Staying organized is essential for any small business! There are tons of tools for productivity out there, but Asana is one of the best. These Asana tips will help you stay on track with all your projects, to-dos, and goals.
Why You Should Use Asana For Your Small Business
Asana is one of the best tools for small business owners! No matter what your goals are or where you’re at in your business, it’ll help you stay on track and stay organized.
You can use Asana on your laptop or even download their mobile app for on-the-go work, updates, or ideas. It’s a simple platform that’s easy to use and customize once you get the hang of it!
Don’t worry about Asana being too technical for you. As you grow your business and even expand to have a team, you need a better system for managing projects and keeping everything in one place.
The more organized you are, the better—especially if you’re striving to grow.
If you’ve been using sticky notes, paper to-do lists, or desktop planners, you’ll need a more sophisticated way to stay organized as you grow. Whether you’re a solopreneur or growing a team, Asana helps you prioritize and organize all of your ideas, projects, goals, and daily, weekly, and monthly tasks.
There are three main parts of Asana you’ll need to know about before getting started:
- Workspaces/Teams: Inside your workspaces, you group together different projects under one umbrella (like multiple projects inside “marketing” as a workspace)
- Projects: Projects are lists of tasks that can be divided, prioritized, and even tagged with specific tags
- Tasks: Your tasks have all of the specifics, like details, due dates, who’s responsible, comments, and even sub-tasks
Before we get into specific Asana tips to help you maximize your productivity, here are some more reasons you should try Asana in your business.
You Can Improve Task Management For All Your Projects
No matter what your niche is or what you’re working on, Asana helps you manage multiple projects with detailed task lists and subtasks. Everything will have its place, and you can set up strategic, seamless workflows for yourself and your team.
Instead of sending tons of emails back and forth about projects, everything can be housed in Asana.
You’ll always be able to see what’s completed, when projects are due, and who’s working on them. That makes it easy to collaborate across different projects and goals!
Become More Efficient In How You Work
With Asana, you’ll be able to prioritize things and become way more organized. This not only helps you get more done, but helps you focus on what’s most important, too.
One of the best things about Asana is that it’s visual! You can tweak the layout, view, and colors to meet your needs.
Make Collaboration Easier
Inside of the Asana platform, you can update projects seamlessly and in real-time. Plus, the other collaborators on a project or task will receive email notifications and notifications in their Asana inboxes with updates they should see.
If you’re working with a team, collaboration is easier than ever with a tool like Asana on your side.
Fundamental Asana Tips To Get You Started
These basic Asana tips might seem kind of common sense, but they’re a great way to make the most of your productivity.
Make Sure To Check Your Inbox Each Day
Checking your inbox inside of Asana helps you stay on top of any notes, suggestions, changes, or updates. Whether your team members have a question or you need to check in on a project, your inbox will house all of the notifications you need to see each day.
Avoid Clutter By Archiving Projects
If a project is completed, out of date, or not really relevant anymore, archive it! Just like a physical office space, keep your Asana workspace clean for everyone. That way, nothing important gets missed or lost amidst digital task clutter.
If Projects Apply Only To You, Use Private Projects
Asana is a great place to do braindumps, brainstorming, and other messy, not-so-ready-to-go tasks. But you probably don’t want to clutter up a workspace or project for your team members with all sorts of unfinalized tasks!
Instead, just use a private project for your personal work. When it is the right time for your team members to step in, move those tasks over to a public project and start collaborating.
Make Sure To Add Teams
Teams are a great way to divide up the work in Asana! With teams, you can give everyone a clear focus on the projects they need to be working on. Of course, you can always assign tasks to individuals in Asana outside of a Team or Project…but teams are an additional, effective way to organize.
Update Task Descriptions (Don’t Rely On Comments)
Comments are a great feature in Asana, but no one wants to rely on scrolling through the comments for important information. Instead, make sure that you ALWAYS leave all details in your task descriptions and keep things up-to-date.
This saves everyone time and helps you and your team avoid costly mistakes.
You can always leave a comment summarizing what’s new and asking team members to review the updated task description, too.
7 Specific Asana Tips To Help Boost Your Productivity
Let’s get into some more specific Asana tips that will help you stay productive!
1. Create Sections With List View
This is one of the most basic Asana tips, but it’s important to know how to organize your projects!
With Sections, you can separate your projects to be even more organized. Use List view in Asana and add sections by hovering above your task list—a button will pop up!
Alternatively, type out a regular task that you’d like to convert into a section, and add a colon at the end. Asana will automatically convert it into a section for you!
2. Add Projects To Your Favorites for Quick Access
If you have a ton of projects inside of Asana, you can actually add specific ones to your “favorites” section for quick, easy access!
All you need to do is click on the star icon next to the title of your project. Then, you can access your favorites in the top of the left-hand sidebar. So easy!
3. Place One Task In Multiple Projects Simultaneously
What if one task needs to be accessible to multiple people, for multiple reasons? You could create duplicates of that task, but that makes tracking progress almost impossible.
Instead, here’s one of the easiest Asana tips to do this and make tracking easier. To add a single task to multiple projects, click the + icon inside the project area at the top.
4. Add Colors To Your Projects For Visibility
If you’re a visual person, adding colors is a great way to keep yourself organized. You can even develop a whole system around different types of work in your business or levels of completion.
5. Set A Start Date AND A Due Date
Normally, you probably set due dates in Asana. But did you know that you can also set a start date? This will help you keep your team on track and give them flexibility in managing their own schedules.
6. Create Automated Workflows With Repeated Tasks
If you find yourself doing similar processes each day, week, or month in Asana, you can set up automated recurring workflows with repeated tasks. You can actually do this at whatever intervals you like.
Set this up under the due date in Asana.
7. Schedule Time To Consistently Track Metrics
Speaking of intervals, one of the best Asana tips is to set up tasks that remind you to do what’s most important. If you’re someone who forgets to track their metrics, you need to set up recurring Asana tasks!
You can customize this to fit your needs. However frequently you’d like to be examining your metrics and adjusting your strategy, schedule tasks that remind you to track your metrics. Include links to whatever you need to track and how you keep track, too!
Asana is super flexible, and you can include everything you need in one place and make metrics tracking easy to remember.
These Asana tips are going to help you make the most of Asana and start being more organized than ever before. Which of these tips will you implement?