Fundamentals of Asana (Project Management)

1. Welcome: Hi, My name is Nicky Parsons. I'm a freelancer and self professed asana freak. And today I'm gonna be teaching you the fundamentals. Asana is an awesome and very popular tool for project management. It's easy to use, but when starting out, everyone needs a little bit of help just to understand how it works and get used to this new way of organizing their work. Often, when people start using asana, they tend to get thrown into it and learn on the go. But having a little primer is useful so that you can get brought up to speed more quickly and understand the full potential of the tool. Asana is not just a checklist, and there are a lot of awesome features that can help make you on your team more productive . I've used asana extensively, especially in the last few years, both when working full time at events, companies and consultancies and also now when working as a freelancer. Because several clients use this tool because they see the value of it in this class will review the basics of asana. So we'll look at the interface how to create tasks, how to set deadlines, how to create projects how to organize everything. And my goal is that you finish this class feeling very comfortable with Sana so that you can either go out and start using it right away. Or, if you're already in a sonic user, that you could pick up some new ticks that you can share with your team to really maximize your use of this tool. I'll only discuss the basic features of asana, which means that everything we talk about in this class is possible on the free version of Asana. And if you're interested in learning more about primitive features, don't worry, because this is only the first class in a new Siri's about asana and project management in general. 2. Understanding the interface: Although the asana interface is easy to use, its good toe have an overview so we can speak the same language when talking about the different features of asana. So the first area we have on the interface is here on the left side bar. From here, we can access our home page, our tasks, our new inbox, replacing email hopefully and projects in our organization. At the top, we have our header which contains the actions and views for the project task or current view at the top. Right there is the top bar where we can search a number of things tasks, projects people used. The only button. We'll talk about that in a SEC, access the help page or change our settings. If we click on a task, we can open up the right pain. So we have the main pain and the right pain next to each other. The center of the screen is the main pain, which shows the tasks conversations, calendar progress or files, and finally, on the right pain weaken C sub tasks. Other task details, comments, etcetera. So we have five key areas of the interface will be talking about the sidebar the header. The top bar. Main pain on right pain. Don't worry. If you can't remember the names right now, once we get into making tasks and projects, it will come naturally. 3. Deciding between a shared workspace or organization: the first thing to do when setting up your team's asana is to decide whether you're going to be using a shared workspace or an organization. A workspace is a collection of people on projects in the sauna that doesn't require a company or custom email domain, while an organization connects everyone in a company using asana based on a shared email domain. When you first sign up for asana, you create an account, but an account is a free individual page as a default, only you will be seeing the tasks you add from there in order to be able to interact with each other share projects and tasks. You do this through sharing either a particular project in your personal projects, creating a shared workspace or an organization. So why does it matter how we set up our account? Well, different features are available depending on what you choose, and there's also pricing to consider. If you're just gonna be sharing a few accounts, then you can set these up in your personal projects and use a basic account, which is free. This is also where you can put projects that you might not share with anyone. It could be something like household errands. You could also organize freelance work for small projects. But if you want to take full advantage of all the basic features and asana, you need to be in a workspace or organization. If you're a small team, then you'll want to set up a workspace and invite your team to become members of that space . This means they'll be able to see all of the various public projects. Tasks and conversations is useful when managing an account, as you simply add someone to the workspace, and they have visibility so you don't have to add them. Project by Project An example of why you might want to use a workspace is if you're working on several marketing projects for your company, a new website, launch, social Media management or a brand redesign, and you want all the team in one place with visibility over the big picture. If you'll be inviting guests for specific work on projects, but you don't want them to see certain information or projects, you can always have them as a limited access member to keep control of the workspace. If you're a medium to large size company, you'll definitely want to be in an organization on. One of the main benefits is you can set up teams within asana. So instead of giving individual permissions to projects or work spaces, you give the entire team access, and teams can have their own projects. Their own conversations on team calendar. How does it work in terms of pricing? Well, using personal projects on workspaces are free, but you'll find you have a 15 member limit. Once you reach 15 people in a specific project or in a specific workspace, then you have to pay to upgrade to a premium account for all users to upgrade from a basic account the next year. Premium can be hard at first because you go from having 15 people, all using free accounts to everyone having to be a premium user at 99 per month per user. So it seems like a big jump. But luckily, the 15 person limit is big enough for most small and even medium sized companies. So if you're a startup or a freelancer, don't worry. But being an organization, you'll need to have at least premium access for all of your members, so starting straight away you'll have to pay the premium fee even if you're less than 15 people. If you're in doubt at this stage at what you want to do, I recommend to set up a work space on a basic account. If you find you wanna upgrade to an organization and you can always do that later, don't set up stuff in your personal projects because you won't be able to change those to a workspace or organization later down the line. So really only go that route if you're a freelancer working on just a few projects. Otherwise it makes sense to set up a work space or even several different work spaces, depending on what you're trying to achieve. 4. How to set up a workspace & organization: in this lesson will look at how to set up a workspace organization in a sauna. So click on your profile photo in the top bar and scroll down to more. From here, you can select create new workspace. All you need to do is give your workspace and name and add Some team members, then hit. Create workspace if you want. The toggle between workspaces just had to your profile on Click on the organization you want to see here. I can toggle between the new example of online teaching or my personal projects or my other company. What about organizations? We'll if you already have a workspace set up, you can just convert it to an organization. Click on your profile photo and head toe workspace settings. From here, you have a tab called Convert Toe Organization. You'll need to click to add work email to account here. You'll put in your email address, which uses the company email domain on. Once it's verified, you'll be good to go. If you haven't gone Asan account yet, you can make an account with your company. Email address on asana should automatically create an organization for you if you're the first person from your company to sign up. If for some reason it creates a workspace for you, it might mean someone else from your company has used asana in the past and just contact us on a support toe. Ask them to convert your workspace to an organization. 5. First impressions: Homepage, My Tasks & Inbox: in this lecture will look at three first options in the sidebar in more detail. The home page, my tasks and our in box. Now, once you've created your account and are here inside asana, it will take it to the home page. This will show you any tasks do soon. If you've marked any projects as favorites, they'll show up in here as well as any recent projects you might have gone to. And right now we have a pretty empty asana. I just added a few tasks, so we have some stuff to play with in this lecture. Next. Here in the sidebar is the My Tasks section, which you can get a complete list of all tasks currently assigned to you. You can use the sort button to change how you look at this list of tasks you consorted toe . Look by project by due date or even by number of likes. Let's go back to suit Original view. All tasks on their first assigned to you will end up in this new tasks section on will cover sections more in depth in a later lecture to sort them into priorities, you can click this blue button here on the side and market task for today. For upcoming or for later. The rest of your colleagues in the workspace or your team in the organization will only see the task due date. Okay, they won't see how you prioritize this task within your personal list. They can access this information, but they have to actively do it. For example, if I want to have a look at somebody else's priority list, I simply searched their name in the search bar. I click on the user, and then I'm able to see exactly how much is on someone's plate and what their objectives are for the day. So again, this is a list of priorities. It's not by due date itself, so I could sort it to have a look at that. Let's go back into my tasks. Any new task you create from the my Tasks screen will be private to you by default. Seal have to click to share it. Otherwise, if you create a task inside a project, it's gonna be automatically shared with the people in that project and made public these priorities of new tasks upcoming and later they'll change as the due date gets closer automatically. So, for example, a task marked as upcoming will become a task do today own midnight. The night it's Do your asana inbox will give you a little summary of all your notifications . If you have new notifications, a little orange dot will appear next to the word inbox on. Once you click to view your inbox, the stock will go away. So the inbox shows you any updates or comments on a project or task you're following or any new task you may have been assigned. And you'll want to get in the habit of coming here first every day to check the status of tasks and try and get to invoke zero. So here we can see Andrew assigned a new task to us right script for adding past. Lecture the next lecture in this class. So in the in box you have two key screens, activity and archive activity. Where we're looking at now lists all notifications, and once you've read them and you've clicked on them, you send them to the archive. But you can always access old notifications by clicking here. So when looking through notifications, you can take action on tasks by clicking on the task that was updated, at which point the right pain will appear and you can already make comments or look at any attachments if there are. So let's get out of this screen and go back just to the activity view on the inbox and you archive items by hovering over this little X. Okay, so if you click this notification, it will send this to the archive, which will be able to go and have a look at. So if we archive this now and then, we go into the archive. We see this task here, and we can always send it back to the activity view by clicking here. It's well, suits kind of an undo button there. You can also hit the archive all button to do this toe all of your notifications. But I'd use this sparingly because it's good to be kept abreast of what's happening in your projects. If you do notice you're getting a lot of notifications, maybe from one task in particular, and you're not very interested in it, you find it clogging your inbox. Then you can always unfollowed that task, and I'll show you how to do this in a future video 6. How to quick-add a task: in this lecture, I'll show you how easy it is to create a basic task. The quickest way is simply to go to this button here, the only button in the top bar on select task. From the drop down, you're presented with a plethora of options to add to your task. But all you really need to do is give it a task name. So what it is you need to do on set an appropriate owner, So the default it will be set on you real quick. Let's add one and now so demonstrate how to quick add a task, and then you can see this task appear in the my task section in the sidebar. Now this task isn't very useful for us at the moment. If we click on the task, we click over the name, the right pain will open up to show us the task detail. As you can see, we don't have a due date. We don't really have much information about the task. No description. It's not part of any project. It's not shared with anyone on the team. The task is marked private to us. We could make it public or added to a specific project. So let's look at this task in detail and see what more options we can add to give it a bit more meat. 7. Task ownership & due dates: The most critical part of using asana effectively with a team is to ensure there is proper ownership of each task on a deadline for tasks to be completed. Otherwise, asana is just being used as a rather disorganized checklist for your team. If you want to properly manage your team, see what they're working on. Get an accurate, big picture of what's going on. Then you need to assign ownership and give deadlines. You can assign an owner to a task in several different ways. You can simply add an owner in the moment. You quick at a task from the Omni button is what we just did in the last lecture when we assigned myself because I'm the default to this new task of Demonstrate had a quick added task. You can click on the task directly in the main pain and type in the owner you'd like. So if we go into a task project I've set up, we'll see. There are a few tasks here. Design, flyer purchase, new website domain and scripting video that although they have a due date, they don't have any owner assigned. But this little people icon here you can assign them directly from the main pains. If I click this, then I can choose to assign to myself or type in the name off one of my teammates. So let's say I want to assign this to Andrew. Let's say I want to assign this to myself and we assign this again. Teoh under. So now these have a person attributed from the main pain. If we go back to where we were in the my tasks list on, we open up again, the demonstrate had a quick add a task you see. Now there's the task I just assigned to myself now in the project, showing here a swell. So there's 1/3 way so you can assign in the moment you create the task from the only button you can assign from the main pain. So you go to a project and you can just assign people from there. Or you can assign here in the right pane as well. So say, I had no owner here. I could go ahead and assign this to myself. I can also just click here in order to change. It says. It's very simple, very easy to assign ownership, and you'll notice. If you do come toe, add an owner here in the right pane. When you click on the ownership, you get this little icon popping up as well, which is a sign copies. This is really useful. You have a task that several people will have to complete. For example, say you have two new employees in your company. They each have to complete the on boarding process, which consists off a few different trainings. Now, when sending up our task and sub tasks, we wanna assign both of these new employees a task to complete the on boarding process. It is possible to just duplicate a task will cover that in the next video. But duplication alone is not ideal, as you have to then go in and change the owner. So to avoid that hassle, it's easier just to set up a task for one person and a sign a copy to another person. It simplifies the duplication process for you, so let's just show how that would work right now. If I wanted to go ahead and add a new task and I wanted to add on boarding training and say I want to do this for myself. I want to do this with the due date off tomorrow. But I also want Andrew Toe have to complete this task. I can come in here to assign copies, and I will put Andrew's name on a sign. Copy. Now you see, he has it over here in his task list. And remember, we can check what's on someone else's plate by going to the search for on typing in their name. So here you see now the on boarding training task is also on Andrew's side. Now, if we move on to do dates, setting a due date could just be a specific date on the calendar. When we click on the due date, it opens this nice little calendar pop up for us, which makes it really easy for us to select a day and see what day of the week it is. And if you ever want to change the due date, so say tomorrow doesn't work for the on boarding training. You just click on this and you just change it. Just click on the other date and it will automatically update This might happen if you were delayed in completing a task or your list of priorities changes. Maybe you move a task to the backlog or work on another, more urgent task. Instead, it happens right now. What if you have a task that you need to be completed by a specific time, maybe, for example, you're here. You're designing a flyer on. You have to send the design to the printer by a specific time. You have a hard deadline in order to get the Flyers done for whatever revenge you're attending. So how would you set a deadline for the time? Will again? Just click here to open up the calendar, pop up and you'll see here. Add do time so I can say this is due tomorrow on Tuesday, but also its do Fred click here. It's due at noon. So by 12 p.m. On Tuesday, I must send this to the printer. Lastly, what about if you have a recurring task that happens daily, weekly or monthly, for example, maybe you have a monthly report that you need to finish by the last day of every month. Well, let's take that example. I'm gonna set this up again for myself, so I'm gonna come back into my tasks and let's add a task off. Create monthly reports. I'm going to say that this is due on the last day of the month, but I'm also gonna come back here, and I'm gonna set it to repeat this way it, once you've marked the task is complete. It will automatically show up again with the duty in the future at a time interval you've selected. If we open up the set to repeat option, then we can make the task repeat daily periodically weekly, monthly or even yearly. Play around with these options, so you become familiar with what's available. If you select a date that repeats periodically, you can set the new task to be due at an interval of X number of days after completion. If you set a task to repeat weekly, you can choose X number of weeks for the interval and even the day of the week that you wanted to repeat on. And if you select a date that repeats monthly, you can choose the specific date within the month that the next task should be Do finally said. Now we've talked about ownership and due dates. What about here This is the task description, and this is just an open field where you can type whatever notes you want about the task. When you click on the field, you see a number of formatting options available, so they click here. Suddenly, all these formatting options show up. I highly recommend using this as it's going to help your team digest the information if you use things like bullets on bold, important information, rather than just writing a long paragraph in this space. When working with a team, be aware that anyone who has access to the project the task is in concomitant ear and update the description. Now this is different with comments below, because only you can edit your own comments and we'll cover comments more in detail in a future lesson. So in this lesson, we looked at how to assign ownership, how to give deadlines and right task descriptions 8. Adding comments & followers to tasks: it's time to go step by step through all the different options within an asana task. This will help you get a better overview of what you can do with the task beyond just assigning an owner giving a deadline and a little bit of a description so that you can think about how to best set up projects, tasks and sub tasks for your team. Understanding the options a sonic gives you will save you time on. Make your workspace more organized. So first off over here in the right pane. If we go through all the different other options we have are we have the mark complete button, obviously self explanatory. Here we take this when the task is completed, and we can either market in the main pain next the task name or here in the right pane. Now, if you accidentally mark a task is completed, don't panic because you can always search past tasks in the top bar. So, for example, say a accidentally marked this task as complete. It's disappeared now from my list of my tasks and say that was an error and I didn't actually complete the task. I can always search up here for the task. Open it back up since opened back up here in the right pane and unticketed. And you see, it's now showed up again now continuing to see options available to us in this right pain. If we continue along here. So we've seen the mark complete. We can add attachments to a task. Now you can add a file from your computer from Dropbox from Google drive from box from one drive and thes four all have integrations with Sana. Now, if you don't want to just click this little paper clip icon, you can also drag and drop tasks. So if I come out of full view here and I wanted to go ahead on drag and drop, I could do that as well. And you see it uploading right there. Now, once you add in attachment, it will show up in the attachments field at the beginning before you see comments. But it will also show up in the activity field. So this is giving you kind of a history of this activity. So Nicky Parsons created it. She signed it to you at assigned it to you because we're playing around with the ownership and previous lectures we assigned itto Andrew was handed back to ourselves on. We've just now attached a document. This is also very useful. This activity feed because if you're not sure who created a task or what's going on with the task, you can come here and say, Hey, someone So you created this task. What is this task at him? Happens to me a lot in teens when someone's not clearly put a due date or clearly put a description on. I'm just trying to see what is this task, Or can it be removed now, in terms of attachments, there are no attachment limits to asana, so you can upload as many files as you need. And they won't expire. There's just a 100 megabyte limit per file that's directly uploaded. And obviously, to get around this, you can just use one of the file storage systems like Dropbox on just copy and paste, maybe in a comment, a link to that file. Next, we come across sub tasks. Now, many times a task is composed of several steps, so we should add these as sub tasks. Now toe add a sub test. You can click on this button and you see a sub task pops out or you can use the tab s bun and you see more sub tasks popping up as well. Empty sub tasks here in the right pane. Now, any time you want to delete a sub task, you just hit backspace on your computer so you would enter the task were already in it, but you would click toe, enter it and you'd hit backspace, backspace, backspace. And that's how you get rid of one. So let's take a simple and rather silly example of sub tasks. Say we're using asana for personal reasons, not for business. And we have a project called like household errands, and one of the tasks is to prepare a Sunday night dinner while preparing a Sunday night dinner doesn't happen. Magically, we have a few sub tasks to make sure we have dinner prepared, right? So let's add some sub tasks in here now, so we have to decide what to eat. We have to go shopping for groceries. We have to cook the food. And what else could you do? Set the table. Okay, so you get it. I'm simplifying the process here. Maybe you can add clean up afterwards or something like that, but you get the idea many times in our work. We have responsibility for a key task, so, in this case, preparing dinner. But it's not so simple, because to complete the work, you have to complete several sub tasks. And maybe each of the sub tasks are assigned to a different person, even though one person has responsibility for completion off. The overall task. So important to note here is that for each sub task, you can add a do day. You can assign an owner, and you can even go even more deeper into this view if you click this little common icon. So now we're within the task of Sunday night dinner and within the sub task, and we can add a more detailed description out attachments even add more sub tasks within this sub desk. So it's easy to imagine that a very complex project my branch off like a tree. You have a project with a lot of tasks. Maybe one task has a lot of sub tasks, and maybe the most important sub tasks there are also more complex. So can really brunch off, and it makes it very important for you to stay on top of your asana so that things don't get kind of hidden in many different layers of sub tasks. Luckily, as long as you've properly assigned owners and deadlines to these sub tasks, they will be easy to find. You also have the search bar, so you can locate any tasks you need. However, to prevent things from becoming lost in a sauna, your team has to be in putting tasks and sub tasks correctly. So let's go back to the task itself and let's update thes sub tasks with an owner and a due date. Maybe it's our responsibility to choose what we want to eat and to go shopping. But perhaps it's our colleagues responsibility or someone in our family's responsibility to cook the food and to set the table in terms of due dates. Well, we should decide what we want to eat, probably by Saturday, so that we can go shopping on Saturday for groceries. But we don't actually have to cook the food until next Sunday, and we would set the table as well, probably not on Friday, promoted on the day off, right? So that makes sense. Now. We have a little bit of a good flow for this task. Okay, we've covered what sub tasks are, how to use them and how to add them. Let's continue talking about the other options we can add to our task itself and go back up to the top off the right pain. So I've looked at mark, complete attachments and sub tasks. So after sub tasks, you see you can click on the Copy Task Link button, which does what it says on the tin and copies the u. R L to the task. This makes it really easy to share a specific task with co workers. So if they're not sure where something is or you want to mention a task in another communication, you can copy the link and send it to them. Another very easy to understand. But is the like button. Maybe you're excited to see that a task is finally being prioritized and you want to like it. This notification will pop up in the in box of any of the task followers 9. Task options: Attachments & Sub-tasks: next we have these three little dots, which give us a number of additional options. First off, we can add this task toe a project. You could also do this under the task description. There's a little add to project button, so remember projects show up in sidebar on our left. And right now our asana only has one test project. So if we select add to project, it will ask us for the project name. So at the moment, the only one it can prompt us is test project. So let's create a new project of household errands. So click the plus and we automatically see this new project showing up in our sidebar. Going back to our additional options. The next one we have is duplicate task. I find this most useful when I've completed a task, and then a few months later, I have a new identical task to do. Imagine you're organizing a company workshop the very first time you do this. It's a bit of a learning process. You'll be adding sub tasks as you think of them as issues arise. But two months from now, if you have to organize another workshop, it's really useful to find a past task and simply duplicate it. This where you have all of the intelligence of what you did last time, and you don't have to remember it off the top of your head. Marcas Milestone and mark as dependent on our premium features, so I'll mention those in a future class. And next we have add tags, which helps to give additional context on allows you to group similar tasks. A reason why you might want to use tags is to track project progress. When you start having a fuller list of tasks within a project, how can you quickly tell which tasks someone is working on? Well, you could add a tag of in progress to certain tasks that would make it easy for a manager to take a look at a project and see what you're working on. Sometimes just seeing due dates or going to someone's individual my tasks doesn't give the full picture. So let's add a tag in here now, off in progress. Now we'll see if I exit out of the right pain and they go into this project that we have a little tag here appearing. What makes this tag look even better is if we add a color to it. So you saw when I created the tag, it prompted me to straight up out of color. But you can also do it afterwards so I could click now on the tag, go up here to the header on on the actions. I can give it a colors if we put it in red and they get out of it. And if I go back into household errands now, you see our tag is showing up really nice, really visible. Now you can add multiple tax, so play with what you want your tasks to show. For example, in our task, we currently have in progress. But we could add another tag for food. And this way, when we have a lot of tasks in our list, we can clearly see and even sort by tag the ones related by food or the ones in progress. It makes it really useful to get a quick view of what's going on in the project. There, instead of tags, you could also play around with sections, but let's talk about project sections in a later video coming back to our additional options. We can also print task. Many people like having a physical checklist in their office so you could easily print this information for you, and you can have it sitting next to your desk of work. You can also easily create a follow up task. So this is great if one of your tasks might be some kind of call, or to reach out to someone for maybe a sales topic, and you need a follow up task to kind of remind you about that existing one so you can just go ahead and click. Create follow up task so immediately you see it's created the same task. But it's his follow up on XX task so you can add it again to a project it will link to the original task. You could put additional details in here as well, if you wanted linked to attachments due dates, etcetera, and you can hit create task. So this has now made a separate follow up task. So if I go back into errands, you see my original task on my follow up task. After printing and follow up, we have the advanced actions. So, for example, maybe this task of prepare Sunday night dinner should be made a sub task of something else . So what could we make it a sub task off? Who knows? Maybe it really should be under design Flyer. So designed fliers, the task and the sub task of this is to make Sunday night dinner. Maybe it's a team dinner who knows so quick bat, and now it's automatically changed it. So now it's within design. Flyer prepare Sunday night Dinner is a sub task, which also affects the projected sin, because if you've noticed it's disappeared from the household errands, it's now in test project because it's under design Flyer. So let's move it back to original Iwas. If you ever want to move with a sub task, you can simply hover over this and dragon drop. So here I am, dragging the sub task to the task level. So now it's become a task in its own right. Andi, I'm gonna click on the task to open the right pain. I'm gonna change the project it's associated with, so let's put it back in household errands. So now if we go there, follow up on prepare Sunday night dinner of both here and household errands again. More things under advanced actions. Or you could also convert it to a project. So, for example, say this task, whatever it could be, really starts becoming very, very complex. You start to realize you have a lot of sub tasks. These sub tasks have even more sub tasks underneath them. Maybe this task is big enough that you want to convert it to a project in its own right. So rather than creating the project and dragging and dropping or changing each individual task to be associated with it, just go ahead and convert a task to a project. It will automatically make all current sub tasks tasks in that new project. Next, you could merge duplicate tasks. So when you're working with a team many times you come across a task that is duplicated in several projects in order to keep the history and all the sub tasks, just merge these two tasks together. It's important to know that this is an option because in previous companies they didn't realize this was even a feature and people would just mark something is complete and then we would get lost is to what was the current task. What was going on with it so honestly, if you notice a duplicate try and merge them rather than just marking one is complete, it will make everyone's life a lot easier. And the final options here are just two of you asana in full screen. So this is to view the entire right pain in a full screen and you have the delete task or delete sub task, depending on where you are. But I usually find it easier to just click on the task itself on backspace. You'll probably find that easier as well. But there's an option here on you've noticed me clicking this little X many, many times throughout the previous lectures. But this is obviously to close the right pain. This is how you do it. If you ever want to reopen a task, you just click on the task itself. It's now you have a full overview of all the options here in the right pane. At the top of the task 10. Task options: Add tasks to a project & Tags: so something we haven't talked yet about here in the right pane is that if you scroll to the bottom of your task info, you can see a space for comments on for followers. Comments are really useful when working with the team to let them know the latest status of a task or get their feedback. So in our example here, maybe we could right thinking to purchase Who will that got? Many thoughts. Our colleagues can write a comment below ours. They can like our comment, and if you want to mention someone specific in your comment, you just hit at and then you can write their name So I could tag Andrew in this comment. And then it will pop up in his in box that I've mentioned him in a specific task or sub task, even if he's no actually following this task. So in case you have a lot of comments in this task, you might be interested to also pin a comment to the top. Maybe it's really important that your followers read this comment so you just go here and you click pin to top. You can also edit your comment or delete your comment. And if you want to add followers, this task simply click on the little plus here at the bottom and add them as a follower. That way, even if they're not directly involved in any of the sub tasks, they're being notified of any changes in this task. For example, say you had a colleague who is not in this project, but it's important that they're in the know about what's happening. We'll add them as a follower, and they'll get updates on this task. Now. On the flip side, if you're a follower of a task that you don't care much about, you can come to the bottom right and toggle off the following icon. That way, you're not getting spammed with things that aren't relevant to you and clogging up your inbox. I might do this if I set up also a task for a teammate, because when you create a task, you're automatically added as a follower, even if you're gonna assign that task to someone else. So if it's really not relevant to me, but I just assigned them the task for something unrelated. Then I'll come in here and I can click to Unfollowed and remember, you can toggle on and off the following or unfollow of any task 11. How to create a project: so far, we focused on tasks within asana and haven't really fully explored projects. Having projects within asana allows you to organize all of the tasks for a specific objective into a list or board. You've already seen us create a new project so that we could link an existing task to it. But another way to create projects is to head up here to the Omni Bun and hit new project. This will take you to a screen where you can either begin a project from scratch or use a recommended template, just F Y I. If you are in an organization, you must belong to a team before you can create projects. So let's make a brand new project together now by going to blank project. Now we'll need to enter a project name. So maybe new products launch. We can optionally add a description in here. If we wanted to say more about it, we can choose whether this project shows up as a list or as a board. So we'll keep with the list view because that's the one we've been doing all the previous exercises with Seal film will comfortable with it on, you can set the privacy so you can have it public to anyone. In the workspace Chris member, our workspaces called online teaching example. You could be a premium member and have private just to specific project members or haven't private to you. So let's make our project public and hit create project. Now we're back here in our familiar interface. And if you notice in the side bar, a new project has appeared under household errands. New Project Launch. This little helper will pop up, but let's send that away. For now, let's review the options in The Header and Seymour about what we can do with the project. So if we click on the down arrow next the project name, we have access to the project actions. This is where we could come to edit key project information, so name description, owner, etcetera. We can also change the color for the project, so this color shows up here in the header, but also in the sidebar. Next, we can manage custom fields or convert template. These again are premium features, so leave them for a future class. We can copy a link to the project or even duplicate the project if we set up a layout that we really like and we want to use for a future project, and you can also import and export tasks saved in CSP format or other four months. Finally, you can archive or delete a project. So the difference really between these two, is it archiving a project hides it from view, but you can still search old tasks using the search form, and you have a record of everything that happened within the project. Deleted projects are deleted for everyone, not just you. So only delete projects. You're absolutely sure that nobody on your team needs Once you really get going with asana , you might find you have a lot of projects here in the sidebar at the moment, we just have three since pretty easy to keep on top of them. So if you did have a lot of projects here, a good way to keep on top of this is to mark specific projects as favorites To mark a project as a favorite, you can simply come up here to the header and click this little star button. Now, this project not only shows up down here next to your list of all your projects, but it also shows up here in your favorites, so shows up more prominently in your sidebar on. Also, when you're on your home page, you're now gonna have this project show up in your favorite sections again, it shows that more prominently, it's easier for you to access for any projects you have marked. As favorite, you can also drag and drop them to have really the number one project at the top. So let me just add the test project as well to our favorites that we have two things to play with here to say, the test project was more important. Once again, I could just hold, drag and drop. You see, there's a little line appearing in between favorites and new product lunch and then drop it right there. This way, you can really reorder the sidebar toe work for you. You can have a long list of projects, plenty of things going on there. But maybe you just have a couple key favorite projects, which is the most important for you and the work you're doing right now. 12. Add team members to projects: now project wouldn't be very useful for your team unless you have someone to share it with . So let's come up here. We're in the project. View off new product launch. If we go up to the header, we can see. Right now, I'm the only one in this project, so let's click this share button on. Let's invite Andrew to be part of this project as well. If you want, you can write them a little message about the project you're adding them to and thats click add member so the person who creates the project will automatically become the project owner. All other project members can still add, edit and delete tasks. If you're a member of a project, you'll receive notifications Any time someone adds a new task to the projects, you don't have to be a follower of each of these individual tasks. You are a member of the project and as a default, anything happening in the project, you're gonna get notified off. So changes to tasks, new conversations, updates on the project status, etcetera. If you don't want members receiving all of these notifications, you can always come to manage member notifications and untech the boxes of the notifications you don't want them to receive. Speaking of notifications, old Alesana was designed to eliminate the need for email by default. It sends an awful lot of emails. If you ever want to change this, come over to the top bar. Click on your little profile photo and go to my profile settings and from here, click on email notifications and now you can untech older notifications you want to remove . I would recommend if you're new to asana, to keep these email notifications active for a week or two. But once you get in the habit of checking asana every day, then you can get rid of these summary and update emails. 13. Using the project calendar view: coming back to our new product launch. We have some more options to play with here in our header. Let's review these now. First we want to add some more example tasks to this new project. So we have some things to move around. So let's do that now, Theo. Okay, cuz have put some pretty unrealistic dates in here for a new product launch. But it's just that we have some stuff to play with in this lecture. So remember, we're here in the list view off the project. Another nice way to visualize tasks coming up on measure. Your workload is to come to the calendar. Here you can see all the tasks of the project. So we see all the example tasks, which we just added on the days on which there do. From this view, you can hover over a task toe. Either market is complete or two dragon. Drop these tasks and move them to a different due date. So let's try this now with envy Pete Development. So let's move it here into the 12th. And now, if you wanted to go back into our list view, we can see that the due date has updated correctly. So this is really useful when you have a long list of tasks and it's hard to gauge how much work is on your plate. Maybe you come into the calendar view, and you realize that your workload is way too heavy or too light on a certain week. You can also add tasks directly on this calendar view. Just click on the white space on a specific date on type in the task you need to complete, then click enter. The task is now being added as the task only has a title on a due date. You can click the new task to pop out a more detailed window where you can add additional info like setting up a task owner or description. The usual jazz. Right now, this calendar is a little bland, so let's add a little color tour tasks, so it's easier to get a visual representation of what's going on. We can do this by using our tags feature, so enter into an individual task, for example, update website and enter into more options and go to add tags. And let's give this a tag with a color. So maybe design and the color of red, and we'll go back to her calendar, and now we can see this task much easier. We see the color of the project is associated with, but also the color off the task. An example of why you would want to use this is if you have a lot of design tasks, maybe you want to add all these tasks as the color red. Now we can see the although the owner is always me. We're going to rely on the graphic designer Ah lot during a specific week off the project. Having this visual overview can really help a project manager to manage the team's workload and keep everyone on track. So let's add some more colors to these tasks, and you'll really see how this calendar kind of comes alive back here in the calendar view . Now that all of our tasks have a tag with at least one color, you can see already what type of an impact that has for your project manager, for your team and for you as well, because you can come here and get a really quick, big picture of what's going on with the project 14. Project progress, conversations & files: now, I skipped the timeline and forms options here in the header, and that's just because these air birth premium features will cover in another class. But here, in the more section we have progress, conversations and files. So let's take a look at these now From the progress option, we can add a status update. This is a great way to share with your team whether progress is on track, at risk or off track. You can also provide a custom status update on add a more detailed description about what's going on with the project and to get in the habit of doing this. You can tuggle on this. Remind me to update the status every Friday button. Let's add a little status update now, just so you can see how it will show up in the project. You okay? This is how it will look here in the progress section. But actually, if you go back to the list view of the project, you can even see a little record here all of your project status. So as you go adding more and more project status, they will show up here next to the description section of the project. So back here in MAWR, after progress, we also have conversations. So there's two types of conversations in asana. There's team conversations and project conversations, and this is where to add a project conversation. Your team would want to use this for project level discussions, brainstorming, etcetera. So probably if you're gonna have a meeting and you want to put some meeting notes, you would put it here in conversations rather than status. Unless there's just kind of one really important meeting that you want to make a note off. Another example of why would use conversations. It might be if you're looking for feedback from the team on whether to add a new task to a project. So perhaps you're launching this new product and wondering whether it's worth making a press release. There's not currently a task for this, so maybe it's worth asking the people involved in the project by making a post in the project. Conversations and the difference between project conversations and team conversations is essentially where you start the conversation, who is involved or notified and who has access to the conversation. Ah, project conversation is only going to notify those people in the project. On the other hand, a team conversation would go out to everyone, so it should be used sparingly for things like a company wide announcement. The last thing in here is files on. This is just a place where all the files attached tasks within the project are kept for quick access. You can always access the relevant file in the individual task, but it's nice to have this space where all the files are stored together. It can help you quickly find what you're looking for. 15. Use sections to keep projects organized: Another great way to keep your projects organized is by using sections. This lets you visually group some of the tasks by whatever category you choose so that you can get a better overview off the project to create a section, go into your project and click the down arrow next to the AB task button in the main pain. The first option here will be ad section. You can also learn the shortcut tab plus N Let's set up a couple sections here in our project. Now perhaps we want to separate out by project function. Imagine we have the marketing team working on some branding elements. Some of these design elements, while our executive team of your management team are taking care off the planning or are product development team, is taking care of all of these engineering tasks, so I'll create this new section. I'll change the title of it just to whatever I want. So let's call it marketing for now, and you can click anywhere to stop editing. Let's create another one called product development and another one called management Team . Okay, so how could I move the existing tasks into their relevant sections? So There's two ways first you've already seen in this course weaken, drag and drop from the main pain. So I just go over to the left of a task and you see these six little dots here? So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click and hold and I'm gonna dry. Get wherever I want and you'll see this harder. Ah, black line appearing, which will show you where you're planning to drop it. So let's put under product development these engineering tasks, an alternative way to move tasks between sections is to actually click the task and open up this right pain here. If we look at what project this task is in, you can also see to the right what section within the project IDs in. So if I want to change this task of brainstorming new product ideas out off the marketing section within the new product launch, what I can do is I just click here and I can send this to management team. And you see, it pops up down here so you can drag and drop, or you can enter an individual task and you can update here. Let's just get rid of this test task is not helping us out, backspace. Remember, you get rid of tasks by back spacing. Now sections aren't exclusive to the task level. You can also add sections within sub tasks. So let's find one of these tasks here now. Creation of the business plan. And let's just add some basic sub tasks here. So sub task. One sub task to sub task three. And then to add a section here in the sub tasks, you actually have to use the shortcut. So unlike here in the task level, where you have this little button, you can click to add a section here in the sub tasks, you have to click this shortcut of tab, plus and toe. Have it show up. So let's do that now. Here in the right pane, add a new section off part one and parts you, and then we can drag and drop things to where we want them. Obviously, hopefully would have a slightly more descriptive section than part one Part two, but it depends. Maybe you have a project in various phases, who knows, and totally a section. It's really the same as the leading a task or some task. You just click on the section on hit backspace, deleting it until it's gone. 16. Your project: Because so much of this class is about understanding the basics of asana, which you use and customize with tasks for your organization. You might not feel comfortable sharing with everyone riel tasks and projects you're setting up, and that's perfectly OK, and as a result, your project for this class is quite simple. If you're not comfortable sharing publicly a project you've set up, just go into your personal projects and set up a fake project with at least five tasks and two different sections. All of the tasks must have an assigned due date and owner, even if it's just you sharing your gallery a screenshot of this project and explained the reasoning behind why you set it up the way you did. If you are willing to share publicly a real project you've set up. Then again take a screen shot off the project and walk us through what it is and why you've set it up that way. Who knows? Maybe we can even give you feedback on the set up to make it even better. 17. Conclusions & Next steps: great job for making it to the end of this class. I feel confident you now understand how to use a sauna toe help make yourself and your team more productive. If you take full advantage of the features the Sana offers you, you can set up a workspace completely customized to the needs of your company, your department, and you individually. So use the knowledge we covered today to get out there and start setting up the project organization of your dreams. If you're interested in learning more about asana or project management, I suggest you follow my skill share profile so that you can receive notifications about future classes. Thank you so much for joining me, and I hope to see you again soon.