The main purpose of this site is to make my product The Activity Plan available to the public.
Description
This application is an excel-based tool using Visual Basic and macros designed to help organize and increase the efficiency of a busy workday consisting of many tasks and deadlines. Especially, this tool helps to sort items according to priority, resulting in a better overview of current tasks, as well as getting those that are irrelevant out of the way.
The Activity Plan is a voluntary initiative and therefore 100% free under the defined conditions stated in section "Terms of Use".
Objectives
The intent and objectives of this tool are the following:
Make planning and following up of targets and activities simpler on day-to-day basis.
Increase the probability of managing deliveries to customer on-time.
Help indicating urgency and status-situation for a quicker determination of relevant work-focus.
Make the process of adding, clearing, sorting, hiding and filtering agendas and information in your list as simple as possible, as well as presentable in a daily job situation.
Background for Making The Activity Plan
The Activity Plan is a private initiative aimed to fill an obvious need to improve the efficiency and handling of every-day tasks. The loads of activities many people have are so overwhelming, that they have no chance to keep an overview of their tasks and thus are not able to prioritize sufficiently. In fact, the workday of some people is solely prioritized by other people coming into their office and flagging urgency.
Some common ways to keep track of things are to make Excel or Word lists, sort emails or write manual notes, but these are not always very good ways to follow up tasks, as a busy workday tend to make these kinds of “lists” very unorganized.
Often, one argues that there is no time to maintain notes in a tool, and I completely understand this when managing primitive to-do lists. I believe that this approach to such a common challenge cannot be the correct solution in the long run, and is probably a good reason why some people in the first place cannot make correct priorities.
My thought is that this is a reality that should be handled seriously, so that companies can use resources in a better way. One step to reverse such a trend is to enable and inspire people to build sufficiently good everyday routines to maintain a list of tasks, in a tool that serves peoples basic needs (i.e not too complicated), so that prioritization is at all made possible.
This Activity Plan tool is meant as one of many possible means to achieving this. My hope is that management of companies, as well as others, take the challenge of improving them self and the company, for all that it's worth... Further, I hope this tool is seen as useful and will be utilized by those that feel the need.
Main Functionality
Prioritize tasks according to defined dates with a click of a button. Priorities are clearly shown with color-codes and automated comments.
Formatting of dates are assured when using in-built calender function for dates.
Finished tasks are automatically moved to the bottom of the list when sorting by priority, making your list much more tidy and maintainable.
Background: When listing tasks in a conventional way, f.ex. using Word or Excel, old and outdated items tend to clutter up the list, making maintenance and follow-up a messy business.Move all dates on a selection of tasks a defined number of days.
Background: When editing tasks it is often tedious when a whole group of dates need to be moved.If you are used to Excel, this tool is very simple to learn.
Automatically generate reports and status request emails directly from the Activity Plan, as well as assign tasks in Outlook, using your tasks with dates as basis.
Print setup is handled automatically, giving a perfect result every time.
Background: In Excel, print-outs are often tricky to get nice-looking.Filtering, hiding or showing rows with specific information is a breeze.
All listed items may be filtered, sorted or hidden according to need.
extensive help function is readily available, describing all columns and functions. May also be printed.