I’m a productivity geek… we all know this. If you’ve been following my writing or videos for over the past two years, then you will also know that I have found my beloved task management system: Asana.
It has become the backbone of my company handling all our projects, tasks, and our editorial calendar. I LOVE this tool, and I feel like I had to share some of the wonderful ways that we’ve started using it both professionally and personally to inspire you to give it a try too. Someone recently suggested that I run a webinar on Asana, so I might do that too in the near future. Would you be interested? Leave a comment below to let me know!
What is Asana and Why I Love It?
Primarily, it is a project management and communications platform. It allows our team to bring all task-related information and communications into one place. Steps for launching that new program, following up with clients or networking relationships, and, of course, everything involved in getting our blogs and vlogs posted for you all. Having all that information together makes it dramatically easier to track and decide what to do today.
It is particularly powerful if you work with others (even just your spouse) because everyone’s tasks related to any project are immediately visible. My team members always know what’s on their plate, which can be clarified further at staff meetings. My husband and I have eliminated the “honey do list” posted around the house and nagging conversations largely because we can keep all that information in our private workspace. We review it together during our weekly “family meeting” and make sure we’re all clear on our top priorities for each week.
How I Use It?
Just to help you get a sense… here’s a list of the ways that we use Asana both at work and at home to keep the trains running:
Personal
- Birthday Cards – I have a project with reoccurring tasks for everyone’s birthdays to remind me to buy appropriate cards and send them out in time.
- Holiday Tradition Plans – I keep the tasks for our family holidays in separate projects and can just clone and update last year’s to make sure that we don’t forget steps or who we need to buy presents for.
- Home Improvements & Maintenance – When we think of something that needs to happen around the house we keep a running list and can assign the steps to the appropriate family member to complete. Putting in the AC units, taking in the garden hose for winter, putting up the storm windows in the spring… these are all things that we can track and repeat.
- Party Planning – We host a monthly wine tasting for our friends, and I use asana to make sure that I remember all the steps to notify the wine guys of what we’re tasting, post the Facebook event invite, and keep guests updated. It’s helped ensure that everything happens with appropriate notice.
- Travel Planning – With a template project I can get a head start prior to any major trip by cloning an old trip and immediately having all the tasks created for booking plane tickets, hotels, ground transportation, etc.
Professional
- Editorial Calendar – In conjunction with Evernote, Asana has REVOLUTIONIZED our blogging and made it so much easier to keep track of posting regularly. We have a series of sub-tasks for each post from brainstorming ideas through the first draft to syndicating on our social media, and all those tasks can be assigned to the right member of the team and tracked easily!
- Event Planning – Got an upcoming webinar or speaking event? Just clone a past event or create a template and all the necessary tasks are created in seconds to help you remember everything for the preparation, marketing, communications with hosts, etc.
- Program Launches – I can’t imagine trying to go through a program launch without a tool like Asana. There are SO MANY tasks involved in planning, marketing, production, delivery, etc. A good project management system is a MUST!
- Relationship Follow-up – Need to improve your system for client, potential client, or networking contact follow-up? I have projects to manage these tasks in Asana. You can set up phases and move people through a CRM – like sales funnel, or create projects for monthly or seasonal check-ins with former clients to ensure that you remain top of mind.
- Writing Planning – I use the “dual-housing” function in Asana to make sure that all my creative/writing related tasks appear in one place together. This means that when I start my morning writing time I can go immediately there and choose which task to complete each day. This makes writing blog posts, email marketing copy, webinar/presentation speakers’ notes, articles, and book sections SO much easier.
- Website Updates – It’s inevitable there are always things you want to change about your website. But unless they’re mission critical, rarely do they happen quickly or immediately. I have created projects for each of my sites that allow me to capture changes and tasks either to take care of in a batch later or to delegate to the appropriate team member/contractor.
- Staff Onboarding – Bringing on a new team member? There are a bunch of tasks that need to happen to get them up and running: email address, access to relevant accounts, introductions to “how we work”, etc. Rather than trying to remember all those tasks each time you have a new person joining, we have an onboarding template that I clone to help myself remember everything to do. (Same thing when a staff member leaves… all the steps to shut down their access to our world.)
I’m sure that I could keep going for a WHILE about all the ways that we’ve used Asana to track and simplify our lives both professionally and personally, but I think you’re getting the idea. It’s my Master List, and I LOVE it. If you want to learn more about how to setup your own Master List (using Asana, or something else), then you’ll want to download our “Start Your Master List” eGuide. It will provide you with the first 6 steps to get your Master List started effectively.
Next Steps
Do you use Asana? What are some of the use cases that you’ve had success with? Share it with us in the comments below. Got questions about using Asana for your own life or business? Then, you can ask those too, and I might just put together that webinar to help people get comfortable and familiar with it.
