Wrike Tips and Tricks
3 Things We Like About Wrike (and 3 Great Tips for Wrike Users)
Wrike Tips and Tricks

3 Things We Like About Wrike (and 3 Great Tips for Wrike Users)

Trying to decide what project management tool is right for you? Don’t sleep on Wrike. Built to help companies streamline their workflows, Wrike is used by over 18,000 businesses worldwide, including the likes of Google and L’Oreal. As expected, it’s set up to encourage internal collaboration and allows you to easily manage and track projects, deadlines, schedules, and other processes. It also plays well with most of the big enterprise systems, integrating with software from Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, and more.

Why should you choose Wrike? Here are three things we like about the tool that might sway your decision.

Three great things about Wrike

1. Feature sets catered to your role

Are you on a creative team? A project management team? Maybe business operations? Wrike has specialized feature sets for different parts of the business, so you can really cater the tool to your workflow with ease.

Wrike for Marketers, for example, was built with marketing workflows in mind, and includes an Adobe Photoshop integration, intake forms, proofing and approving tools for videos, images, and other creative assets, and document versioning.

If you’re rolling out Wrike organization-wide, there are also plans to match the size and scale of your business. Wrike Enterprise includes advanced analytics tools, custom workflows and spreadsheets, and other features designed with large companies in mind.

2. Simple, clean design

Despite having a suite of awesome features, Wrike has a sparse, minimalist UI. If a cluttered interface packed with bells and whistles gives you a headache, you’ll appreciate Wrike’s clean and simple multi-pane aesthetic. And all Wrike features are categorized as either “project management” or “team collaboration,” so you won’t end up wasting time searching for the features you need to use.  

If you’re ready to get down to business and start working on your project, Wrike won’t get in your way.

3. Easy to add and manage team members

Wrike makes it really, really easy to add users, share documents, adjust permissions, and send out invitations. Project managers who have large teams to wrangle will find a ton of value here, but even small teams will appreciate the simplicity. One of the biggest myths about Wrike is that it’s only for big teams, but there are plans for all team sizes, including a freemium version that allows for up to five users.  

Three tips to help you get the most out of Wrike

Whether you’re already a Wrike user or still need a little convincing, here are some tips for using Wrike like a pro:

1. Use a custom dashboard as a priority matrix

A priority matrix can be a great way to organize tasks, as it helps you identify what tasks are both urgent and critical. You can build a matrix in Wrike by creating folders for each priority level, and then dragging tasks from one folder to another as your priorities change. Wrike’s custom dashboard setup options make it easy to arrange these folders in a way that aligns with your team’s workflow. You can even name and color-code the folders so it’s crystal clear where to drop immediate, critical tasks and where to store tasks on your backburner.

2. Keyboard shortcuts

Do you know how many working hours are spent each year moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse and back? We don’t either, but it’s probably substantial. Instead of wasting time, speed up your project management and avoid carpal tunnel with the help of Wrike’s keyboard shortcuts. Here are a few particularly useful ones:

  • “Send” = shift + Enter
  • Create a new task = Alt + Shift + N
  • Assign a new task to yourself = Alt + Shift + “.”
  • Open the current task in a new browser tab = Alt + Shift + O
  • Open the current task in fullscreen view = Alt + Shift + F

3. Track your time accurately

Whether you’re a freelancer who gets paid by the hour, or you just want to see what tasks occupy the majority of your work day, Wrike has impressively integrated time tracking into its dashboard. Within tasks there’s a “play” button which, when clicked, starts a timer. Let the timer run until you’re done with the task and click it again to stop the timer and log those hours. Alternatively, there’s a similar “play” button at the top of your main Wrike navigation bar with a handy dropdown menu of all your open tasks. This allows you to start or stop the timer on any task as you move through your day.

We recommend setting up a generic “daily activities” task. Then, when you’re called away from project tasks, switch the time tracker at the top to this “daily activities” task. You’ll end up with a better accounting of how your time gets spent.

Making the Wrike decision

Every project management platform has its pros and cons. What we like best about Wrike is the clean simplicity of its design, how easy it is to use core functions like user management, and its custom feature sets.

Once you’ve gotten comfortable using Wrike, you can start taking advantage of more advanced features, such as:

  • Blueprints
  • Custom fields
  • Onboarding templates
  • Custom workflows
  • Dynamic request forms
  • Filters

It’s important to choose project management tools that are a good fit for your team and your company. See if Wrike is right for you.

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