1991 Civic Tech Center: Worksection is the structure and time management of our project.

About the 1991 Civic Tech Center

We are the first cen­ter in Ukraine for devel­op­ing civic tech­nol­o­gy orga­ni­za­tions and star­tups. We try to make the atmos­phere as pro­duc­tive as pos­si­ble so that peo­ple can cre­ate tru­ly cool things.

We have a cowork­ing space for star­tups, an event zone, and meet­ing rooms. You can orga­nize your own projects with us or attend events host­ed by our team.

A field that works at the inter­sec­tion of civic ini­tia­tives, busi­ness, and IT solu­tions is exact­ly what our coun­try needs

Why It Is Impor­tant to Set Tasks

No mat­ter the size of the orga­ni­za­tion, it’s always very impor­tant to set tasks and track their progress. And always with time and dead­lines in mind.

It’s cru­cial to under­stand what you, your col­leagues, and your man­age­ment are work­ing on. See­ing the full range of tasks, employ­ees feel a sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty for the whole organization.

Thanks to the task man­ag­er, every­one has a sense of time, and the chance of for­get­ting some­thing drops close to zero.

How We Are Organized

In our work, we use Work­sec­tion. We have one project set up in it. For now, we are not cre­at­ing more, as we plan to con­nect oth­er projects from the Social­Boost orga­ni­za­tion in the future.

Every­thing is divid­ed into tasks. There are four root tasks: Events; Office Sup­plies; Legal Issues; Mar­ket­ing. All work is con­duct­ed in sub­tasks and using check­lists. Each task has a respon­si­ble per­son who over­sees all work in the subtasks.

When a new event is planned, we dupli­cate an exist­ing, sim­i­lar task. Then we sim­ply change the title, the dead­lines, and the per­son respon­si­ble, and some­times clar­i­fy a few details. This saves a lot of time for com­pa­nies with stan­dard, recur­ring tasks.

Employ­ees and Worksection

Why Work­sec­tion?

I’ve tried Asana, Base­camp, Trel­lo, Red­mine, and Work­sec­tion. And when I start­ed work­ing on this project, Work­sec­tion was the obvi­ous choice — because, giv­en the nature of our work, a cas­cad­ing mod­el of task-set­ting mat­ters. That is, the abil­i­ty to set tasks at any lev­el. With oth­er sys­tems, I ran into usabil­i­ty issues, at least for me personally.

I val­ue a usable, sim­ple inter­face and the func­tion­al­i­ty I need. Every­thing you need is in one window.

I also like Work­sec­tion for its mobile app and respon­sive design

Func­tion­al­i­ty That Makes Life Better

We use all the ​“tricks” of the edi­tor. It’s handy to embed links and break things down into check­lists and num­bered lists.

Sev­er­al peo­ple often work on a task, and we tag them (men­tion them) so they get per­son­al notifications.

And my favorite — attach­ing files and using emo­jis to react quick­ly to comments.

Time Track­ing and Timer

I only log time man­u­al­ly, enter­ing it into tasks myself. I do not use the time track­er because I work in mul­ti­task­ing mode and quick­ly switch from one task to anoth­er. Employ­ees use the timer, but for longer-term tasks, such as writ­ing an article.

Tags and Statuses

The most com­mon tag for our project is ​“urgent.”

In Work­sec­tion, you can cre­ate deferred tasks by set­ting start and fin­ish dead­lines. Such tasks are moved to a wait­ing mode. In them, we use the tag ​“in progress.” A per­son can start work­ing on a task ear­li­er, and by plac­ing the cor­re­spond­ing tag ​“in progress” — every­one under­stands that the task is already underway.

Some­times sev­er­al peo­ple share the work on a task equal­ly. For that case, we cre­at­ed our own labels with employ­ees’ names. We added them to the task as assignees, and it was clear who was work­ing on it.

Report

The report is more for me. For under­stand­ing where we fell behind on dead­lines. It is con­ve­nient to look at closed tasks and under­stand why it hap­pened, to track how such sit­u­a­tions impact oth­er tasks.

I gen­er­ate reports with the nec­es­sary fil­ters and down­load them. The report con­tains a link to the task, which is a sig­nif­i­cant plus. If you need a detailed his­to­ry, you can imme­di­ate­ly go from the Excel file to the task.

Draw­backs

I wish a task could have sev­er­al peo­ple respon­si­ble. I work around this by tag­ging the nec­es­sary peo­ple in the task descrip­tion. But we still miss hav­ing that functionality.

And add some emo­jis — what, are you stingy with emojis?

Who Is It Suit­able For?

I believe that Work­sec­tion is suit­able for any busi­ness. Espe­cial­ly for those plan­ning events. In any case, the choice of the sys­tem depends on the tasks set. Spe­cif­ic exam­ples might include var­i­ous dig­i­tal or PR agen­cies, law firms.

We hap­pi­ly rec­om­mend Work­sec­tion to our res­i­dents, star­tups, and projects. For them, it’s not just a great ser­vice but also a tool that helps them get bet­ter and reach their goals faster.

In our case, Work­sec­tion is the struc­ture and time man­age­ment of our project. With­out it, effi­cien­cy would drop by 30%.