Workjoy is what Notion Project Management Should Have Been

Project management software is the digital home for all those paper and pen project folders. 

Although we seek a digital platform where we can quickly check and monitor our teams’ progress on the various projects at hand, some of these platforms are more time-consuming than they are a help.

Take Notion for instance. Although it gives you freedom of personalization, it also requires you to spend long hours setting and maintaining those systems so you can manage your projects effectively. 

We need software that takes that pain away and makes project management a smooth experience. 

This is why we created Workjoy’s fully hand-crafted project management features.

The problem with Notion project management

Although Notion gives you the freedom to customise your project database, creating a system that fully responds to your needs can seem complex and overwhelming.

Notion gives you three templates to start with: 

1. A to-do list that is a database to track your tasks.

2. Projects & tasks template that creates two databases (one for projects and one for tasks) linked to one another.

3. Projects, tasks & sprints template that adds a third layer for project cycle monitoring.

On top of this, these initial templates are fully customizable, and you can add more properties as you edit them. The problem is that systems and templates are not that straightforward to set up in the right way.

Sometimes, freedom feels like a dead desert.

Many Notion users complain that they have to put a lot of effort and time into learning how to build and maintain systems. It is common for people to build a system but forget to maintain it – and it breaks – OR people do not set the systems with the exact steps and specificities Notion requires.

In the latter case, what happens is some features may not prove to be useful - like the AI tool. If you do not set the blocks as Notion expects, their AI tool may not be able to retrieve the information you wish, even though it is in the system.

Another issue you may come across in Notion is that large projects, or at least projects that use heavy-size media content, may lead to slower software performance. 

Also, although the systems you create may help you keep projects organised, it is challenging and time-consuming to keep your workspace tidy as the project and task databases grow.

And lastly, another key problem is how difficult it is to communicate in real-time on Notion’s platform. When you are project managing, being able to easily communicate with your team is not an advantage, it is a must. Typically if you are using Notion, you have to resort to Slack to make it happen – which also has its downsides.

How Workjoy helps you manage your team’s projects

Workjoy is not built for customization. It is built for effortless performance.

If you think about it, having a system like Notion that allows you to build every block is like buying a laptop in individual pieces. No one thinks about buying a laptop in pieces, right?

We believe productivity does not come down to how personalised your systems are but how fluidly you can do your work and manage your team’s projects. Thus, although we look to solve the same problem as Notion – to efficiently support project management – we built a different solution.

Every feature already built-in

Your time is valuable for us. We did the hard work of handcrafting every feature, so you could focus on what matters the most: Managing projects and doing your work.

On our platform, a few specifications are fully customizable, like the projects and tasks workflows. Nevertheless, all of Workjoy’s features are ready to use as soon as you create your account. Plus, we designed them according to the best scientific leadership practices.

With Workjoy, we save you the trouble of learning to set systems and maintain them. Everything you need is already built in.

Goals to keep you aligned

Projects flow better when everyone is aligned. So, when we built Workjoy, we integrated Goals as a tool to help you meet your project’s purpose.

You can create OKRs, SMART goals, Cascading goals, or any other framework that best suits you. Our point is that goals are critical to a project’s progression and completion – and you can easily set them on Workjoy.

For each goal you create, we ask you to assign it to one person and set a specific deadline to accomplish it. Then, you can break each goal into actionable tasks to create a road map for your team.

Easily track project tasks

Tasks have a better chance of resulting in success if there is a clear purpose and a single delegate.

Contrary to Notion, where you can assign multiple people to the same task, our software only allows you to delegate a task to one person. This also forces you to subdivide tasks to guarantee that you have just one person owning its outcome.

By keeping task contributors to one person, it is easy for you, as a leader, to see who needs your support, to assess why something is falling short, or who is making brilliant developments. It also avoids miscommunications and the ambiguity of who is doing what. Overall, it helps your team to be more productive.

In the task tab, you can click on “delegated tasks” and get an overview of all the active tasks your team is performing. This helps you have a quick status of who is on track and who needs your support. You can organise this page to give you the best overview by filtering by tasks, priority, stats, and due date.

Everything neatly organised out of the box

We don’t like cluttered spaces because they bring chaos to your team. On Workjoy, you can find your projects and tasks neatly organised.

On the project tab, you can access all your active and past projects. In each one, you have access to the project introduction – where we invite you to explain the project’s purpose and provide some context to your team – as well as the respective tasks and the commenting section. 

Everything you need is easily revisited and is always organised – independently of the project size and the number of resources exchanged.

With this level of organisation, if you need to add a new person to the project, they will easily understand what it is about and have access to everything discussed and shared. You will not have to explain how everything works all the time.

Conversations to keep you in the loop

While it is possible to have conversations in Notion, mainly through its comments tool, people usually resort to Slack to discuss work. Nevertheless, if you are using multiple platforms to manage your work, you are increasing your mental overload, stress, and the chance of miscommunication.

In Workjoy, we built a system that allows you to have conversations from tasks, projects, meetings, channels, or DMs. This ensures you easily communicate with your team members and that every conversation has a clear focus. In your inbox, you can find all your conversations.

One conversation. One focus. For productive work.

Designed to be fast

Workjoy is not a built-it-all type of platform like Notion is. Thus, we can code our software to make it fast and lightweight regardless of the quantity or size of the data you share with your team.

With Workjoy you can say goodbye to those frustrating performance issues.

Key takeaways

Notion requires a steep learning curve for you to enjoy your fully tailored project database. Workjoy has the best leadership practices embedded in its system so you can start managing your team’s projects right away.

Workjoy is built to give you an enjoyable project management experience with less effort and less software.