Hands shake, contract signed, the beginning of a new project. It’s a time to celebrate and also time to get things done. Whenever you start a project, there’s usually a series of steps set into motion, many of which are critical to complete.
Wouldn’t it be nice if something remembered all these things for you?
Starting a project is an exciting time that can quickly turn into a stressful one. You’ve got to set a lot of meetings and deadlines but forgetting one of these can mean dropping the ball. So you spend a lot of time and effort adding each and everything into your calendar and to-do list. But after starting a project it’s easy to get lost in busy work and forget the next most important step.
Daylite helps you automatically create the next steps for a project using Activity Sets. This is a major time saver and gives you the confidence that all your ducks are lined up in a row on Day 1.
Activity Sets save you from having to create each specific task or appointment in sequence for a project. Just select the Activity Set and all the next tasks and appointments are populated for you in Daylite.
Check out how you can turn busy work into better project management using the power of automation with Activity Sets.
How to create the perfect checklist for your projects
When you start a project, a checklist helps you execute and provide your customers the best service possible. For many, it is almost as important as doing the job itself. But maintaining it shouldn’t be just as much work. This is where Activity Sets come into play.
You can make the checklist once, and add it to all your photography shoots, court cases or open houses, saving you from creating each individual task.
To create an Activity Set follow these steps:
- Open Daylite Preferences & Choose Activity Sets
- Click + in the lower left cornerName your activity set & write a quick description
- Click on the things you want have the activity sets apply to
- Add any tasks and appointments you want in your activity set
When you start naming your tasks or appointments, add @@ in the title. When you have @@ in the task or appointment name, Daylite will use @@ to pull the name of the project.
Eg. You have a project called “Dave and Charlotte’s Wedding“, and you create a task for “Confirm Venue Address for @@” in an activity set, the task will be renamed “Confirm Venue Address for Dave and Charlotte’s Wedding“.
Pro Tip: You can set the time frame that each task should be due according to the project due date. For example, you can setup a task within an Activity Set to be due 3 days after the project starts. Or 5 days before the project due date. This way time-sensitive tasks will show up on your “due today” list to keep you informed of what’s important.
You can also assign different tasks within an Activity Set to different people in your company. For example, the first and second task in your project checklist may need to be done by you, but the third needs to be done by someone else in your company. Design work goes to your designer; marketing goes to marketing, and sales tasks go to your sales team. You can delegate tasks within an Activity Set to the appropriate people in your company so that it show up on their task list when the checklist starts.
How to execute on a project with your perfect checklist
Now that you’ve made your Activity Set, applying it to a project is a piece of cake. Say goodbye to the busy work of data entry and say hello to productivity and focusing on the real work.
To trigger your checklist for a project, create the project as you normally would, filling in all the important details in the fields available. Now before you click on save, click on 
in the top right corner and choose New Activity Set. Now all those tasks and appointments will generate automatically and be linked to the project!
Pro Tip: Add Activity Sets to your contextual menu for less clicks. Check out How to customize your contextual menu to add items to the contextual menu.
You don’t want to waste time doing data entry and go through the painstaking process of making sure you booked all the appointments and made all the tasks for a project. You don’t want to manage the project you want to complete it. With Daylite’s Activity Sets, you can automate your project management process so you can save time and manage more projects.
