Fundamentals of Asana (Project management)

1. Welcome: Hi. My name is Nikki Parsons. I'm a marketing leader and self professed Asana freak and today, I'm going to show you the fundamentals of Asana. 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 get thrown into it and learn on the go. But having a little primer is useful so that you can get 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 and your teams more productive and aligned. I've used Sana extensively and not just personally, but I've implemented it at several of the companies where I've worked, so I'm a huge fan of the tool. In this class, we'll cover the basics of Asana. So we'll look at the interface, how to create tasks, how to set deadlines, how to organize everything in Asana projects. My goal is that you finish this course feeling very comfortable with Asana so that you can go out and start using it right away. Or if you do have a little bit of Asana experience already, that you pick up a few tips and tricks to share with your colleagues and really maximize your use of the tool. In this class, I'll discuss the basic features of Sana, which means everything we talk about in this class is possible on the free version of Asana. So I hope you'll join me. Let's get started with the fundamentals of Sana. Okay. 2. What is Asana & why do teams use it: Asana is a work management platform. It allows teams to keep all their work in one place, making it easy to collaborate on projects and communicate on progress. What these work management systems do, whether asana, monday.com, Trello, the list goes on, is to help companies reduce work about work. When you use Asana effectively as a team, you spend less time on e mails and less time tracking down information internally. Companies use Asana to break down goals and ideas into actionable tasks and communicate in one place. This brings better collaboration, less work about work, and more transparency into how individual efforts contributed to achieving overall goals. Say you already use a number of tools in your company. Where does Asana fit in? You'll still want to use your document apps for creating, sharing, and storing files, for example, one drive. You'll still want to have a messaging app for quick messages, announcements. For example, MSTams slack or email. SAA fits right in the middle as a work management platform. It's about creating clear plans and measuring progress towards goals. You still need all three and every company combines these three in their own unique way. 3. How information is organized: Information is organized in Sana in a hierarchy format. On the bottom, we have the subtasks. Subtasks break down tasks into smaller pieces of work and can be assigned to different team members and given due dates. Next, we have tasks. Asana tasks represent the individual actions within a project. Again, they should be assigned to team members and given due dates. Asana milestones are the same as milestones in any big project. They are checkpoints that identify when activities, groups of activities, or a particularly important task has been completed. And all of these subtasks, tasks, and milestones live within Asana projects. A Asana project is for a large coordinated effort within an Asana team. They're working on one common initiative over time. Optionally, you then have portfolios, which are collections of projects, and that allows you to monitor multiple projects in one place. That's particularly useful for project managers or managers in general who may just need a high level overview of a group of projects. Last but not least, everything is connected to the Asana goals. This is one of the real highlights of Asana for me because people can see how their daily work impacts the success of the top level department and even top level company goals. So hopefully, this hierarchy makes sense to you, but to add some extra clarity, I want to share a couple examples. Let's say you have a top level goal of ensuring attractive and engaging webinars. You'll surely have some key results or KPIs behind this objective, but on a broad level, that's what the team wants to achieve this year. As the head of the events team, I want to be able to see the progress of the different webinars we have in the pipeline. So the team makes a portfolio of all the webinar projects, so it's easy for me to see how they're progressing. One of those projects is an upcoming webinar called top digital marketing trends. Now we start to go into the details. What are the milestones tasks or sub tasks that go into the team preparing this webinar? Well, one of their key milestones is going to be to have the registration page set up. That's the key milestone because it means they can now start the promotion phase as we have a link attendees can sign up with. If we don't have the link that attendees can sign up with, we literally cannot progress to the next stage. So that's why we need to have this as a key task. That's why we set it as a milestone. Of course, this registration page needs other things to be ready. It needs confirmation of the speakers. It needs a copy to incentivize sign ups, and of course, some catchy webinar graphics. In order to have those graphics, our designer has to create a Zoom banner and our branding lead has to approve it. Let's look at another example, this time coming in from a different angle. One of our major projects in the digital marketing team this year is a corporate website refresh. The first milestone in this project is actually going to be when our web developers and designers, those key suppliers for the project are contracted. Our team has to lay the groundwork for this by doing smaller tasks, sub tasks such as drafting a scope of work and research potential designers and developers before they can actually reach out to potential suppliers. Later on, we'll have many other tasks like analyzing the suppliers, reviewing offers, putting a purchase order in the system or getting procurement involved. All of this until we reach our milestone of having the suppliers confirmed. Again, all the sub tasks, tasks, and milestones are part of a bigger initiative, our corporate website refresh, which is big enough of an initiative that it's its own Asana project. Now, as we're a large company, we have a lot of projects related to web management and SEO, not just this ongoing refresh. So to make sure we keep the top level overview, we have an SAA portfolio of all the web projects. And at the end of the day, why are we doing this corporate website refresh? What goals does it help us work towards? Well, in this case, the company is doing it to achieve an annual organic search growth of 30%. So the web refresh is directly connected to supporting this goal. In this course, we're going to focus on everything included in the free version of Sana. The three areas of this pyramid we're going to go into in detail are projects, tasks, and subtasks. Nevertheless, I think it's important to understand this full hierarchy because as you grow in your use of Sana, it's easier when you understand how everything connects. 4. Understanding the interface: Although the Asana interface is easy to use, it's good to have an overview so we can speak the same language when talking about the different features of Aa. The first area we have on the interface is here on the left, the side bar. From here, we can access our home page, our tasks, our new inbox, replacing or minimizing e mail, hopefully, and projects in our organization or workspace. At the top, we have our header, which contains the actions and views for the particular project task or current view. Above that is the top bar where we can search a number of things. Tasks, projects, people. Use the omni button, we'll talk about that later, or even come in change our settings. If we click on a task, we open up the right pan. We have the main pan and the right pan next to each other. The center of the screen is the main pane that shows the tasks, conversations, calendar progress or files. On this right pan, we see subtasks, other task details, comments, et ce. We have these five key areas of the interface we'll be talking about in this course, the side bar, the header, the top bar, the main pane, and the right pan. Don't worry if you can't remember the names right now. Once we get into making projects and tasks, it will come naturally. 5. 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. When you first sign up for Asana, you create an account. But an account is a free personal workspace to you as a default, so only you will be seeing projects and tasks you add from there. In order to be able to interact with each other, share these projects and tasks, you do that through sharing either your workspace or creating 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 going to be sharing a few projects, then you can set those up in your personal workspace and use a free account. You can also keep a workspace just for yourself for projects that you might not share with anyone. It could be something like household errands, or it could just be a way to manage a few freelance projects you're working on. If you want to take full advantage of the basic features of Sana and really collaborate with others, then 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 projects, tasks, and conversations. It's 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. Because 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. One of the main benefits is you can set up teams within SATA. Instead of giving individual permissions to projects or workspaces, you give the entire team access and teams can have their own projects, their own conversations, their own department goals, clearly connected to the work they're doing. How does it work in terms of pricing? Well, work spaces up to ten members per team are free, and afterwards, you'll have to pay to upgrade. The first upgrades can be a bit painful if you're a small team because you go from everyone having free accounts to paying a monthly fee per user so it can seem like a big jump. The good news is the team limit is big enough for most small companies and freelancers. If you're particularly price sensitive, you have some time to see the value it brings beforehand. In my opinion, having everyone working more in sync towards the goal really pays off. If you're in doubt at this stage of what you want to do, workspace or organization, I recommend to set up a workspace. Later, you can always upgrade to an organization, and I can show you how to do that later on. 6. How to set up a workspace & organization: In this lesson, we'll look at how to set up a new workspace or organization and Asana. First, we click our profile icon, this little circle icon here in the far right of the top bar. From here, we're going to go ahead and click to create a new workspace. All we have to do is give it a name and optionally, we can add some members. So I'll just call this test workspace so we can differentiate. So like I said, you can add members now or later. So we'll choose to do that later just for simplicity. So now it will create a brand new empty workspace. And of course, we're going to skip any offers or things it's trying to sell us because we're on the free version of Asana. And now we're here in our new work space, and if we want to go back to the other workspace. Again, we'll just click our profile icon in the top right of the top bar, and then we can toggle between the other work spaces we have. Right now we're in test workspace. I want to go back to the online teaching example, where we were before. So here an online teaching example. Now for some reason, it opens in a new tab for us, and we're back to exactly where we were. If you want to go back to the exact same screen we're on, we have this open. This probably looks familiar. We're here back in our original workspace. Well, what about organizations? So as we have an workspace already set up, we can just convert that to an organization. So again, we're going to go and click on our profile icon, and we're going to head this time to Admin console. Let me just go back to this empty workspace to show how this works. I'm going to go back again toggling to test workspace. So right now, I'm going to go into the Admin console this time. From here, we go into settings, and then we have this option here. Convert to an organization. You need to click and add your work email to your account, and only then can you actually convert? Because remember, an organization has to be connected to a custom email domain. Once it's verified, you're good to go. If you haven't got an Asana account yet, you can directly make an Asana account with your company e mail address. A Asana will 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 instead, it probably means someone else from your company has used Asana in the past, so just contact Asana support to ask them to convert your workspace into an organization. 7. Adding a colleague to the workspace: In this lesson, I want to show you how to add new colleagues to the workspace. I've gone ahead and added myself a little profile picture here in the settings, but we're still here in our test work space. You saw that we could add new colleagues directly in the same moment that we created our workspace. But it might also be that you have a colleague joined later on in the project. Many times, you'll invite them after everything is set up. Let's go ahead and do that now. I'm going to hover over my team test workspace, and I'm going to go ahead and invite teammates. All you have to do is add their e mail address. You have to either click Enter on your keyboard or actually click this blue highlighted text that appears, and here you see now it's officially accepted this e mail. You can add multiple emails and add multiple members. If we had project setup, you could then specify the projects you want to add them to. But right now we have a pretty empty SSA. We don't have any tasks. We don't have any projects. Let's just invite Andrew to the workspace itself. I'm going to go ahead and hit sent Okay. So how does Andrew proceed from here? What's it going to look like for him? Well, if I go over into his e mail, He's going to get something that looks a little bit like this, which is inviting him to join our workspace. He has to go ahead and accept the invite. Then he'll actually have to create an Asana account if he doesn't already have one so that he can then join the workspace. Let's say this Andrew here, he's going to continue with his Google account to go ahead and make a Asana account. Yes, he wants to create an Asana account, he agrees to everything. Skipping all of this. He's going to go into our test workspace. This is the one that we just created. He doesn't want to make his own personal workspace. I mean, he can. He can make his own workspace and then also be part of ours. But I think personally it's easier if he just goes straight into our workspace. It's a bit confusing because it's called test workspace. But let's skip all the options and finally, he's in. SC now here in Asana, and this is Andrew's home now, good afternoon, Andrew. You can see that there are now multiple members of this workspace. Here we have Nikki and we have Andrew. Whenever you start an *** account, it's always going to have these little starter tasks and things like this just to give you something to play with. That's also something to keep in mind if you're inviting colleagues who aren't so familiar that they're going to see a screen just like this, and it's probably nice if they just get rid of these test tasks along the way. They're not confuse. 8. First impressions: Homepage, My Tasks & Inbox: In this lecture, we're going to look in detail at the first three options here in the sidebar, the home, my tasks, and our inbox. First of all, because I'm going to be going throughout this course, back and forth between the view that Andrew has and the view that I have, I'm going to go ahead and add him a profile picture as well, and this time, I'll show you how to do that. We're here on the settings, and we just want to go ahead and upload. Photo for him. I just find this really nice touch when you have a bigger team. Otherwise, you're just seeing this initials of everyone, and it's a little bit impersonal. It's also sometimes confusing if people have the same initials, so it's always nice with a little picture. I'm going to get rid of all of these starting tasks over here as well, just so that we don't have all of this whoop. Click the wrong thing there. All of these things just distracting us. Basically, let's remove that whole widget. Okay. So here in the home page, we have our my tasks, our projects, and the people that we collaborate with. There's a few different options here. You can see, of course, your upcoming, your overdue tasks, and you're completed. So we have just those three test tasks that we got rid of before. We don't have any projects right now. You see them over here as well if we had any projects. People, it's just me, me and Andrew right now in this workspace. A my tasks? Again, we don't have any tasks to filter between, but they'll automatically be put into these four default sections. So recently assigned due today due next week and due later. I'll show you later on in the course, how to make sections yourself. And if you want to be filtering the tasks once you have some tasks in here, it's a bit like in Excel, you just go ahead and click. On the column header, and then it will go ahead and filter the things that you see in here. You also have the option to group tasks based on the date they were created by and who they were created by, and you can sort them as well. There's quite a lot of options here and you can customize it to how you prefer to look at it. And then we have our inbox, and you notice that there was that little yellow dot right there that's just disappeared as I've clicked in, and that little dot is telling us that we have messages in our Asana inbox. So we have messages because we have been invited to this team. So obviously, it's just letting us know, here's a few projects you might be interested in joining, which I don't think it's going to be able to give us anything right now because there aren't any projects. But if I go back to my Asana view, I will also have a message in the inbox. You see, again, I have this little yellow dot here that's going to disappear as soon as I click on it. And that's definitely going to let me know that Andrew has accepted my invite to join. That's always what it. Whenever you invite someone to your workspace, when they finally accept, you will get this notification that they accepted your invite. And you can check on the status of the people you invited to your workspace by going into your admin console. From here, they'll be a tab for members. Here you see this person is a member and member. If he had received the invite, but not yet accepted, it would say something like pending invite. That's exactly pending invite. That's how you can keep track of how they actually joined your workspace, maybe you missed something and you're waiting for when someone's actually logging in and joining the team. Now I'm going to quickly create a project and add a few tasks in there, so we have some things to play with in this lecture. Don't worry about how to do that now. We'll go into detail on that later on. All right. Now if we go back to our home, we're going to see some of these tasks starting to populate in there. So I'm here in Mysana and I go to my home. And now I start to see a few upcoming tasks, and I can see they're part of this project, new product development. If I go into my my tasks, I see the full list and I can see that they are here in the section recently assigned. If the date started to get closer, it would automatically move into the relevant section of D today due next week, due later. If you create a task from here in the M tasks screen, it's automatically going to be private to you. That's why I've said it now as a project so that I could assign a few things to Andrew as well. Let's go into Andrew's Asana and see what he's seeing now in his home and his my tasks. So let's go into the home. Here, he has four tasks that are due. He also has them in recently assigned, and you see he has this little blue dot next to it. That's unique. You didn't see that on my profile because I'm the one who created the task. Whereas because this is on Andrew, it's just an extra little notification for him that someone's made something for him. Maybe if he went to his Asana this morning, he already did a quick look at what was in there, and then he comes back in the afternoon and goes, Oh, there's a little blue dot on this one. This one is really recently assigned. And again, he has some notifications here on his inbox because he has another yellow dot, so let's go and have a read. And we see here that it sent him a little notification every time I created a task for him. Let's go ahead and clean this up a bit. Let's go ahead and read these notifications. You see when I hover over a notification, I have this extra three little boxes appearing. First of all, I can go ahead and archive the notification. That's basically marking it as red. You see as well here, I have two options. I have the activity and the archive. Right now, there's nothing in my archive. Everything is here in the activity. But let's say I read that, I see. Nikki's assigned me a new task to launch and gather feedback. I got plenty of time. I got until August. I'm going to go ahead and archive this notification. That takes it away and it puts it over here in the archive. If you ever archive something by mistake, you just go in here and you literally click the opposite. Moving it back to the inbox. That's going to pop it back here in your inbox and you saw again the little yellow notification. Let's archive a few of these. Okay. What else can we do? We can bookmark a task. This can be useful if you want to come back to it later on. You can also create a follow up task or leave it as unread so that you can come back and look into it later. For example, if I wanted to create a follow up task, that's quite handy because rather than having to go into the project and then find the task and then build it there in the sub tasks like you're going to find how to do later, we can just directly go, I got to order and test samples. I quickly want to create a follow up task on this so that I remember to start looking into that two weeks before the deadline. But more often than not, you are going to be directly archiving all of these notifications. Let's go ahead and do that now. Now we have a nice clean inbox zero. Again, if you need to go back, don't worry, just go back there to the archive. 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 unfollow that task, and I'll show you how to do that in a future video. 9. How to quick-add a task: In this lecture, I'm going to show you how easy it is to create a basic task. I'm back here in my test workspace, and the quickest way to create a task is to go up here to the top bar and click this button called the omni button. I'm going to choose Create, and then I'm going to choose task. And now you're going to get presented with a plethora of options and all kinds of things you can add to this task to really give it great context. But in its most simple form, you just need to give a task a name and make sure that there is an owner assigned. Real quick, let's do that now. Going to assign myself a task, demonstrate how to quick add a task. It's by default assigned to me as the owner because when you create a task in this way, this is just how it will work, and I'll show you in the next lecture, if you want to reassign ownership or just remove the owner, how to do that. I'm not going to add it to any project. I'm not going to add any description. We'll look at that later. This is really the fastest way to add a really quick, simple task. Just give it a name and make sure that there's an owner, basically. It should be by default, but if not, if you're creating a different way, give it an owner. So I'm going to hit Create task. It's just confirming to me that it's making this task. You can see it also here in my upcoming. But let's go have a look in my my tasks view how that's coming in. Now here in the recently assigned section, we have this task here, demonstrate how to quick at a task. If I want to go and have a look at all the detail of this task, what I do is I click somewhere on the row of the task, not over the text because that's how I would edit the text and the name of the task, but actually just clicking off that and clicking back again, somewhere here on this row, and that will open up the right pan. Over here, we have all the information about this task. Of course, we have our task name that we wrote before. We have ourselves as the assignee, but we don't have a due date. This task is not part of any project. There's no description. As a result of it not being in any project, this task is private to us. None of our colleagues in the workspace see it because it's not public and not even any of our colleagues who are working on a particular project with us can see it because it's not in any project right now. So we're going to have a look over the next few lectures at all the options and how to assign ownership, due dates, et cetera. Let's go there now. 10. Assigning task owners: The most critical part of using Asana effectively is to ensure there is a proper ownership of each task and a deadline for tasks to be completed. 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. Let's start with task ownership. You can simply add an owner in the moment you quick add a task from the omni button. We saw that in the last lecture where we were added as default owners of the task. But let's create another task and see how that would work if we want to assign it to someone else. This time, let's say, finalize lecture notes, and let's assign this task instead to Andrew. What I'll do is I'll click on my name here on my name here on the task. I'll go ahead and search Andrew. And what you have to do is click on their name to confirm that they are the new owner of the task. This is a common mistake that I see people making as they just type the name and then they click somewhere else, for example, if I click here in description, and that's not change the owner. I'm still the owner. You actually have to click on Andrew and now you see his little picture attached and it's confirmed that he would be the owner of this task. The task finalized lecture notes, that's assigned to Andrew, and let's go ahead and create that task. If I go over to Andrew's profile, then let's go to his my tasks, and he sees that new task coming in, finalize lecture notes. Okay. Let's go back to my Asana. Let's go into the example project. I had set up a few lectures ago. I'll show you another way that you can change the owner of a task. We've looked at how to create a brand new task and assign owners. But what about for existing tasks? How would you change the owner? I'm here in one of my projects. I'll show you how to assign due dates in the next lecture, but say I want to change the owner here. Instead, I want to assign this customer needs task to Andrew. The process is exactly the same. I just click on the name. I'm going to search Andrew. You see him always popping up as one of my frequent collaborators. I'm going to make sure to click his name, and now that task is assigned to him. The third way is actually to go into the task detail. Let's do that for research competition. If I click here on task detail, I can actually go ahead and again click here and now assign it to Andrew. Another thing you might notice from this view, which is very useful, is this assigned to multiple people button. This is very useful if you have two people who need to do the same task. For example, say you have two new employees in your company and they both have to complete the onboarding process, which consists of watching a training. Now, when we set up our tasks and potentially our subtasks, we want to assign both of those new employees, the task to complete the onboarding process. It is possible to just duplicate a task and we'll cover that later. But duplication alone is not ideal because you have to go in and change the owner again. To avoid that hassle, it's way easier to just set up a task and then assign it to multiple people. It simplifies the process for you. So let's see that now, how that would work with this task. Let's say maybe both me and Andrew have to research the competition. So what I'll do is I'll go ahead and click on my name. Now, I'll hit this assigned to multiple people. I want to go ahead and assign that to Andrew and to me. Now I'll hit a sign. You see that that new task popped in here now. I created this task from this project, so it's added automatically the other task to this project. You see you have research competition for Nikki and we have research competition for Andrew. We both have this task assigned to us. 11. Setting due dates: Now let's move on to due dates. Setting a due date could just be a specific date on the calendar. Let's create a new task creating from the Omni button again. This task can be what we were saying before, complete onboarding process. Let's assign this to Andrew. And when should he complete this task by? That's this little calendar icon down here. Let's go ahead and say that he needs to complete that by the end of the week. Now I'll go ahead and hit Create task, and let's see how that's showing up for him. Again, he has his new task, complete onboarding process, and he sees that that is due on Friday. If you ever want to change the due date, say Friday doesn't work for Andrew, you just click on this due date and change it. Let's say he wants to do that by the end of next week instead of this week. And that will automatically update this due date. This might happen if you were delayed in completing a task or your priorities change. Maybe you move a task to the backlog or you work on another more urgent task instead. It happens. Now, what if you have a task that you need to be completed by a specific time? Maybe, for example, you're designing a flyer, and you need to send the design to the printer at a specific time. You have a hard deadline in order to get these flyers done for whatever you need them for. How would you set a deadline for the time? Well, again, just click on the due date of the task to open up this little calendar, and you see this little clock icon here. Let's go ahead and click that, and let's say that this is due by 5:00 end of business day on the Friday. I don't know why we need such a hard deadline for onboarding training, but use your imagination. And it's saved, I'll just click out of that. Now it's saved eighth of March at 5:00. As that task approaches, it will show that here as well in the column, which is really nice when you're trying to organize your day of what do you need to start with? What's more urgent. If I click back into the task, Okay. We'll also see it here. D on 8 March 5:00. Lastly, what happens 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 and that one, I'm going to set up for myself. Let's go back into Mana, This time, I think I'm going to create this actually from my my tasks because this one's going to be private to me, so I'll add a task. I'm going to go ahead and say, create monthly report. I'm going to say that this is due on the last day of every month. But I'm going to come here after I've selected the next last day of the month to set that to repeat. This way, once we mark the task as complete, it will automatically show again with the due date in the future at the time interval we selected. Let's see how we want this to repeat. The options we have are weekly, monthly, yearly, we can also have a custom one. In this case, we want this to repeat monthly, and we want it to repeat on the last day of the month. That's it. Just click out of this, and that is now repeating. Once I mark this task is done, It's going to show up again saying it's due the last day of March. Let's go ahead and mark this task complete by either ticking here or ticking here. You see that automatically, this populated a new task, create monthly report due on 31 March. It registered that I had the other task completed, and it automatically duplicated this task from my previous task to set it at the date that I decided. I can click here and actually it will take me to the old completed task where I have the setting set up. 12. Adding a task description: Finally, now we've talked about task ownership and due dates. What about here? Well, this is the task description box. It's just an open field where you can type whatever notes you want about the task. When you click on this field, you'll see all these formatting options appear. I really recommend that you use them when you are writing context for your team about a task. If you're using bullets or you're bolding important information, it's going to help your team digest what they need to do rather than just writing a long paragraph. I often also see people writing in the space as if they're formulating an e mail, but you don't need to write a long e mail. You just need to give enough context about the task, link to the resources that someone might need, and be clear about what they need to do by when. So let's give context to Andrew about this onboarding training. Let's go back to the onboarding training task, and I'm going to search that task this time so I can show you how this works. If I search onboarding here, it will give me any relevant tasks, projects or even people if there was somebody with the word onboarding in their name. It's going to show them here. Let's click into the onboarding process. That's brought us to Andrew's profile. We're still in our workspace, but we're able to see what's on Andrew's plate, which is really useful. It's opened automatically this onboarding process task, this one that was due in two weeks at the end of the day. Let's give Andrew a little context about what the heck this onboarding process or maybe better onboarding training is. So this onboarding training will take you about 2 hours. There are three videos in the training. Please budget your time accordingly. Let's send him how you can find the videos here in one Drive. Let's link that to use our nice formatting. Let's just send it to Google for today. Okay. And what else could we give him as a background? Three videos in the training, you can find the videos here and there is a quiz, quiz. You need to complete. It can be a bit tricky. So pay attention especially to re or video two. Here, I will highlight that so he really sees that and pays attention. I think you get the picture here. Just give the person as much context as you can about the task. A best practice is really to add plenty of detail to the tasks you're creating. This really helps if you have a situation, for example, if you have a team member who's sick because it's easy for a manager or their peers to have a look at there to do to see if there's anything urgent that they should reassign or if the tasks can wait until the person is back again. Similarly, if you have maybe a team of designers and one designer is really overloaded, then you can easily switch the task between them, so you could reassign this task to whoever you want. I'm just assigning it to me just to have an example of how quick that is. That really helps because if they have all the background information, the context about a task, you can pretty easily balance a team's workload as the day goes along or as the week goes along. Even if you think only one person is likely to complete the task, it's helpful to add a little background in case of situations like this. Even other situations, for example, when you might have to repeat a task and you can't remember how you did it because it was two years ago and so long ago, it's very helpful to be able to search an old task and duplicate an old task if you have all the context and the links to the resources in there. So I really do recommend you take the time to put a little task detail in the task description. When working as a team, be aware that anyone who has access to the project the task is in can come here and update the description. Even though I created this task, Andrew can come here and he can change this description. He can edit it the same way I can. So just be aware of that and also be aware of the visibility of your task because right now this task is available to both me and Andrew to view it because we've been assigning it back and forth to different people as owners. But it's not in any project. It's not currently visible to the organization. If it was and we had somebody else in the project, they would also be able to see this task, and they would also be able to come in and update it. So you just do have to be aware that people can edit sometimes over your task. You can always see if there were more things happening with this task, who did what in the task. So you do have a history if something gets messed up. Okay. It's different with the comments below because only you can edit your own comments, whereas the description, anyone can edit. If I would write a comment now of example comment, and I'll hit a comment here, and I go back to AndrewsAa go into his inbox. He sees my comment, but he can't edit my comment. He can only like and do a few other things. Was I can actually go into my comment and edit my comment and change what I was saying. 13. Adding attachments & reviewing task history: It's time to go step by step through all the different options within an assign a 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 task description. Then you can think about how to best set up projects, tasks, and sub tasks for your team. Understanding the options Asana gives you will save you time and make your workspace more organized. I'm here again in my test workspace, and I'm going to go to my my tasks and open up that complete onboarding training task that I see all the information over here in the right pan. First off, over here in the right pan, we have the mark complete button. It's pretty self explanatory. You've seen me use it already in this course. We click this when the task is completed, and we can either mark it here in the right pan or over here next to the task name in the main pan. If you accidentally mark a task as completed, don't panic because you can not only uncheck this, but you can always search past tasks in the top bar. In the moment that you do it, if you're completing your task from the main pan, you'll even have this little undo notification that you'll be able to quickly tick. Let's go ahead and have a look at both of those options now. Let's say I mark this task as complete. It says, you've marked this is complete and before that disappears, I'm going to hit undo, that's popped that back for me here. Let's go ahead and hit Mark complete from the right pane. Okay. You notice you don't have the little undue notification, but not to fret if I had already closed out of this task, which let's say that I do. Where can I find this task? Well, I can obviously unfilter to just see everything that has currently been here in my list. You see a lot of other tasks here as well, and I could uncheck it from there, and then it will show up again. But let's say I put that standard filter back and I don't see it. I can search up here in the top bar and the search complete onboarding training. I see this task, here is complete. Go ahead and click that and it's brought the task back for us, all we need to do is click here completed so that that unchecks itself is complete. Down here, we will see the history of what we've been doing. So we can see that just now I marked this task as complete and later on, I actually marked it as incomplete. So this is quite useful if you see maybe someone has ticked something as complete either by accident or they haven't fully understood the task description, and maybe you're coming in and you're approving their work, and you actually have to check it as not complete and ask them to do a little bit more of whatever the task consists of. Now continuing to see the other options available to us here in the right pane. First off, we can simply like a task. This function is nice but used pretty rarely. As a manager, I would give a like if a task I was following was completed, and I would see that many times from my AAA inbox and I could like it from there. But more often than not, I would use the appreciation feature, which we'll show in a later video. You might also like a task, almost like a thumbs up to a message like task received or just if you're excited the particular task is finally being prioritized because maybe you see the due date is now being moved up and you're really excited about that. You can like this task and multiple people can like the task. You also see it here from the main pin. This like notification will also pop up in the Asana inbox of any of the task collaborators. Much more useful is that we can add attachments to a task. You can add a file from your computer from Dropbox, from Google Drive, and other similar file storage platforms, many of which have integrations with SNA. If I wanted to go ahead and upload this word document now, you'd see it uploading. And now that it's uploaded, if I click here, I can go ahead and delete it if that was, for example, an accident. So another way I can attach documents. If I didn't want to just come here is I can drag and drop. So let me open my finder here, and then I'm going to go ahead and drag that over, and you see how now I have this kind of highlighting of the task. Also, if I wanted to, I could put it here in the description, but it's going the same place in this task. So let's go ahead and drop that. And again, we see it uploading. Once you add an attachment, it will show up again in the activity feed down here and I can see who uploaded that document and when they did it. Okay. Remember, this activity feed is very useful 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, Andrew, you created this task, what's going on with it, even though in this case, it's me, who created this task. That definitely happens to me a lot when someone has created a task, but they've not maybe put a due date or they've not clearly written the description, and many times I'm looking around and I just see this kind of unclear task and then I can go to the person who created it and ask what that task is about or comment what that task is about. Now, in terms of attachments, there are no attachment limits to Sauna, so you can upload as many files as you need and they won't expire. There's just a 100 megabyte limit per file, any file that's directly uploaded. Obviously, to get around that, you just use one of the file storage systems like Dropbox or copy and paste a link here in the task description if it's hosted elsewhere. 14. Breaking down work with subtasks: Next, we come across subtasks. Now, many times a task is composed of several steps. We should add these steps as subtasks. You can click on this button here underneath the task description, Add subtask, or you can use the shortcut it's recommending us now tab. I'm actually only going to highlight a few shortcuts in this course, so that's definitely a useful one to remember. So let's go ahead and add a subtask here, and you see that it pops out this little formatting box very similar to what we're used to from our tasks where we can write a task name, give it a due date, and assign a person. Let's go ahead and just say subtask one for this subtask. I want to add more additional subtasks. Of course, I can press another add subtask. I can do tab S, or if I'm in one of the subtasks. I'm currently here with my scroller. I can just hit Enter on my keyboard, and that will pop out another subtask. Now I have subtask one and subtask two. Anytime you want to delete a subtask, it's the same. You actually have to make sure you're here with your scroller and then hit backspace all the way until it disappears. Let's do that again now and we'll just go back to zero subtasks. Let's take a simple example. Let's get out of this particular task. Let's say we're hosting a team workshop. In order to be able to successfully host this meeting, that's the main task to host the meeting. Let's create that now at task, host the team meeting. We need to do a few administrative, smaller tasks, subtasks. I've just given this new task a name, and let me click into it to open up the right pan. Remember, it's automatically assigned you as the owner or me as the owner because we've created it from the my tasks section. Let's give this a due date of two weeks from now. Remember we have all the same options as before, we just created a different task. Let's think about what we need to do to host a team meeting successfully. First, we need to have an idea of what to talk about in this workshop, so we'll need to prepare a rough agenda for the meeting. At least we have an idea of the timing. Let's go ahead and hit tab S and prepare a rough agenda. What else do we need to do? Well, next, we need to schedule this meeting. Things we might need to be able to do to schedule it would be to check everyone's calendars and if there's a free meeting room. So I want to add another task to this. If I want to add another subtask, I can either click on Add a sub task or I can hit Enter to go ahead and create a second sub task. So now I want to schedule this meeting. Okay. And what else could I do? The last thing maybe would be that if there's some pre work before this workshop or this team meeting itself, we want to go ahead and prepare and send out the pre read materials. So I'll hit Enter and prepare and send out pre read materials. Important to note here is that for each subtask, you can also add a due date and an owner. Many times in our work, we have the responsibility for the main task. Maybe it's my responsibility to make sure that the team has a chance to connect. But it's not always that we're responsible for all of the elements that go into that task. That's why we break it also down into sub tasks because it makes it easier to split the responsibilities of who is doing what basically. So let's say in this case, I want to prepare the rough agenda. I'm going to assign that to myself. Maybe I want to do that by tomorrow. But let's say that Andrew is going to take care of this kind of admin work of scheduling the meeting and preparing the pre read materials. Of course, I have to give him the agenda first so he knows how long it needs to be, et cetera, and what kind of materials could be useful, but maybe he's going to take care of that for me. So here, I'll click on him, and I'll assign the sub tasks to Andrew. I can put this maybe already for Wednesday. Another thing you might have noticed is when I'm on the task or whether I'm hovering over the task, you have this little speech bubble appearing. Now, even though it's the same icon, it's really different than what is here in the tasks. Here, you see that this is showing that there's a comment on the task. But when I'm in a task view, This is actually allowing me to go one level deeper into the hierarchy. Remember, when we saw the pyramid in one of our earlier videos, we saw that subtasks was the bottom layer and tasks was a layer just above it. So this is a task. And if I want to go down to the bottom level of the pyramid, then we have the subtasks. But maybe I need to give Andrew a little bit more context about the meeting. Well, I'll click here on this little speech bubble it opens here in the right pan. Another very similar to our task view, view of a sub task. The only real clue you have here that you're one level deeper is these two lines here. You see host the team meeting. Is the task. But I'm actually in my sub task of schedule the meeting, which is assigned to Andrew and do on Wednesday. It's really nice because similar to a task, I can add lots of context here, I can add attachments, I can like, et cetera. It's easy to imagine a very complex project branching off like a tree because you have a project with a lot of tasks, maybe one task, has a lot of subtasks, and you can even go deeper and you can even have maybe the most important subtasks, have another subtask on them. It can get a little bit complicated. I think it's really important just for you to stay on top of your Asana, make sure your team understands how your asana is set up so that things don't get hidden in too many layers because too many layers is not really benefiting anyone. Luckily, as long as you've properly assigned owners and deadlines to the subtasks, they're easy to find. You also have the search bar, so you can locate any tasks or sub tasks you need. 15. Filtering with tags: Let's continue talking about the other options we can add to our task itself. We've looked so far at the mark complete, the button, attachments, and sub tasks, and the task description. Incidentally, another way you can add subtasks is by clicking up here this additional button. You see it's created a new task and I'm going to backspace just to get rid of that. Next up is copy task link. And this does what it says on the tin. It's going to copy a link to this particular Asana task. That makes it really easy to share a specific task with co workers. And I find that particularly useful. If I'm in the middle of chatting with someone on Slack and I want to link them to my task so that they can go and maybe we can continue the discussion based on the particular task I'm talking about. Next up, you can toggle this task. Right now, remember it's here just in the right pan, but maybe we want to have it full screen. That's particularly useful when you want to write a long description, and it's just a bit of a hassle to see it just in the side of the right pane right here. You see there's a lot less space. When I'm in the full screen view, you can also toggle it to just a description view and really make your life a lot simpler if you want to write a lot of detail. I'll close that back. Okay. Next, we have these three little dots, which give us a number of additional options. First, we can add this task to a project. You can also do that just above the task description, add to projects. Projects show up here on the left in the side bar. Right now, we only have this one project, new product development. If I click to add to project, it's going to go ahead and prompt us directly because that's the only one that it could offer us. If we would have lots of different projects, we could start typing and it populate them for us. Remember, you have to click on it for it to actually select, and now this task is part of this new product development project. It's added it to an untitled section. Don't worry about that. We're going to talk about sections in a later video. Now to make this a little bit easier, I'm going to come into the project itself. We're going to see this task already in there, because remember we just added it there. And we have it here at the top. Going back to our additional options, we have other useful features like dependencies, Marcas milestone, Marcas approval. As these are paid features, I'm going to skip over them in this fundamentals course. Next, we have tags, which helps to give additional context and allows you to group similar tasks. I do think it's useful to say, once you're on a premium version of Asana, I find tags not so useful because we can accomplish everything with custom fields instead. It doesn't make sense to use both tags and custom fields. Okay. So tags are really just useful when you're on the free version. As that's our focus, let's have a look at them now. A reason why you might want to use tags is to track project progress. When you have a full list of tasks within a project, how can you quickly tell which tasks someone is working on? Well, you could add a task of in progress to certain tasks. That would make it easy for a project manager to look at a project and see what you're working on. Sometimes just seeing due dates or going to someone's individual profile doesn't give the full picture. I've clicked on Create tag, I've typed in the name of the tag I want to create, and I'm going to go ahead and click Create tag. You can also add a color to these tags. I'll show you in a later video how that comes in handy. I'm just going to click out for now and confirm that that's the tag that I want to add to this task. Now, let's say I want to view all tasks in this project that are in progress. Here it's not super intuitive. You actually have to click on the tag you just created or one that maybe you've gone into on a task so that it will show you all other tasks with this tag. If I click on this in progress task right now, obviously, you see this is the only task which is currently in progress. Let's just add a few more tags to these other tasks in this new product development project, just so you have a little bit more visual understanding of how this tax is working. Let's say that determine customer needs is also in progress. Let's add a tag. We see now it's already prompting us with the in progress tag we just created, so I can just directly click that. Let's say maybe research competition. This one is pending. Let's go add tag and this one is just pending. I want to create a new tag. Here if I click on pending, we should just see this research competition. Okay. Perfect. If I go back into my project and to determine customer needs into in progress, we now see the two tasks that I added as in progress. I can also edit this tag. If I wanted to rename the tag, I could do it from here, if I wanted to change the color that I've associated or set the color. In this case, I could do it from here. I don't have to go into each task to change the name of the tag. Another important thing to note with tax is a task can have multiple tags associated. So if I click back out here, right now, I just have the tag of in progress, but maybe I would also have a tag for all meeting related tasks. I don't know if that could come in handy. I just wanted to make sure I'm not forgetting any upcoming meetings, then I could also have this other tag. So that can come in useful. I think particularly for me, the most useful ones are when I'm trying to group all types of tax, like if I have a lot of design related tax, but then I also want to have the priority. Tag as well. Important here is that everyone in your workspace can be adding tags and that can again have the potential to get a bit messy. It's good to have a system of what tags you have and when they should be used. 16. Follow up & duplicate tasks: Next up here in the additional options is the create a follow up task. This is great if one of your tasks is something like maybe a call or to reach out to someone for something and you need a follow up task just to remind you about something, or maybe just to make sure that you get started with plenty of time before your deadline. You just go ahead and click this create follow up task and it populates automatically this follow up on and then inside the apostrophes, the name of the original task. The original task is host the team meeting, and this follow up task is follow up on host the team meeting. Maybe you want that in your personal to do just for yourself. It adds a link to the original task in the follow up task description, which makes it easy to go back to the full task. I'll get out of this. I won't save that, and go back to the additional options. The next useful one is convert two. I'll look at that in the next video. For now, we have duplicate task. I find this most useful when I've completed a task and then a few months later, I have an identical task to do. Let's take our onboarding example. Let's find that task where we added quite a big description. The very first time we set this task up, it was a little learning process. We had to write a little text. We had to link to the videos. Maybe a month from now, we're going to have another new person on board. Rather than having to write this all again and upload the attachment and provide the link, we can just duplicate the old task. This way, you have all the intelligence of what you did last time and you don't have to remember it off the top of your head. It just speeds up the workflow. So if I would want to duplicate this task, I come up here, hit Duplicate task, and it's quite similar to this follow up on task structure because it's going to say duplicate of, and then in here, it says the original task. And then you choose which things you want to copy over. In our case, we want to copy the description, but maybe we don't want to copy the assignee because you're going to assign it to someone else. You can even copy the subtasks and the tags and the parent task if this is a sub task which you're duplicating. It makes life really easy. Next, in these options, you can also print a task. Many people like to have a physical checklist in their office, so you could always easily print this for your desk at the office, and you can make this task visible to everyone in your workspace or organization. That way, even if these people are not in your project, they'll have visibility of the task if they're in the workspace. Personally, I rarely use this feature because the people who need visibility are almost always in the project or in the relevant team. And lastly, of course, you can delete the task. You can delete the task either from this option or remember if you go into the main pane, you can just backspace. I'll just go ahead and delete this, demonstrate how to quick add a task task. And that task is gone, just like how you delete a sub task. It's the same way. Also if you go into a subtask, let's go into the host, the team meeting, and then here on the rough agenda, I could of course, backspace to delete that. But I could also, if you remember, go deeper into the hierarchy, click this little speech bubble, and I'll have the same options. Here as well, I can go ahead and remove this as a subtask or delete the task, which is what I was really wanting to show you. 17. Convert a task to a subtask: Lastly, from these three options, you have this convert to subtask option. Let's take an example to talk through why this is useful. Let's say we have a satisfaction survey that we send out after every major team meeting. Maybe we make this first as a task. Send out satisfaction survey. Then we realize, actually, that would be better placed as a sub task within this host the team meeting task. We want to go ahead and convert that. Let's go into the task, hit the three dots, convert to subtask. From here, we now have to tell it which task we want to connect it to. Obviously, we can see it here. We can also start to type, host the team meeting. And clicking that. Now we have this right pane showing us that we're actually a subtask, no longer a task because we have one level higher host the team meeting. If we go into that, we can see that it's added it down here at the bottom of the subtasks. But as you're moving things around, you might notice things changing or showing up in a slightly different order. I'll show you in a sec the dragon drop, which will really help you out to see things how you like. But let's just do the reverse of what I did converting that task to a subtask for now. Because say you have a sub task that you say, actually, you know, this is big enough that I want to pull it one level higher in the hierarchy. I want to make it its own task. Let's go ahead and click on one of these subtasks. Okay, maybe schedule the meeting. Who knows? That's a really complicated one? We again, click on the three dots. This time we remove it as a subtask. By removing it as a subtask, you can see that those two lines disappeared. Schedule the meeting is now a task in its own right. It's no longer a subtask. Coming back to reordering things, I'm going to go into one of the projects here. I think it's just going to be easier to show you how things move around. If you want to drag and drop certain things, you can see when I'm hovering over, there's these six little thoughts appearing. So if I go ahead and actually make sure that those are appearing and then I'm going to click and hold, and now I can drag it wherever I'd like in this project. You see that this bolded line is appearing. That's key because if I would not see that, for example, here, I don't see it and I just try and release, it's not going anywhere, this task. But instead, if I hold it, I drag it down and I say, Yeah, I want to put this task in between research competition and develop product concept and design, I can just release and now it's moved over. Similarly, inside tasks, you can do this with sub tasks. For example, if I wanted for some reason, prepare and send out pre read materials to happen first, I could go ahead and hover over. You see those six dots. Click there, drag and drop. Remember to wait for this bolded line to appear and then release. Another thing you can do to move tasks from sub task to task level or from task level to sub task level is using this dragon drop. For example, if I wanted this prepare and send out pre read materials that we just moved, instead to be a task in its own right, you have, of course, the option to go into the task to remove it as a sub task. But another thing that you can do if I just go back to the task level is hover over the six dots. Click and drag and drop it over here to the main pan. Again, you see this bolded line and I'll drop it here, and now it's a task in its own right. See it popping up here. It's no longer a sub task on the host of the team meeting. The reverse is true as well. You have to make sure that you have this right pan open for the task you want this new task to be a sub task of. For example, if I find a manufacturer, as the task, and I want to move order and test samples to be a subtask, find a manufacturer. I have to make sure that find a manufacturer is open here on the right before I do anything. Then I have to click drag and pop it over here in this subtask section. Once again, you're going to see this bolded line appearing. You know that it's here because you're over here in the subtasks. It's a bit more difficult when you don't have a subtask appearing, but you do know that it's here. Drop that over there. Now you have order and test samples as a subtask. It doesn't work the other way if you're imagining, I'm here on find a manufacturer, and I just drag and drop something onto this, nothing happens. You have to make sure that you have the task you want open as the main task and then drag the other task you want to be a subtask into it. 18. Adding comments & collaborators to tasks: Something we've only briefly touched on is commenting on tasks with collaborators. Comments are really useful when working with the team to let them know the latest status of a task or get their feedback. In this new product development project, let's say one of our tasks is to purchase a new website domain. And I want to get feedback from Andrew on the domain that I'm planning to buy. So of course, I could write some information in the description, but I actually want to essentially not chat him, but ask him for his feedback. So maybe the difference here between commenting and chatting is if I needed immediate feedback, then Slack is definitely the tool you want to go to to get quick immediate feedback. If I want to ask him for his feedback, but I'm willing to wait similar to an e mail up to a day, then I'll go ahead and leave him a comment here in Asana. So thinking to purchase google.com. Any thoughts Right now, this comment before I comment it is not going to go to anyone. Andrew is not currently listed as a collaborator on this task, so he's not going to get it in his Asana inbox. If I want to directly ping Andrew specifically, it's similar to any messaging app, you're going to have an app and then start to type the person's name and then make sure you click their name. This is now going to send alert basically to Andrew, a little inbox message to Andrew that I've asked for his feedback. Let's go ahead and comment this Now let's go over to Andrew Sana. Now we're here in Andrew sana, and we have a notification. We see that there's this task, purchase website domain created by Nikki 1 minute ago, and she's asking me, Andrew, that she's thinking to purchase google.com. I'm going to say sounds good to me. And comment. This way, you can have a good conversation, get lots of feedback. Sometimes this gets so much that you actually need to start pinning certain comments to the top because maybe that's a particularly important comment or you want to make sure everyone reads it, or maybe you've already found a resolution to this discussion, and so you want to just pin the resolution so that people don't waste their time chiming into something you've already solved. And for your own comments, you can edit your comment or delete your comment. Remember, I'm here in Andrew's profile, so I can't delete or edit Nikki's comment, I can only edit or delete my own. A little bit more about task collaborators, because now you see that Andrew is officially a collaborator on this task because he's been included in the thread of the conversation here in this task. If you want to add other people as collaborators, you can just click here and similar to what we did when we tagged Andrew, you can just type their name and then add them here as well. Adding someone as a collaborator on an Asana task is similar to see seeing someone on an e mail thread. They may read the e mail passively or the Asana task passively, but there's nothing immediately requiring their attention. That way, if they're not directly involved in any of the subtasks, they're still being notified of any changes in this task to their Asana inbox. We'll archive this notification now that Andrew's answered that. Okay. So for example, if you had a colleague who's not in the project, but it's useful that they're in the know about what's happening on key tasks or milestones, you can just add them as a collaborator on those couple of tasks. That way, they'll get notified of any updates on the task. Remember, if you do want someone to do an action, don't just send them a comment about this action that you want them to do. Actually set an *** on a task. You can still comment asking for this particular action, but make sure you create a task. You can even link to that task in the comment or vice versa, link to this comment in the task description of the task you create now. Now, on the flip side, if you're a collaborator of a task that you don't care much about, you can come to the same place as where you add a collaborator. If I go back to my Asana profile, the same place, where you add a collaborator, and you can go ahead and hover over and you see this little x appearing over different people. Remember the plus is to add more people and the X is to remove people as collaborators. And that's quite useful because then you don't get spammed with AAA inbox notifications of things that aren't relevant to you, and maybe that's just slowing you down. So I might do this, for example, if I set up a task for a teammate, let's go into one of these tasks that I created for Andrew. I want Andrew to create this, but I don't actually need to oversee that. I'm trusting it's good. I don't need to get constant updates. I'll come over to my little profile, and I'll. Now I'm no longer a collaborator on this task, which hopefully saves me a bit of mental brain power. 19. Is it a subtask, task or project?: So far, we've covered mostly tasks and sub tasks in this course. Before we move on to projects, I want to take a quick pause and just remind you of when to use what? Should it be a project, a task or a sub task? The answer really depends on what you're trying to achieve and how you want to see the information and which hierarchy it should go. You should create a project when you have a large coordinated effort with a group of stakeholders working on one common initiative over time. For example, if you're planning an event, launching a campaign, or developing a new product. You should create a task when you have a specific action or deliverable that needs to be completed. Remember tasks are the individual actions within a project and should be assigned to team members given due dates and track for progress, like writing a blog post or hosting a training session. If your task doesn't fit within one of your projects, that's okay. A task can also just be floating as a task. It doesn't always need to be part of a project. Now, sub tasks are for those smaller actionable steps within a larger task. They break down tasks into smaller pieces of work, and as you know, can also be assigned to different team members, like creating the first draft of a block post or approving the block post. Let's recap this with an example, a little quiz example. So I have three topics on the left, an editorial calendar to publish a weekly blog post and to gather customer quotes to include in the blog post. Which should be a sub task task or project? Have a quick think. Yes, so the editorial calendar should be a project, the weekly blog post is a task, and the customer quote gathering is a subtask. Let's move on now to projects. 20. How to create a project: Having projects within Asana allows you to organize all of the tasks for a specific objective into a shared view, whether as a list, a board, a calendar, et. One of the easiest ways to create a new project is you guessed it the omni button. Let's go there now and create a new project. This will take you to a screen where you can either begin a project from scratch, use a template or import from another tool like Excel. Let's start our project from scratch. I'm going to hit blank project. We'll need to enter a project name, choose our layout, and set the level of visibility we want for this project, whether it's going to be a public project, visible to everyone in the workspace or private only to us. Of course, we're using Asana to collaborate, in this case, we want it to be shared to the team visible to everyone in the workspace. We're going to choose this option. Let's give this project a name. What could this project be about new marketing campaign, something around a new marketing campaign. And we're going to keep the default view as a list because that's what we've been seeing so far in this course, so it will stay familiar for us. So let's go ahead and hit Create Project. Now we have our blank project, and I want to go through some of the options that we see here in the header. First, we can go to this little down arrow right here next to the project name, and from here we can edit some of the basic project information. Tough we can do more as well from the overview, which I'll talk about later. We can create a color scheme for this project. So maybe we want to see this project in blue, for example. And that will show this color on our side bar. When we start to have a lot of projects, the color coordination can definitely come in handy. We can copy a link to the project, we can duplicate the project, and of course, you can import and export this project if you are using a sana in combination with another tool. Lastly, we can archive or delete this project. Typically, you'll want to archive a project when you're finished with the project because then you can refer back to it and it's tasks later on in the future, should you so need. It's just hidden from view. Versus Delete project. If you delete a project, it's gone forever. You can't refer back to that project. So I rarely use Delete only if there's really a one off project that I'm confident that I'm not going to need again. Otherwise, in almost all cases, I am archiving projects when I'm finished with them. Once you really get going with the sauna, you might find that you have a lot of projects over here in the sidebar. At the moment, we only have a few, so it's easy to stay on top of them. But if we did have a lot of projects here, a good way for us to keep on top is to mark one or two as favorites. To mark a project as a favorite, we simply come up here next to this little dropdown arrow that we've clicked before and hit this star icon. Clicking this will toggle the project on and off as a favorite. And then the project will show up as a favorite in your side bar. Let's click that now, and you see immediately we had a starred section show up over here. If I click that again, it's going to disappear. Also, from your home page, you can have that customized so that it shows you directly rather than your frequent projects or your most recently clicked projects, that it can show you your starred projects. When you have multiple projects marked as favorite, you can also drag and drop between them. If I go and choose that new product development is also a favorite. Now we have both here. It's a little bit duplicated because we only have two projects. But if you wanted new marketing campaign to show up above new product development because really it's the top of your favorites. You can just click and drag and hold. Remember, again, the same as moving tasks and subtasks around, you have this little line appearing and you can just move it there. Now I have the new marketing campaign as number one in my list of start projects. 21. Add team members to projects: Now, a project wouldn't be very useful for your team unless you have someone to share it with. So let's come up here to the header of our project, and we can see that right now I'm the only one in this project. Yes, it's visible to all members of the Asana workplace that this project lives in, but actual project members is just me. So let's click this share button, and let's invite Andrew to be a part of this project as well. If you want, you can write them a little message as well to just explain why you're inviting them to this project. Hey, Andrew, this is the new project for the Black Friday campaign. Still in the middle of setting it up. We need to choose what permissions they have as a project member. He'll be an editor by default, or if we prefer, we can make him a project admin, and then you can also have permission to do things like delete the project or archive of the project. The person who first created the project is any way automatically a project admin. In my case, having Andrew as an editor works just fine, he'll be able to add edit and delete tasks. I'll leave him on that level and go ahead and send him an invite. If you're a member of a project, you're going to receive notifications, anytime someone adds a new task to the project, so you don't have to be a collaborator on each individual task. As a member of the project, by default, anything happening in the project, you're going to get notified of. But if you don't want team members receiving all those notifications, you can come here to manage member notifications and untick the boxes of the notifications you don't want them to receive. Let's say I don't want Andrew to get a ASA inbox message. Every time a new task is added to this project. But for now, I'll leave messages and status updates on. We'll get to those later in the course. Speaking of notifications, although Asana was designed to eliminate the need for e mail, by default, it sends an awful lot of e mails. If you ever want to change this, come up over here to the top bar, click on your little profile photo and go into your settings. From here, go into notifications, and then e mail settings or e mail notifications. You can choose what types of things you want Asana to e mail you about or maybe no e mails at all. I would recommend in the beginning when you're new to Asana, keep these email notifications active for maybe a week and once you get into the habit of checking Asana every day, and then you don't need the email reminder, then I would come and click here and remove all email notifications. You can also set the default for your own project notifications. So that's what we just looked at in terms of that individual projects settings for the new marketing campaign. We went ahead and turned off Andrew's notifications when tasks are added to that project. But actually, each individual team member, can set their own default, which then will be saved. So if Andrew, for example, had his tasks added toggled off. Then if I added him to a project later on, that would automatically be off. So people can have their own personal preferences, which are the primary, but you can always change it for certain projects. You just go exactly as we saw into the particular project, into the people, and you can click managed notifications. So this is always on an individual project level. But if Andrew had his default settings enabled, in the moment I created it, it would have been unchecked. 22. Having a project overview: We've looked at some of the project basics, like how to set a project as a favorite and how to add team members to projects. Let's go back to looking at the options we can see within a project, starting with the overview tab. This is where you can put a short description for what this project is all about. Similar to adding a task description, you can format this really nicely and give the project plenty of context. You can also add links to important documents, and of course, you can also add new team members from the screen. You'll see right now the team members who are part of this project, and as you created the project, you're going to be the project owner by default. Before we had something different. We saw we were the project Admin. Don't confuse project owner and project Admin. Project Admin is for the permissions level within the project, and multiple people can be the project admin on a project. Project owner is communicating to everyone in your workspace who is really accountable for this project. So if you're not the accountable person driving this forward, then you're going to want to go ahead and add a role to whoever is. And this is an open text field, this role feature. So you can really add the person's role in the way that your company has it uniquely set up. For example, maybe this project is big enough that there's a project deputy role, or maybe there's someone from the leadership team who joins certain projects, and they have a mentor role. So let's make Andrew our project deputy. Now anyone in our Asana workspace who's coming and having a look at this project will ideally have a bit of context what this project is about. Maybe a link to an important document like a project brief or supplier information, and who is responsible within our organization for what in this project? Clear roles and responsibilities is just a basis for good project management. If you have a premium version of ASANa, you'll have even more options here in the overview screen, such as Asana goals. Those aren't visible to us on the free version, which is why your screen might look a little different. 23. Use sections to keep projects organized: Back to our header, and we have all the different views for this project, a list, the board view, timeline is premium, and a calendar view. I'm going to add some example tasks here in our list now, and then we can look at how these different views compare. First, I'm just going to add a list of tasks. Now, you remember I'm always repeating that tasks need an owner and a due date. To speed up that process, rather than going one by one, you can use multi select and assign owners and due dates for different tasks at the same time. So, for example, let's say that approving the photos needs to come from me. I'll click on this task. And now I'll hold down my control or command key, and I'll click on the other task I want to assign to the same person. Let's say I'm approving the photos, I'm approving the project brief, and I am approving the final campaign content. These three tasks are now, you can just slightly see that they're highlighted in this deep blue, which is very similar to the black. I've done that by clicking on the task by holding down my command or control key. Now I have this little multi select kind of tool box down here, and I can go ahead and choose to assign these three tasks all to Nikki. So I'll go ahead and do that now and you see how they automatically populate there. And you can do the same thing with due dates. So if I wanted all three of these tasks to be the same due date, I could go ahead and assign them all to be due on May 3. In our case, that doesn't make quite so much sense, but I just wanted to show you that tool because it really helps to speed up your workflow. So let me go ahead and finish this task list now with assignees and more accurate due dates. A. And to make this project more interesting, I'm going to share access with another colleague. So let's invite also Lela to this project. Remember the permissions, remember about the notifications, and whether you want to add them to the whole workspace or just the particular project. And now that Lala's accepted our invite, let's go ahead and finish assigning ownership. The list view which we're familiar with, is a bit like a large checklist at the moment. But we can split this up and give it a really nice overview using sections. Sections are a great way to keep your project organized. It lets you visually group some of the tasks by whatever category you choose so that you can have a better big picture. To create a section, either click down here on this little ad section button, or up here next to the add Task button, you have add section. Tab is another really useful shortcut to get familiar with. So let's set up a couple of sections here in our project. Looking at the tasks, maybe we want to separate this project into phases, a setup or planning phase, an in development phase, and then a rollout phase. So let's create those now. Let's go ahead and click Add section. And let's type setup planning phase. I'll create another section in development and another section rollout phase. Let me just remember the word phase here. We have setup planning phase, in development phase, and rollout phase. How can I move now the existing tasks into their relevant sections? There are two ways. First, as you've already seen in this course, we can drag and drop from the main pane. So for example, if I scroll up here to the top task, complete project brief, if I want to click that, and I want to drag that down and just pop that here in the setup planning phase. That's the first way. That's certainly an easy way to go ahead and move tasks around. An alternative way to put a task into the right section or move it between sections is to open up the task. Then here in the right pan in the projects section, you can see both what project this task is connected to and which section. Right now, this task is in an untitled section. There's no section associated. If I click this drop down, then I can choose to move this into the setup planning phase. When you start moving tasks around like this, you might end up anyway having to come and use the dragon drop just to get it into the exact order that you'd like. This is going to become much more useful when you have a lot of projects and you might want to move a task to a different project, or you might want to assign a task to multiple projects, and we'll come to that later on. Let me go ahead and move all of these tasks into their related sections. All right. This project is looking way better now that we've added some sections to it. This has really given it a bit of structure. If you want to hone in on specific information, you can even toggle these sections open and closed. When you start to have a project with really a lot of tasks and sections, that just again, speeds up your life to look at what you're interested in. Now, sections are not exclusive to the task level. You can also put sections on subtasks. Let's go ahead and choose one of these tasks now, maybe higher freelance photographer. And if we want to go ahead and add some subtasks to this, let's have I think we could have research potential photographers get quote from two suppliers and contract photographer. We have three sub tasks here similar to tasks. We can go ahead and highlight them using control or command and clicking, and we can assign them all in this case to Lela and all maybe for the day before. But let's say we wanted to put a section to two of these tasks. So how could we do that? Here, we actually have to use the shortcut tab plus N. There is no button here to add a section. You actually have to have this task open, be here in the right pane and click tab. From here, you see that a section has created, so maybe we can say here, research phase. If I again hit tab, then I can create a finalize phase, maybe in this case. I just want to drag and drop my sub tasks to the right section. And of course, in this case, with three tasks with three subtasks, I should say, you don't really need two sections. But as projects get more and more complex and you have more subtasks. This just again, makes life easy to hone in on where you really are in the project, where you are in the process. To delete a section, it's really the same as deleting a task or a subtask. You just go ahead and click here and back space all the way. 24. Project board & calendar views: Next up is the board view. This view is only useful when your project has sections. Because as you can see here, our board is organized by the sections we just set up. This titled section will always populate if you're adding tasks before having sections. Let's go ahead and delete this untitled section. It's not useful for us. We have all the tasks in different columns with the section header as the column header. We can easily add a task in a particular section by clicking here on add task. We still need to give the task a title, assign an owner, and give it a due date. But then this task will automatically be saved to the relevant section. In this case, roll out phase. Let's create another task here for the roll out phase. Maybe complete retrospective meeting could be one of the last ones, and Lela can still take care of this and that by the end of the month. If we go back to our list view, we'll see that this information is transferring. So here under roll out phase, we also see the retrospective meeting task. If we want to add a new section, we can do that here as well. We can also click next to add task, the same as in the list view. And we can also sort the tasks in between each section or amongst sections, just by dragging and dropping. In this case, you don't see these six little dots that you're quite used to seeing. It's just click anywhere on the task and drag and drop. You can also filter, sort, group by, just like you can in the list view. Another nice way to visualize your work is with the calendar view. Let me put this to a monthly view, and maybe let's go to May where there's quite a few more tasks. Here you can see all the tasks of the project. Even the tasks I just added, they'll show up here on days when something is due. From this view, you can hover over a task, and then you can market as complete or click on the task to open the usual right pane where you can edit the details of the task. Another nice thing of the calendar view is you can click and drag and drop tasks, and then the due date will automatically change. For example, now, if I go back into approved photos, the due date will be May 8, not May 7, and you have all the activity history here on your task just like normal. This is a really nice way to come and move tasks around quite easily if you're playing with how the different tasks are going to fit together in the project. Again, if we go back to the list view, the approved photos task will have had the due date updated on this task. Whether you prefer seeing it in a list, a board or a calendar view, don't worry, it's all synced. The calendar view is great if you want to gauge how much work is on someone's plate in a particular week. For example, here on April 26, we have quite a few tasks for Lela. Maybe we want to move some of those tasks around, so there's not so much on one day and the workload is more evenly spread. You can also add tasks directly on this screen. If I wanted to just add a new task here on April 25, I just click anywhere here in this space of the cell. Then this box opens up and here I can add example. Example new task. I hit Enter to actually save that as a task. Enter. Now we can hover over, we can click to add all the detail that you know I like the assigne, the due date, maybe a bit of context, some description to this task. Let's go ahead and mark that little task is complete. Right now, this calendar is a little bland, let's add some color to our tasks. This will even better give us a visual representation of what's going on. We can do this with tags. Do you remember how we add tags? Let's review now by going into one of our tasks. For example, here in approved project brief. Let's say we want to have all the approval tasks with the tag of approval, and then we'll assign a color to that tag. So let's go in here up to the more options, tax, and here we're going to go ahead and type in approval, and we'll create a tag for approval and mark that in red. And now, I think you can already see how this calendar is going to come to life here when we add lots of tags and different colors. So let me go ahead and do that now. All right. So now all of our tasks have a tag associated with at least one color, and you can already see what type of an impact that has for our project manager, for our 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. And for example, this April 26 day when we saw Leyla had quite a lot of tasks, we can see that one is just kind of admin related, and it's not that big of a deal. So that already visually helps us to get a sense of this workload. And you now know from today's lecture about the list view, the board view, and the calendar view. Different types of projects will lean naturally to different views. For example, in my work in marketing, if I want to create a publication schedule, then having the calendar view works amazing for planning content because I have a top level overview of just when things will go out. The board view I find most useful when it's a project without a huge number of tasks and a very simple setup. For example, maybe my sections are pending in progress and blocked. The list view tends to be the default for most other projects, but you do need to make good use of sections to really make sure that the list view can bring some value. 25. Project messages: Let's look at the last few options we have in this project. We'll skim over workflow and dashboard, which are premium options and go to messages. Messages is where you can see a record of guest it messages that have been sent to this project's members, as well as status updates, and just a record of all that communication in one place. I'll show you how to make a status update later on, but let's send a message now. I can click here on send message to members. I could also go to the omni button and create a message from there. But let's do that from the messages screen. I'll click here. This opens up nicely into a full screen message for me, and it's similar to sending an e mail, but of course, you can reference all the Sana tasks, projects and people really nicely. Let's say I'm the project manager, and I have an important meeting with the VPs this week to discuss the new marketing campaign. I just want to give a bit of insight to the team on how that meeting went and if any actions came out of it. My subject is going to be follow up from VP meeting. Okay. And by default, it's going to send it to all project members as I created this message from the project screen. But if I wanted to send it to different people, I could just go ahead and click here and either send it to individual people or members from another campaign, sorry, another project, or even everyone from the test workspace. So for me, it's just perfect to send it to all project members of the new marketing campaign. I just want to give them a bit of insight. So let me go ahead and hit that here. I'm going to type hi all want to let you know that the VP meeting went really well. They were impressed with the progress so far. Thanks for your hard work. Now let's try and tag some of our Asana projects or tasks to really show you the value of that. They agreed we can take an extra week two to do what hit app and then we can go ahead and references task project, teammate message, et. Let's see what do we have something about approval we can take an extra week to maybe approve the photos as we are currently blocked by At what were blocked by maybe casting the photoshoot models. We can take an extra week to approve the photos as we're currently blocked by casting photoshoe models. Let's say that Lela will update task due dates accordingly later on. Speak later in the daily huddle. That's Nikki. All right. So I can, of course, add a little bit of formatting to this if I want, but I think you already get the picture that when I send this message, people will receive it in their Sana inbox and they can click directly on the things that I've referenced to go and take a look at those tasks in more detail. So let's go ahead and send that now. Send. And now, of course, there is a record of this message in the new marketing campaign project, if anyone goes here to the tab of messages. Let's head over to Andrew Sana to see what he now has in his inbox. Get rid of this. So he has now been notified, follow up from VP meeting, and he's seen all of the detail that I've sent, and of course, he can directly click onto this task to open up the project and see a bit more information about it. So I just find it a really useful way, rather than sending an e mail with a link to Asana, everything is just kept within Asana and it makes life really easy. Okay. So let's go back to Masana let's say I've forgotten what messages I have sent. You know, how can I find that information? Well, I can go to Masana inbox, and there's this other tab here, messages I've sent. So whether you've sent a message in a project to a particular group of project team members, whether you've sent it to one individual person, you can always access the messages you've sent from here from the inbox and then that tab. So this is also really useful because when I started with ISAA, I remember when I started sending messages, I was really lost as to, you know, how the heck can I find the messages I've sent? I'm sure that I've sent somebody a message, and I just couldn't remember. But remember, if you need a task to be done, you need some action. You do want to make sure you said that as an Asana task, and you're not just sending an Asana message and then kind of using e mail secretly. Remember, messages aren't like DMing someone on a chat platform. If you need them urgently, again, you shouldn't send an Asana message, reach out to them on the other platform. The Asana message is really most useful when it's connected to a type of work, an A sync brainstorm, or a general question or feedback that can wait. You can of course, put that feedback or that question directly in a relevant task. But sometimes it's more a general question about a project or a process in general, and so it makes more sense to send a message to the full project team separately and not having that as a comment on an Asana task. 26. Files & cleaning up the header: So back to our project, let's go back to new marketing campaign, and we have this last tab for files. Once you've added files to the project, you'll see them all populating here. If you're planning to use teams or one drive links in your Asana, you're not going to see all those document links here. This is only when you upload an actual file to Asana. With that, you've gone through everything from overview to files. Now I want to give you one of my top tips. This is when you're setting up a project, come and remove things from the header that aren't bringing you value because that will just add extra confusion to your project team members, and they see all of these options and they get a little overwhelmed when maybe that's not super helpful. For example, As we don't have any files in this project. And let's say as a practice, this group is going to be using one drive to store all the documents. We're only going to be linking to those documents here. We're never going to add any files into a sauna. That's just how we decide to use it. Then we don't really need this tab, so I can hit these three dots right here and I can go ahead and remove it. I'll remove it here. And now I no longer have that tab. It's brought me to the next tab, which was the messages. If that was a mistake, I can always hit the plus, and I can go ahead and add files back. So it's not disappeared, it's still there if we do need it, but it's just not taking up any head space. That's definitely one of my top tips is to remove things that you don't need. As we spoke before in one of the last videos, you know, about the differences between list board and calendar and how certain projects lean towards certain views. What you can also do is really remove views that aren't going to add value. So let's say in this case, the board view is going to be a little bit maybe too simplistic for this project because there's quite a lot here in the development phase, so we'd rather have our people looking at it in a list view or in a calendar view. So I'm going to go ahead and remove the board view from here. Okay. And of course, we saw a few things which were premium features. The timeline, the workflow dashboard, we didn't talk about. Let's just remove them from here. This isn't adding any value. Let's remove. Let's remove and let's remove. I think you get the idea already, this is a much simpler project, we're keeping our people focused on the things that they need to be focused on, the work that needs to be doing, the communication, and the alignment that needs to be happening and not worried about what's this tab? It says that it's a premium feature. Do I not have it? Am I on the right plan for our companies, et cetera. The only thing I would say is that sometimes people do have strong preferences, so it might be worth leaving all three. Like for example, maybe I prefer to see things as a list, but I know Leyla prefers to see things in a board view and Andrew cannot survive without the calendar view, then maybe I leave all three. But in general, I would say simplification makes everyone's life a lot easier if you're looking at the information the same way. But that's really up to you and how you work with your team. 27. How to make a status update: Status updates are really important and often overlooked by project teams. This is giving a quick snapshot of the project health. Is the project on track at risk off track or finished. Let's learn how to make one now by heading to the overview. Over here is the section where you can create a status update, and the project owner should on a regular basis, update the status. It should be clear to everyone how the work is going. As we are the project owner, let's say our project at the moment is on track. Ooh. So I'll come there, and I'll click on track. And that sends me to this full screen view where I can add a bit more detail to this status update. On the free version, we're pretty limited, but just a status update headline and a short description is already enough to ensure good project communication. Please, please please update this status update headline. Don't just leave it here on this status update 19th of April. I see that so often, and that's really frustrating when you're having a lot of status updates, and you want to quickly skim through how the past updates went. Please give a little top level disclaimer subject of this status update. It's just a elevator pitch of what you want people to take away. It can be something like finished setup phase or gearing up for an intense few weeks of design and something like this. In the summary, you can of course format in detail as you would a task description or a project overview description. I like to use the bullets feature in the summary because I think it's nice to give a little flavor for which key tasks were completed or if something is blocking the project or maybe to add some or to the team. Let's say in our marketing campaign project, the first section, the setup phase is completed. So let's go ahead and advertise that basically to our colleague setup phase. Completed. Of course, the status is on track because I already clicked that. I'm the owner. There's no dates associated with this, so I can go ahead and remove that if I do want, just to make it even simpler. Don't need to add any attachments, and let's just add some summaries. Maybe The groundwork is finally finished, and now we have maybe the approved brief, approved project brief completed, even though we don't. Now, let's say, maybe some kudos to Andrew and I'm going to emoji claps. Yeah, definitely. Kudos to Andrew for getting it all done on time. Next steps are what was the next phase, the development phase. Starting with and I don't remember what was the first task that we had in the development phase. So let's try and think we had to approve things. We were making photos. I'll just say something again about casting cast models. And let's keep pushing. Let's do another MOG just because I'm crazy like that. So this status update will be sent as a notification to everyone in the project, and they'll also have a history of it from the project overview and from the messages tab. You can toggle this status update reminder, and then it will put you as the project owner a task every week just to remind you to update the project status. So I don't want that, so I'm going to turn that off. It depends on the type of project you're doing if you need a weekly update. For most of my projects, every other week or a monthly cadence was just fine. There's no way unfortunately to customize this reminder to a different cadence. You just have to set up your own task recurring task if you want to do that. I'm going to go ahead and post this status update, and now you see how it looks here on the side. We have our status update. I can click here and it will open the full screen. Once you have more status updates, they will all populate over here. So you'll have a full thread of all of the updates for this project, which can be really useful if you have people in the project. Again, maybe you have an executive team member and they just need occasional updates. They can come here and they'll read your kind of highlight phrase here. That was why, again, I think the highlight phrase is so important rather than status update, April 19, which wouldn't add much value. When you see them all here, you have to click in to see what was the update. Just give a little top level header. Then let's go into Andrew's sana, and let's see what he has in his inbox. And now you see he's obviously got our message from before, and now he has our status update. Let's get rid of this message. Okay, I can go ahead and like his status update. Maybe I want to send him one of these little appreciation stickers that it's often recommending. So I say, Yeah, have some flowers. Show you appreciation. And back in Masana I also now have an inbox that Andrew showed his appreciation, which is nice. 28. Adding a task to multiple projects: Another thing I want to show you is multi homing tasks in multiple projects. So what do I mean by that? Let's come into one of our projects. And let's see if there's a task here that could be also related to new product development, maybe launching this campaign. Let's say that they launch the campaign of this marketing campaign, is not just relevant for this Asana project, but also for the new product development project because maybe one of the tasks in here is the same as one of the tasks in there. Rather than having two duplicate tasks, which doesn't really make our life very easy because we have some information on one task and some in the other, we can go ahead and choose that a task is actually homed. It lives in two different projects. So let's do that with the launch the campaign. If I open up this task, remember we have this project section here where we have that this is in the new marketing campaign project and it's in the section rollout phase. Well, now we can also say, You know what? This task, I also want to add it to the project of, in this case, new product development, and then you can give it a section as well. But of course, that project, we don't have sections. So this is really useful if you have different teams maybe and they're all with their own different setup of a certain project. Maybe you have a design team, maybe you have a engineering team, and sometimes they're teaming up on certain tasks, but they don't want to have to learn each other's setup. So they just have the task that lives with both of them, and then maybe one team has their project as a board view. Another team has their project as a calendar view, and everyone can have the setup they want and the tasks shared. The only relevant thing about this is what's important is if someone's going to mark this task as complete, it's also complete in the other project because it's literally the same task. So let's have a look here. Launch the campaign is in the rollout phase, and if I head to new product development, we will also have launch the campaign, our new task right here at the top. That's also why it's key to understand this information about how to add things into projects in a particular section from here, because if I just taught you the dragon drop, well, that's not going to help you very much when you want to add a task into multiple projects. And of course, if you want to remove things from showing in multiple projects, it's also important to make sure people aren't marking this as complete because they want it to be removed from their project. They just need to hit the little X here. So if I want to remove this task from this project right now, I hit the little X. It will disappear from here, but the task is still good and alive, and it's back here in its original home of the Marketing Campaign Project. 29. Best practices for Asana: In this last lesson before your project, I want to review some of the best practices of Asana. First off is obviously to assign due dates and owners to tasks. That way, everyone knows who is responsible for what? Of course, due dates allows everyone on the team to budget their time. I also want to recommend you to add collaborators to tasks wherever it can improve alignment. Remind and remind your team about this because although it seems basic, it will absolutely happen that tasks end up going into projects without a person or a due date or the right collaborators assigned, and therefore, it's a private task that no one can find. Next is to use task titles effectively. They should be concise, specific and action oriented. The easiest way to do that is to start the task with the verb, which clearly indicates what needs to be done. For me, the main thing is it should be obvious without reading the description, roughly what this task is about. Otherwise, team members are going to waste time having to decipher what this task is about. For example, don't just write blog post. Instead, write first draft of blog post. This provides a bit more insight. It would be even better if there was the topic of the blog post. Instead of graphics, write about the specific graphic you're planning to do. Design icon for coffee is a lot more specific. Create a clear project structure. Use sections to bring clarity to the project. Use tags, so members can easily filter between types of work or priorities. Use sub tasks if certain tasks are big or require multiple people to contribute and hide irrelevant tabs from your project. Make it as easy as possible for your team. Finally, keep communication flowing by ensuring that each project has a short overview available and you're keeping the team informed with status updates. Encourage people to comment on tasks and sub tasks and don't be afraid of using the messaging feature. 30. Your project: All right, it's your turn because so much of this class is about understanding the basics of Sana, which you'll use and customize with tasks from your own organization. You might not feel comfortable sharing with everyone real tasks and real projects you're setting up and that's perfectly okay. As a result, your project for this class is quite simple. First, if you're not comfortable sharing publicly a project, you've set up, just 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 an owner, even if it's just you. Share in your gallery, a screenshot of this project and explain the reasoning behind why you set it up the way you did. If you're willing to share publicly a real project you've set up, then again, take a screenshot of the project, 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 setup to make it even better. 31. Conclusion & next steps: Great job for making it to the end of this class. I feel confident you now understand how to use Asana to make you and your team more productive and keep everyone aligned. If you take full advantage of the features Asana offers you, you can customize your workspace completely to you individually, your team, and your company's needs. So take what we learned today and get out there and start organizing the project management of your dreams. If you're interested in learning more about Asana, project management in general, marketing or leadership topics, then please follow my profile to get notified of the next time I have a new class. You can also follow my blog or social media for more tips and tricks. Lastly, I just really want to say a big thank you for joining me on this journey. You've learned a lot, but I really appreciate that you've stuck around until the end. So thank you so much, and I really do hope to see you in a future class. 32. Bonus lecture: Asana on mobile (iOS): If you have IOS 16 or later, you can use Asana's mobile app on your iPhone or iPad. I tend to only use the Asana app when I'm on a business trip at a conference or if I'm in a workshop, and I can only check my phone quickly in between breaks. You can do most of the things we looked at in this course, create tasks, projects, create status updates, et cetera, but I find it can be a little bit cumbersome on the phone. So for me, I find it best when I use the Asana app just to check in, see what's going on and quickly respond to any comments they may have received. I'm going to walk through the app a little bit now so you can get comfortable with it. You'll recognize the projects from what we've looked at in this course, which will help you to understand how the browser version we've been looking at compares to the IOS version. All right. So here I am on my iPhone. I have the SAA app installed. I'm not going to walk you through how to install and log in. I think that's pretty common sense, but let's just go ahead and open the app and see what we're looking at. So first, maybe down here at the bottom is the easiest place to just kind of visually look. So we have the home, my tasks, your inbox, a search, and then a count where you can toggle between your different work spaces. So right now, we're here in the home. And it's got a few of these widgets. They're slightly different from what we see on the browser, but I think you're going to be familiar with all of them. So we have just a little notification that we have a task due today. Scrolling down, we have this section jump back in, which is the tasks that I've most recently been in or created, so I can quickly navigate back to those. We have our projects view, and we can toggle between our favorite projects or our recent projects. Scrolling down. We have our M tasks. And again, we can toggle overdue or do soon, and we could click here to go to my tasks, which will open down here at the bottom, as well, the MTasks tab. Scrolling further down on the home. We have our comments mentioning me. Which is just nice because like I said, when I'm using Asana on the phone, I'm typically just quickly responding to comments and seeing what's happening. So this is just a really nice screen for me where I can see if anyone needs anything from me. You know, if I've been away from my laptop that day, then I can quickly unblock anyone who needs some help. And then further down, we have teams and again, to projects. Teams is not very useful because we're on the free version of ASA we're not using that feature. We don't have an organization. Set up here, we're just in a workspace. Actually, if I click on Teams, it's not taking me anywhere, I don't have any other teams to choose from, but that's just how this app is set up. If I wanted to navigate to the other workspaces, I would go here to account on the bottom right. And then from here, I can toggle to our cookie land workspace where I'm just right now here in the test workspace. We see that there's this little yellow dot, and that's just letting us know there's also notifications that we should be looking at in the other workspace. But there is as well here in the task work space, the yellow dot. So we know there's also notifications here. If I go into the middle of the bottom here on inbox, we can see what those are. Those are just the same as what we saw actually on the home page of those two comments that were pending for me, one from Andrew and one from Lela. If I click on this one from Andrew, we can have a look. What did he say. We're all set for the kickoff meeting agenda wise? Should I order some snacks as well as it's a two hour meeting? I can just quickly let him know. Yes. That's a great idea. Okay. You see why I'm not very good on the phone. Please do. Perfect. Now he has that and he's unblocked and if I go back, we can have a look at what Leyla let us know. She is working on this cast photoshoot models task. It always immediately pops down to the comment. That's not me on the phone dragging down. That's actually Asana pulling it down. So she's casting photoshoot models, and she has some two models that she has selected, and she's put me a link in one that's great. I'll take I'll take a look at that later. Thanks. All right. Now going back and back to the home. Now I don't have any comments mentioning me here because I've gone ahead and resolved all that information. Back in the inbox, I can now swipe to the right and that will archive those notifications. Up here in the top right, I could hit Archive all if I had a lot of notifications, and I didn't want to be constantly swiping them, but in this case, I just have two. So I'll just go ahead and swipe them. Right now, I'm in the activity. If I wanted to go back to the archive, I can also hit this button here of archived, and then I could go ahead and unarchive that by again, swiping to the right. So same as on the desktop, I can always go between the activity view and the archive view. So let me just go ahead and archive this other notification from Lela and then we have a nice clean inbox. So now we see from this inbox view, I could create a new task from here, I can also do that from the my tasks view, which I'll go to now. In the top of writes, I can go ahead and view this as a list, a board, a calendar. I also really like this compact mode because it just pulls everything a little bit closer together. There's actually no change in the information that we see here. It's just making it easier for me to see. So if I put that back to what it was, you see it's just less information, and for me, I can read quite well with small letters. So I'm just fine having this on compact mode. And you'll see that that's the same when we're looking at the projects in aC that you can also zoom in and zoom out. So, sure, we can go ahead and have that as it was. And down here in the bottom left is actually where the sort feature is. If you want to sort this information, you know, based on due dates, if you want to sort this information based on likes or whatever, you can go ahead and do that there in the bottom. So let's go ahead and create a new task now, and we'll just see what that looks like. So in this first view, it's just giving me the most important information I need to give a task, a space to give this task a title. It's assigning it to me as it always does when I'm creating a task from my tasks view by default, but I can change that and a due date. But if I wanted to give this task more detail, like we know is a good practice to write a detailed task description, I can actually hit here and just scroll up on my screen, and then I can go ahead and add this task into a project, give it Uh, maybe a link or something else or maybe add an attachment. I can do all the things that we're quite used to doing, add followers, collaborators, et cetera. So let's go ahead and create a task. What could the task be create Woop, create meeting agenda for investor results announcement. Sure. Let's assign this to Andrew. Let's put this due in a month. Let's make sure that this is not just in a private task, but we'll put this in a project. For today, we can just put it in this project of your dreams one. There's no sections in that project, but as you know, you can click and give a section. Maybe we should put it in a different project just so that we can practice that. Here and I click here and I could put it in roll out phase. Sure. I doesn't really make much sense. Here we can add a description. And we could add sub tasks if we want to add attachments at somebody. Maybe I want to add also Leyla as a collaborator on this, and I can create the task. And actually, now, if I go back to my home view, we have this task that I just created in the jump back in because that's one of my most recently touched tasks. So other than my tasks, where are the projects here, right? So we saw them from the home screen, but how can we create a new project? It's not immediately clear. You do have to jump into CO projects to be able to do that. And now here in the bottom right, we also have a new project create button. And here we can create a new project in either a list or a board view. We can't create a project from the phone. In calendar view. We can see a project in the calendar view. Maybe I'll just go back and show you that. So let's go into new marketing campaign. And from here on the top right. We can go ahead and change the view, so we can see this project as a board. We can see this project as a calendar. But you can, for whatever reason, create a new project in the calendar view from the phone. So if you want that view, you can just create it as a list or as a board, and then you can come into the project and change it later. So let's go back to creating a new project first. So what could this project be maybe Asana course. We can add it to our task work space. We can just create a list view. And here we have a very basic Asana project. And of course, it's highlighting how to add a new task. So maybe Task one. Oh I'm so bad on the phone. Task one, creates a very basic task, no due date, no owner. But let's just populate this a little bit. And then we have three tasks in here. So again, from this top right, we can zoom out, and then we have all three columns showing here in the list view. Let me go back just to tackle that on and off so you see the difference when I had the default, which is zoom in. We don't see the third column. And the only way to see the third column when you're zoomed in is you can't click anywhere on this first column of task name and track because it does nothing. You actually have to on the assignee column, put your finger there and drag to the right. So it's quite annoying for me when I'm in the zoom of this view, I find it quite irritating, so I'm always on the zoom out. And the thing is from the board view, you can't do this zoom in Zoom out. So if I go back to the board view, you know, you think, Oh, I can't see all the sections here, but here you have no way to zoom in. So it's a little bit play with this and see what works for you, how it's easier for you to see the information. But typically, I'm not creating projects from the phone. So this scenario that I'm walking you through is just so that you know how to do it in case you might have to. But realistically, I would suggest you get out your laptop, quickly create the project, make it how you like it, and then you can just decide by playing a little bit trial and error on the phone what view you like if you wanted to come in and see what was going on. So let me go back out of this. Realistically, you want to be doing what you saw me do before, which is answering the comments or seeing what's going on. And if you do come into the project view, the only thing I think you might want to see is probably the status. So if I go into new marketing campaign because that's the only one we have with a status. Let's go to this in the list view just to see a little bit. This is the zoomed out view, remember, and it's quite nice here, though it's probably very small depending on, you know, how your own vision is. So let me go into view status. And this is quite nice from the view status. So if I'm on the phone, I just want to see what the status is very easy for me to come and have a look. Okay. So what else could be important. The last thing here is this search view. It's the same as what you have on the browser, but I think you'll be using it even more here on the phone because sometimes you really have to play with how can you find something within a project and you really don't want to be clicking Okay, seal projects, go into the project, go into the task. So you just typically quickly search something. So let's have a look at that meeting agenda task that I made before, if I couldn't find that easily. I can just quickly search and there I have it. Coming back to the main view, your home view is your main view, and this is where you're going to spend most of your time answering little questions, just checking in on status. If you do have something big, I'd just suggest you get out your laptop if you have to create a project. And I showed you how to view a status update, but not how to make one. Let's just go back into the projects, and we'll practice that again. So see all projects. Let's go this time into new product development. And let's say I wanted to create a status update for this task, so I can go to set status. I can go ahead and add the information just like I can on the browser. What kind of status could I have for this? Maybe new marketing campaign, ready to go for the new product. What's been done? Then let's add some of the tasks. What tasks did we have in here? Something with marketing campaign? Sure. Perfect. We have this ready to go. And now are working on this little a, maybe something launch in the campaign. And now we have a little status update. That's pretty easy. I would definitely say creating a status update is pretty easy from the phone, looking at status updates, answering people's comments, liking, collaborating. But if you do need to be really thinking and planning something, probably just get out the laptop and do it there.