Using Asana to reduce (or eliminate) meetings [VIDEO]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCkxETZRodE&w=560&h=315]

Ah, meetings, we love and we loathe them. On the one hand, meetings make us feel good because you feel productive and important. On the other hand, they're usually a massive waste of time because they're unstructured and things we said we'd do in the meeting usually don't get done.

Enter Asana! In the video below, I share some tips for using Asana to reduce and eliminate meetings altogether. And, when you do need to have a meeting, Asana can be used to keep everyone on track and putting meeting notes into action.

Using Asana to reduce meetings

Meetings are often used to get clarity on how a team is going or where a project is at right now. There are a few key ways that Asana can be used to reduce the need for this type of meeting:

  1. Instead of having a meeting to “catch up” or have a one-on-one with someone, you can simply look at the other person's My Tasks to see what's currently being worked on.
  2. Project managers can use the Progress tab to update everyone on a project's progress. By writing a few sentences about what's going well and obstacles that are holding the project back, the team can chip in with suggestions and be kept in the look without the need to hold a “Project status” meeting.
  3. Team members should only meet to plan the project next steps and high-level goals. More tactical stuff like “Can you do this?” should be discussed in Asana via the comments.

How to run better meetings with Asana

When you decide that a meeting is justified, you can use Asana to keep the meeting on track and log important action items. There are a few ways you can do this (watch my video for a demonstration of each one):

  1. Project or Team Conversations – A quick and easy way to run a meeting is to use the Conversations area of a project or team to keep your meeting notes. During the meeting, you can add new tasks to a project as you go to record what everyone needs to do.
  2. Meeting Project Template – Asana comes with a pre-built template with sections for the agenda and action items so you can clearly plan and run your meeting. This is okay, but it can result in a lot of projects cluttering up your sidebar.
  3. Meetings as Tasks – Instead, I prefer to plan and run meetings using a task template. The task can be added to the necessary project so the meeting notes are recorded in the right place. Within the task, you can use subtasks to plan the agenda before the meeting. If you add followers to the task, you can encourage other people to add to the agenda as well. During the meeting, you can add new subtasks to set up action items. You can take this a step further by adding the subtask to any necessary projects so the meeting tasks are clearly visible within the grand scheme of things.

To get a free 30-day trial on Asana Premium or Business (even if you're an existing customer), you can use my partner link: https://paulm.in/2BFvAvR

Need help with Asana? View my consulting options to see how I can help.

Please let me know if you have any questions about using Asana's for running your meetings!