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As a project manager, you hold all of the puzzle pieces. You’re key to the success of every project at your agency. It’s not an easy gig — you have to stay highly organized to make sure every milestone doesn’t become a blocker, that feedback comes promptly, and all necessary changes are made.
You have Punchlist in your toolkit to simplify how your team receives feedback from stakeholders via a shared link. But now, let’s take it one step further by making it work for you too.
As your Punchlist Workspace grows, so do the number of projects and shifting timelines. Unfortunately, chaos shows up quickly, and things slip through the cracks if things are not in the right place. You don’t want a client seeing the wrong version of their deliverable and getting irrelevant feedback, for example.
With many balls in the air, how can you keep your Workspace organized, reduce your mental load, and keep your work uninterrupted? We have four ways to keep your Punchlist Workspace so tidy, it will make your project manager’s Type-A heart sing.
Here’s how to get started during your next housekeeping sprint.
Your project stakeholders have a lot going on each day, and limited time to dedicate to providing feedback. When they finally jump into Punchlist, you don’t want them to be faced with a confusing cluster of pages to review. Without some guidance, the stakeholders may miss a page or two critical to the project, creating a blocker for your team.
Before sharing and during an active project, you can curate exactly the Pages that you need feedback on. Within the Project, click on the Pages button on the top right of the page. This view will allow you to add, reorder, rename, and replace pages within the project.
Multiple pages in one project allow the client to interact and swipe as they provide feedback. You can even add URLs from other sources of inspiration or previous relevant work.
→ Learn how to create a ‘Swipe File’ and put your own spin on it
Fast forward a few weeks — you’ve shared the unique URL, collected feedback on your creative project, and are ready to start reading and delegating updates to members of your team. On a massive project, this could mean scrolling through dozens of pages, even some that have no requested changes.
Streamline your review by using the Pages with Feedback Only filter at the very top of your screen. When this toggle is enabled, you’ll only see the thumbnails of pages with active feedback across the top of your project. You can see exactly what pages need your attention — knocking out work more quickly and moving on to the next thing on your list.
When you first created your Workspace and invited team members to try out Punchlist, you probably created projects ad-hoc without much thought to test things out.
But as your Workspace starts getting filled with more projects (yay!), we suggest creating new folders to categorize those projects.
Right on your Punchlist Dashboard, you can create new folders and organize them by client name, department, launch date, or campaign, just to name a few different ways. We suggest picking one standard way of naming the folders for clarity.
Click New Folder to create a new one. Once you name the folder, you can select existing projects right below in the dropdown to move them to that new folder.
Even if you’ve already created dozens of Projects, you can easily use the file picker to reorganize them later, too, if you just want to create Folders first.
Another benefit to organizing your Workspace? Make sure your team members stay within their projects, and there’s no unnecessary feedback noise.
Create a housekeeping sprint for yourself to do the initial clean-up and create a process for categorizing and creating new projects for your team to follow. After the initial work, staying organized is easy!
As a project manager, you set the standard on how things are archived, categorized, and named. After a few quarters of trying out different processes, there always comes the time when you have to reorganize and move things around. An excellent feature to keep top of mind is the ability to rename your projects.
You can quickly rename your projects under the Project’s Settings page. On the General Settings tab, the Project Name is the first item. Type in the new name, scroll to the bottom and click submit.
Pro-tip: Only change the names of inactive or new projects. It will be confusing to see name changes and things shifted, especially if the projects are still active. Give your team a heads up that a clean-up is coming.
With Punchlist paid plans, you get unlimited projects, which is crucial when you’re concurrently designing print collateral, landing pages, and website projects — sometimes all three for the same client!
But as your projects go live or are sent off to the printer, it’s a good idea to archive them. This prevents people from adding feedback far too late in the game and avoids confusion among your teammates (No one likes getting “I thought this project was done?!” Slack messages).
To archive a project, find it on your Dashboard. Hover over the project thumbnail and click the menu icon in the top right corner. Select Archive Project and then click again to confirm the action.
And don’t worry, if you ever need to reopen a project, you can see all archived work in the Archived tab of your Dashboard or Folder. Just click Restore Project and you’re good to go!
It happens to everyone, even rockstar project managers — one chaotic sprint, and everything is upside down. That’s OK! Take a deep breath and tackle project organization one by one with these tips.
