. Once this project has been created, anyone in the team can create and assign task to it.

In conclusion
Lists are great, they are easy to understand. Another advantage is anyone can create them.

• They give you a sense of accomplishment each time you can cross off one the tasks in it.
• They help you put some order in your projects.

And now thanks to Sam9000, it is easy to manage multiple lists and get so much more out of them.

• You can organize multiple level of projects.
• You can work on these project with other people.
• Your projects, tasks, documents and emails are safely stored in one place.