One of the secrets to getting things done is to remove everything you’re thinking about from your head and getting in into a reliable system. I love systems and I love experimenting with new tools to improve how I work. Asana is a tool I’ve been using for the last year or so and it’s now one of the apps I feel I really couldn’t live without. Detailed below are my reasons for why you should be using Asana for planning your projects; whether they’re work related, side-projects or even getting things done at home. If you’re already using Asana I’d love to hear what kinds of projects you’re planning with it and how it factors into your workflow. Leave me a comment below.
What is Asana
You may have heard my talk about Asana if you’ve been through my “7-Day Productivity Plan” or downloaded my “Top 10 Productivity Tools” resource guide. Asana is basically an extremely powerful, yet easy to use to-do list app. It’s perfect for planning projects within teams but works equally well for individuals.
At the top level of Asana you have an organisation. Within the organisation, users are organised into teams (you can be part of multiple teams). Within these teams you have projects and in the projects you create tasks. In a task you can create subtasks (and even more subtasks within each of those). Under each task you have a comments thread.
As I hope you can see, the structure of Asana makes it very powerful and can be adapted for however you like to use it.
You don’t necessarily have to use it within an organisation. You can use it as an individual and create different projects for the different areas of your life. For example, at home; DIY projects, recipes to try, planning a wedding, planning a holiday. Or for your side-projects; planning and writing a book, building a website, writing blog posts.
Why You Should Use Asana
Here are my top reasons for why you should be using Asana for planning the different projects in your life:
1. It’s Extremely Powerful
With the different combinations of teams, projects, tasks and subtasks that you can create, Asana can be used for any project that you can think of.
The use of “sections” within projects is one of the most useful features and allows you to categorise tasks and create structure. For example, you can can create sections to highlight task priority (high, medium, low) or if you work using a “sprint” system you can separate tasks into the different sprints.
When you create a task, you can add descriptions, subtasks and attachments to collect everything you need in one place. So when you start that piece of work, you can quickly open any resources and links and get straight into your work. I particularly like being able to add screenshots and images to a task which appear inline in the comments section.
The other really useful feature which I haven’t seen in many to-do list apps is the ability to link people or other tasks and projects together. Similar to how you would mention a person on Facebook with @name, you can loop people into a task and link other tasks or projects together.
The final feature that’s worth mentioning is tagging. Similar to how tags work in Evernote, you can categories tasks together with a common tag. For example, I use the “Someday” tag to categories things that aren’t important now, but are things I’d like to do at some point in the future.
2. It’s Easy to Use
Even with all this power and a huge list of features, Asana is extremely easy to use. Creating tasks in a project is as easy as typing on a line and hitting return. It works very much like a Word processor and you can create an entire list of tasks and sections without even touching your mouse.
The app is full of easy to use keyboard shortcuts that allow you to navigate and sort through tasks very quickly. You can select multiple tasks and drag them around or change the due date and assignee on all of them at once.
Asana also makes managing your workload very easy. As you set due dates and tasks are assigned to you, tasks get pushed to your “Today” view so you always know what to work on next. You’ll get notified of tasks that are due today or that are coming up soon.
3. It provides Context
When using Asana, you can choose to view all of your tasks in the “My Tasks” view or choose to view tasks related to just a specific project. If you have a tag like “WIP” (Work in Progress”) you could choose to view all the work that you’ve started and still need to finish. Asana also comes with a great search function and better yet, you can save these search results to your “Favourites”. For example, you could search for all tasks assigned to you that are due within the next 5 days and save this to keep your most urgent tasks instantly accessible.
This ability to filter tasks by context is one of the top reasons to use Asana over any other to-do list or project management app. If you think about it, what good is a list of tasks that you need to complete? It's only when you sort and organise tasks by context that they become useful and more importantly; actionable! Here are some useful ways you can group tasks and create context in Asana:
- Everything assigned to me. Go to your “My Tasks”.
- Everything due this week. Create a search to find everything due in the next 7 days.
- Everything to do with a specific project. Go through your different projects.
- Everything that's classified as “Work in Progress” that you need to finish. View your tasks tagged with “WIP”.
- Everything you've assigned to other people. Create a search for everything “Assigned by” you.
Here's another cool feature of Asana. Click on a project and get an instant snapshot of your progress in this handy graph. It incredibly useful for viewing the difference between everything that you need to do and everything you've done so far. This is useful and a great source of motivation that maintains project momentum.
In the “Dashboard” view you can view snapshots of the progress of all of your projects in one place. You can even mark the colour of a project as green, yellow or red based on how the project is progressing. So if you're not making the progress you'd like to, you can mark a project as yellow to show you and others that you could be doing more to reach your project goals.
Limitations of Asana
While Asana is awesome there are a few limitations which you should be aware of.
- Other to-do apps allow you to create tasks or to-dos that alert you based on location. For example, you could have a reminder to “Buy Groceries” when you leave work. As Asana is more of a project management app that's best used on the desktop, it doesn't currently support this feature.
- No snooze feature. Where other to-do list apps let you snooze to-dos for later e.g. 3 hours later, or for “this evening” Asana has a simple due date and due time but no snooze feature.
- Adding new tasks to Asana on the smartphone app isn't as easy as other to-do list apps.
Bear in mind that Asana has been built as a desktop application, not a smartphone app. This is why I use the Apple Reminders app on my phone to set more “casual” reminders like “buy stamps” when I leave work (okay not a great example).
To sum up, Asana is one of the greatest productivity apps I've come across and it's an essential part of my workflow. If you haven't tried Asana yet, I highly recommend you give it a go. It's going to be super useful for planning the different projects in your life, outlining and breaking down your goals and keeping track of everything you've got going on. If you're already using Asana, let me know what you think of it and what you're using it for in the comments below!
TIP: If you need help getting started with Asana, or if you want to get more out of Asana, I HIGHLY recommend you check out “Do Better with Asana” by Productivityists Mike Vardy and Jeremy Roberts.
Until next time, have a productive day!