Over the last 6 months at my full time job, things have gotten a bit hectic. We’ve doubled our customers, added 3 more employees, and had a CEO who was busy with other projects. This had created a need for leadership and organization like never before.<\/p>\n
I saw an opportunity to step up but I knew I couldn’t do it myself. Our company is very dynamic, changing tasks and priorities several times a day. If I was to attempt to fill this leadership void I knew I needed a tool to help us keep track of our tasks, as there’s no way I would be able to keep it all in my head or survive with a simple todo list.<\/p>\n
I looked around for task management programs. I asked around for suggestions, searched everywhere, and even tried some on Wikipedia’s comprehensive list of project management tools<\/a>. But none of them had what I wanted. All I needed was a simple tool where I could list tasks by project, assign them to people, and know with a quick glance the status of everything.<\/p>\n I decided to create something on my personal time. It took me about 3 weekends, but ended up with my own tool: TaskShot<\/a>. It accomplished everything I needed and nothing more. I’ve been using it over the last 5 months and I couldn’t be more happy with it.<\/p>\n I then realized that other people may be interested in this, as it fills a pretty specific niche for small companies who need simple, yet effective task and staff tracking. Being the\u00a0entrepreneur\u00a0that I am, I cleaned it up a bit and have plans to market it as a hosted web app. I’ve opened it up so others can sign up for it, but haven’t advertised it, thus currently I am my project’s only customer.<\/p>\n Here’s where the profitability comes in: Last month I had a yearly review with the CEO of my day job. He expressed how impressed with me he was about my ability to focus on the important tasks and keep people on track. He was very happy with my project management skills and even more satisfied with my leadership skills. Immediately after our meeting, he gave me a raise of about $7k.<\/p>\n Yup, $7,000! Lets do the numbers: I’ve invested only my free time, $20 for a template, and a little space on a web server I already had, and created $7k. I know you’re thinking that I would’ve received a raise anyway, and you’re right, but it wouldn’t have been that much (the previous year was just a few percentage points). And I realize that it took my skills as a leader to enforce the tasks I was keeping track of, but I don’t care. The way I see it I would have received a standard raise if I did not have my task management tool<\/a>.<\/p>\n Eventually I still hope to share this tool with others as a side-business, but for now I’m extremely pleased to be my project’s only customer, yet still profitable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the last 6 months at my full time job, things have gotten a bit hectic. We’ve doubled our customers, added 3 more employees, and had a CEO who was busy with other projects. This had created a need for leadership and organization like never before. I saw an opportunity to step up but I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","category-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shanelabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shanelabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shanelabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shanelabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shanelabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/shanelabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153,"href":"https:\/\/shanelabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shanelabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shanelabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shanelabs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}