Why You Should Create Your First Project

Published on September 23, 2015
Yen Lim
Former Chief Product Officer

Get stuff done. Efficiently.

So there’s an important event coming up that you know you should be doing promotions around because it just makes business sense to. But you’ve got a bunch of tasks to complete in the lead up to it, so how do you get organized? Where do you start? Yep, you guessed it – by creating a project.

The situation at hand

There’s a public holiday coming up, let’s say Labour Day which means it’ll be a long weekend and you know that means people are going to be looking for accommodation to rent for that period. Hopefully from your awesome website, so you’re gonna want to do some promotions to attract customers and get them converting. But you also know that your competitors are all going to be doing the same thing. What’s there to set you apart? How do you stay ahead of the curve? The key is being organized.

  • Learn of what events are coming up well ahead of time and create a marketing calendar so you aren’t scrambling last minute to come up with a plan of attack.

  • Get yourself (and your team) organized by setting up a project to work on together.

  • Create a list of tasks and keep them up to date so you and your team know exactly what needs to be done at all times.

When you’ve got a big task at hand, the best way to tackle it is by breaking it down into a number of smaller (more manageable) tasks. Trust me, it’ll feel a lot less daunting then. Do this early enough, and you’ll give you and your team comfortable lead time to get things executed well.

The steps to get there

So you’ve come across an event in PredictHQ that you want to plan a campaign around. Great! Link that event straight to a brand new project, or to an existing one. This will give you a quick link back to the event page so you can easily refer to the event details.

Link an event to a project by simply adding it to your project.

You can find the Add To Project button in a number of different places:

  1. On the event page itself.

  2. When you Quick View an event – which is when you expand the event on an event search results page without clicking through to the full event page.

  3. On the pop up summary of the event – like when you click on an event from Map or Calendar view.

When you click Add To Project, a modal window will appear for you to enter the new project name, or click the link below the text input field to choose from a list of existing projects

Alternatively, you can create a project without linking any events to it.

Task it up

When you’ve created a new project, the next thing you need to do is add tasks to it. Adding tasks is super easy.

Tips:

  • Keep your task names brief e.g.  “Design display ads”. You can put the extra details in the task description.

  • After you add a task, click on it to view or edit details like adding a description, assigning it to someone in your team, adding a due date, tags, attachments or comments.

  • Use the little arrow on the side to collapse the task.

  • Each time a task is completed, mark it as done by clicking the check box to the left of the task name

You can change your project view to see:

  1. What tasks are left to do.

  2. Only completed tasks.

  3. Both completed and tasks left to do.

  4. Tasks specifically assigned to you.

  5. Tasks with due dates or;

  6. Tasks that have been archived (which you can then un-archive in edit mode).

You can also see a log of all the activity happening inside your project by clicking the Project Activity button.

Repeat the magic

If you reckon a project is particularly useful to repeat again in the future, the great thing with PredictHQ is you can set a project repeat reminder. When the reminder comes up on the date that you pick, choose whether you want to copy the original project, or start a new one. If you copy the project, you can choose specifically what to copy. Pretty handy huh?

So, if you understand why event visibility is important, you’ll also understand why creating projects is too.

Get organized. Get creating those projects and tasks and you’ll stay ahead of the curve. Always.