You know the scenario . . . it’s been a few days since any new work has come through your company and you have been busy wrapping up a few larger projects. Then out of the blue a barrage of new clients are requesting jobs from you left, right, sideways, upways and downways! How do you keep track of all these new assignments?

An Easy Answer for Simple Tracking

While there are a variety of large project management applications out there to choose from (and I’m sure they do the job wonderfully), the Riddle Brothers like to keep things as simple as possible. We use a very easy method for tracking our jobs in the form of a shared Excel spreadsheet via Google docs.

Whenever we receive a new job (either design = me, or development = Josh), we add it to our spreadsheet. Information contained on the spreadsheet includes a job number, name of the project, point of contact for the project and contact information.

This spreadsheet is accessible by us anytime, anywhere (thanks to Google) and allows us to keep track as a brother tandem of all jobs in the cue.

The Ever-Important Job Number

The first column indicates the number of the job for the year. This is the most important bit of information on this spreadsheet. For example, our 65th job received during the year of 2007 would be job 07-RID-065….where 07 is the year, RID is our company indicator and 065 is the job number.  

Why is this so important? The number is a locater for us. It is included on all file names for a project that we do. For example, if we were designing a brochure using Adobe InDesign (job number 07-RID-065) for a client, it would be named as file 07-RID-065_companybrochure.indd.

Our reasoning for this is that we may have a client contact us a few years down the road requesting that we revise “that one brochure you did back in 2007”. We would then spend a good amount of wasted time digging through our archives for this brochure if we did not track it in some way. Since have assigned the brochure a job number, we can easily search our archives for the job number (065) or the year (07).

It Saves Time and Effort for You!

Tracking your jobs only save you time and effort to focus elsewhere. I can’t count the number of times I have asked someone to send me a file, only to see them search through their computer in multiple folders and sub-folders not even sure of what they are looking for. What a waste of time better spent on the important and fun things…such as design…or development!