Back in January 2012 I wrote Get Organised with this Free Resource. So today I decided I would write about that same resource, but from a slightly different angle. How you can organise your clients or team with Asana.
I’ve been using Asana for some time now, and it’s made my working days so much more productive. I go over the basics of Asana in my previous review of it, so if you don’t know what Asana is and how it can help, then pop back and read that post first.
As an entrepreneur who works with a number of different clients, sometimes it’s very difficult to manage tasks effectively. Emails popping into my inbox 24/7, a never-ending stream of tasks to complete, and possibly all coming in to different email accounts (I currently manage 5 accounts). It can be the source of a constant headache.
For Teams
Asana is just one web page which I keep open at all times, and it’s constantly refreshing for updates on tasks and projects. I have not yet persuaded all of my clients to use it effectively, but I’m getting there. My virtual assistant and freelance writer are using Asana with me, so I can easily assign them tasks and quickly get back to work myself.
Asana can be used as an instant messenger as well as assigning tasks. I have set-up a task called General Chat, and I can quickly send a message to my VA and she can then respond with an answer, no need to send emails back and forth anymore.
You don’t have to share a whole workspace with someone else, I have set-up two separate projects, one called Virtual Assistant Tasks and the other Writing Tasks as you can see above, I have then shared just those projects with my team. I can then work away on other projects knowing that only I have access to them, but can quickly transfer over a task from one project to another.
For Clients
As I said, I’ve not convinced all my clients to use Asana, but I am working on it. I think someone has to use Asana for all of their tasks to see the benefit, rather than just use it to communicate with one person. One of my clients has implemented it himself, and has started to use it to keep track of his own workload, but often he isn’t able to find the time to update Asana with my tasks.
One of the benefits of Asana, which I will be reminding my client later today is you can email tasks directly to a project. Rather than filling your inbox up with tasks these can be redirected to Asana and be set-up as a new task. The subject line is the name of the task, the body is the content, and you can even attach files.
Asana is the first thing I check every morning to see what tasks I need to do for the day. You can easily move tasks around, put them in priority order, deadline date order, hide them until a later date or assign them to different projects/people. Each workspace has an inbox, this is where your due tasks will show and if there are any messages from other people in your workspace. I work through these first, to make sure I have dealt with everything I need to.
Over the last few months Asana has bought in some great new features, their latest integrations are Harvest (time tracking software – this is great!), Google Drive and Dropbox.
Project Management
I still can’t believe that Asana is available for free. If you are part of a large organisation and want to use Asana with a big team then it does cost, but I think the price plans are very reasonable.
One of my favourite features which has just recently been launched is the ‘repeat’ function, it’s only a small change but it means I can set a recurring task up once and when I mark it complete it will create a new task automatically so I don’t have to. So I’m off to tick off my blog post task for today, and will see you again next week!
