Is WhatsApp an effective task manager?

Usage of WhatsApp as a task management app is increasing day by day. The ease of use and accessibility has made it everyone’s go to application. In my recent interactions with owners and managers of organizations, I found out that on an average a company having 60 employees have 20 WhatsApp groups to manage coordination among employees. While managing so many groups is a tedious and erroneous process, alternatives are limited and not economically viable. Thus managing tasks over WhatsApp is gaining traction.

Ideally managing tasks involve monitoring current to do list, tracking number of hours spent on a particular activity and keeping the relevant stakeholders like owner / manager timely informed. A task also needs to remind employees before it reaches near to the end date. WhatsApp is a communication platform and it is used to communicate between people. One part of task management process is to have an effective communication and WhatsApp application is known for that, but the core of an effective task management process is not only communication but also timely reminder, monitoring and reporting. Objective of any task manager app is to save time, collaboration effectively and manage easily. It needs an easy to use task management system for users of organization to maintain to dos, keep track of tasks with time, supervise tasks and monitor their completion. WhatsApp would be solving on portion i.e. communication, but other factors that are more important during activity execution is completely missing. In fact using WhatsApp for team collaboration is not a safe bet for the long run. Instead of reducing time and increasing productivity, organizations tend to spend more time in managing tasks and monitoring activities. While performing tasks if there is some important information to be monitored or referred to, then the users need to search for these in different groups and there is a high chance that one might miss the information given the large volume of data exchanged on WhatsApp. Another feature that is missing from WhatsApp’s feature list is real time status update and notification of how many tasks are pending with each user which could be used in understanding user load and availability.

For increasing productivity it is important to asses, how much time has been spent on what kind of activity to identify the improvement areas. WhatsApp or any other communication platform will not address this and thus it prevents them from becoming a sustainable model for managing tasks.

To summarize, using WhatsApp or any other communication platform might be lucrative in the short run, but absence of several features does not support an organization in its growth. A dedicated task manager with necessary features can play a vital role in organization growth.