Transcripts
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.