Organizing Your Life: Asana (Task Management)

1. Introduction: Hi there, and welcome to organizing your life with asana. Keeping track of errands, Grocery list, trip planning, kids schedules, renovations and more. Congar Overwhelming without a solid organizational method as a self processed organization freak, let me help you grab hold of your to do lists. Let me introduce myself. I'm Taylor Conaty, a software designer and product manager. An organization is truly my life. I use the same tool to keep track of business projects as I do to plan my wedding. And I genuinely think that the world would be a better place if everyone had better organization. And I'm here to show you how Asana is a project management tool that's used by designers, project managers and business people everywhere. But why not extend that usefulness of asana to the rest of your life? This course will walk through what asana is, how it could be used for common organisational problems and offer some suggestions on how to set up your own asana. There are a few tools that can help you round out your organizational sweet, but asana is a great place to start. This class is part one of a series, and all the uploading other classes for helpful things like Google Calendar and Work Khloe later on 2. Account Creation: So let's get started with the first step in the process, which is obviously creating an account. So if you navigate over to asana dot com, you will see their website, where they feature some of the companies that use asana, some of their their tools and their features and lists, which will go into in a little bit. Um, and then it's great to know that asana is a really good resource when it comes to feedback and questions and support. They've got a great support team. They have a really detailed blawg and F accuse. So if you have any questions, you can definitely head over there for more information. So we're gonna get started by just going to get started for free in the upper right hand corner, that purple button. When the dialogue pops up, you'll just enter your email address and it says to use a work email address. But that's not entirely necessary. So feel free to use Gmail. Yahoo, Um, whatever you'd like in the next confirmation dialog, you'll just make sure to click on the blue, continue with my email on the bottom right hand corner instead of enter a work email address, but of course, you can use whatever you like. So once you click on, continue with my email, you will get a notification telling you to verify your email. So just wait for that notification to come in, and once that comes in, just click on the button in the email. 3. Signing In: So once you verify your email address, you'll be taken back to Asana, where you can watch an instructional video, which will skip for now, and you can begin filling out your account as a side note. You don't have to enter an actual organization. I just used my full name, and it was perfectly fine. You also have the option to add teammates, which we can get to you later, but it's it's not necessary right now. So at the beginning you can start a project or keep track of your tasks and without much further context. This is a little bit confusing. We'll start with adding a task first, since that's the simplest form. One of the great parts about asana is all of their helpful hints and tips, so you'll notice we have been taken to the main portion of our Sana project. Now, Um, and there's a little pink bouncing bubble icon next to the ad task button. Hovering over that icon will give you some tips as to how to add a task, which will do in the next video. So stay tuned 4. Creating Tasks (the essence of Asana): So we're gonna go ahead and click the add task button, which opens an empty task for us. Well, just type in. Go to the gym for now is an example, and you can hit Enter to add another task, or you can go back up and click on the add task button to quickly add tests. You'll probably get the hang of using enter more than the actual at task button. So now let's walk through some of the icons on the right hand side. The first icon will look at is the sub task icon. Clicking. This allows you to add sub tasks to your original parent task. There is no limit to the level of sub tasks you add, so feel free to just keep adding and adding, I'll go into that more in a second. The next icon, Mullah Gut, is the tags icon. Now think of this as any sort of tag or label if you have a way to organize something around someone in your family, for example, or a particular vacation that you're planning those air all options for labels and one of the beauties of asana is there so many different ways to organize. So as you start using it, you'll get used to whether you like using labels and tags or if you prefer projects, which will go into in a little bit. For now, just know that you can tag a task. The next icon is the heart icon, which is pretty self explanatory as well. Um, this is great for teams and businesses, mostly. But of course, there's no limitation to who can heart another task. So if you're working on something with a family member or friend, um, you can heart a task to send a notification to that person. The next icon is the due date icon, which is super powerful. It just attach is a date to the task, and it will notify you on different views in asana as well as email when that due dates coming up. So if there's something you have in the future, you can schedule it for the future and be reminded of it. Then the next action is the assigned to button, and right now, since we're the only ones using this application, it will just be assigned to ourselves. So in this case, it's assigned to me. If I was working on this with a friend again, I could then assign it to that person, and I'll get into that in more detail later. The next icon is the attachments icon, which is great for adding images or files or spreadsheets or whatever you need to attach. And it's really powerful. You can drag directly into it and attach something to a task which will also get into a little bit later. The last icon is just more icons, which again will get into later. So let's go back and add some sub tasks to this original pick up groceries task. So I'll click on the sub tasks button and see the sub task pop up below the pick up groceries area on the right hand side. So I'll type in eggs, spinach and cookies. So you'll notice that there's some additional icons on these tasks on these sub tasks of the original task on cookies, for example, you can assign a due date, you can assign it to someone, and you can add a comment which is basically adding more levels of sub tasks. So we're going to click on that and be taken to the cookie sub task level. So in here I can add notes or, you know, whatever I want. So I'm just gonna specify the type of cookie that I want. In this case, it's a Nirvana, Cokie, which, if you haven't had one, you definitely should, because they are delicious. So we're gonna add what we need for Nirvana's, which is shredded coconut chocolate chips, butterscotch chips and condensed milk. Super easy. So we've added all of our ingredients on. We're going to go back up to the pick up groceries task. So from here, everything we do builds on this foundational knowledge. So if this isn't totally clear to you, go back and watch this section just one more time. We'll also be playing around more with different tasks, sub tasks and projects later, so you'll get the hang of it soon enough. One other feature wanted to touch on while we're here is Theobald itI to dragon drop any of thes tasks into a different order. So if, for example, I wanted to pick up the groceries in order to make my breakfast of eggs and spinach and cookies, all I had to dio is click on the task itself and you'll see this blue dotted icon appear on the left hand side. That's kind of the universal icon for dragging and dropping. So you'll just click on the task and drag it up or down wherever you want. In this case will drag it up above make breakfast and we'll add one final task, which is actually baking the cookies. So that's it for basic task creation from here. As I said, we're just gonna be building on this foundational knowledge. Um, and the next step is creating projects, so stay tuned. 5. Project Creation: so we've made it past creating basic tasks. But what happens when your task list starts to get out of hand? Well, there's another layer of organization that we haven't touched on yet in asana, which is called Projects. So, for example, let's imagine we're planning a birthday brunch on the left hand side near projects. Click on the plus icon, enter in birthday brunch. And for now, let's keep all the default settings, as is Click Create, and you'll see that project appear in your list of projects on the left hand side. Now, just like before, you can click in or click the add task button to start adding tasks right away. For the first thing we need to Dio is create guest list. We're also gonna have to plan a menu and decorate, so we've already touched on sub tasks before. But let's go back into the plan menu task and actually plan the menu you'll see again. There's another one of those pink bouncing icons, which helps you understand these icons that we walk through before, So we're going to click on the sub task icon again and start entering Thean Formacion for a menu so The first thing is spinach and mushroom for Tada Mimosa Bar and Bacon, of course. So back to the Mimosa Bar task. We're going to click into that comment section, and that's more sub tasks like we did before. So this time for our mimosa bar, we're gonna add grapefruit juice, orange juice and pomegranate seeds to garnish. That's all we're gonna do here for now. But there are a couple of other things I want to show you before we leave. So if you go back over to the projects area on the left hand side and hover over where it says birthday brunch, you'll see some dots appear that you can click on to get some additional settings. The one I want to show you right now is that highlight color. So if you hover over that option, you'll see a whole bunch of colors that you can select. This just makes asana a lot prettier to look at and helps you keep track of things in a little bit more of a visual way. So we're gonna choose a green, and you'll notice that now, on the left hand side of birthday brunch, there's a green bar toe help with visual differentiation. Now back up at the top, where it says, birthday brunch. There a couple of more settings. We can change here. So if you click on edit name and description, you'll see a motile pop up that allows you to edit the project name and add a description. The description, of course, could be whatever you want. So when you're done entering a description Click Update project and then in the upper right hand side, you'll see a little X on the original Mimosa Bar task. You'll get back to the basic task list of you, and you'll see on the right hand side a new little card that says description and whatever you entered. So this is great for accessing links or other information really quickly, and it could be edited at any time. So now we've touched on tasks, sub tasks and projects, and next we're going to be looking at creating sections within the task list. 6. Creating Sections: in this lesson, we're gonna talk about creating sections within the main task list. As I mentioned before, Asana is great because there's so many different ways to organize. Like I said, you can use labels. You can use projects you can use sub tasks. In this case, we're gonna talk about sections. So we'll go back to her birthday brunch project that we just created. And under the decorate task at the end of that task, we're gonna enter a colon. You'll notice this immediately changes the formatting of that task. It moved over a little bit to the left. It's darker and it's bold. So this essentially has created a section for us that we can create tasks under to have a little bit more of a visual separation. If you prefer this highest task level view, so under decorate, we're gonna add candles, music, fancy plates and streamers. Now, just to show you again how we could do the dragging and dropping, I'm gonna out another task right where am called. Call people to remind them. Now this doesn't go in the decorate section, but I just wanted to jot it down while I was here before I forgot. Now we can quickly and easily just drag this back up above the decorate section title just like we did before. So let's assume that this birthday brunch is happening on Saturday, January 21st. That means that we need to call people to remind them before the 21st. So let's go into the due date section and assign the date of January 20th which is the day before. So we set that. And of course, you'll notice another little pink helpful icon that's pointing out the heart, this action so we'll help her over it just to make sure goes away. We already know what it does, and now there's another one on the bottom here, so we haven't talked about comments before, but we'll get back to them in a little bit. So let's get back to our main view on the left hand side. You've got all sorts of stuff in this column, and to be honest, we don't really need to know any of it right now. So we're going to click on that little arrow next to the report section to just collapse it to make our view a little bit cleaner. now up in the middle under where it says birthday brunch. Let's investigate thes sections a little bit more So we were in the list view originally, which is just exactly what it sounds like. That big list view. The next section is conversations. This is great. If you're collaborating with other people on a project, for example, you can have conversations all in one place, and it will pull in any comments or notes that you've written to each other in this section . So you don't have to click around to different places to see them. So to show you how it works a little bit, I'm just gonna write a testing note and tag someone in it. So right now, like I mentioned, it's just us in this project. It's just me. So I tagged myself to see you can see what it looks like, But if other people were in this project with you, you could easily just tag them by starting to type their email address or their name. And it would pop up in that drop down list. The next fuse the calendar view, which is really helpful if you have tasks that have a lot of due dates associated with, um, you'll see the call people to remind them task that we associate it a due date with earlier on the calendar. The next section is the Progress section, which at the highest levels where you can associate a due date for the overall project. So let's go ahead and associate January 21st the date of our birthday brunch. The rest of the features on this page aren't really necessary for basic use, things like status and progress, which we can go into a little bit later in an advanced class. The last section is files, which is a really convenient place to view all of the files that have been associated with any of the tasks in this entire project. So if one of your friends is helping you plan this birthday brunch and they uploaded a picture of what the invite should look like, you'd be able to see that right here in this Tabas. Well, now, at this point, we've covered the basics of asana, and the next lessons will walk through some examples of how you might find a sauna useful for you. 7. Week Planning: So let's get started and actually used asana to generate our list of ideas on how to use a sauna. So we're going to create a project and call it to do list ideas and just start putting some ideas in their weekly errands. Kids schedules, trip planning, wedding planning, home renovation, grocery lists, you name it. We'll start with the 1st 1 and create a new project for next week's tasks. Now, one of my favorite ways to organize dates is to start with the year, then go to the month and then the date. This just makes it really easy. If you have your folders on your computer or your projects in asana organized alphabetically, you'll have the oldest of the top, and you'll be able to really quickly go down from there. So we're going to create a project called Week of 2017.1 dot 23 and we'll start adding some tasks in there. So this week, imagine you're selling a house. Your tasks are to call a real estate agent, clean up the house for showings, go to the grocery store, call your daughter's school about her report card, pick up your dry cleaning a pack for a trip and double check your flight schedule. So under each of these things, you can add a description or sub tasks like we've Joan before. So under call real estate agent, we're going to add discuss upcoming showings for the week. And, like I said, asana super flexible so you can add that to the description or as a sub task. If you like the checkoff ability, which I definitely dio. So we'll created as a sub task. And also add figure out when to meet for coffee under clean up house for showings. You cannot some reminders on what, exactly, you need to dio. So in this case, we're gonna add open the curtains, clean countertops and put things away for the grocery store task. I'm going to write a reminder to myself that we only need meals for Monday to Wednesday of this week because we'll be going on an upcoming trip on Wednesday and then we'll add the list of items that we need mushrooms, onions by get eggs and pomegranate seeds. No, on the next task, I want to show you a couple more capabilities that asana has. So we're gonna add a little reminder in the description that what we're calling about is a B minus in history. So there's some basic formatting you can dio right in the description using hot keys. The 1st 1 is using command Be. If you're on a Mac, which will make something bold, you could just double click on a word, highlight the word and then click command be to make it bold and help you differentiate that text a little bit more. One other one will do is I Tallis izing a word and that hockey is command I and I'll have another tutorial on all of the other hot keys that you can use on the Mac. So look out for that under pick up dry cleaning. We know there's a specific date we need to do this on before a trip on Wednesday. So we're gonna go ahead and associate Tuesday for this task as well as for the pack for trip task on the double check flight scheduled task. You can use those to keep information in one place or you cannot it as an actual task. So in this case, I know the details that I'm looking at here. I just want to have it in the same organization of the rest of my week so that I can always reference it, so I'm gonna add Delta. Wednesday, January 25th at 1:30 p.m. Now this brings us to an exciting next step. We haven't actually checked off any of the tasks that we've created for ourselves to do. List will obviously get super long. We don't check them off sooner or later, so we're going to start checking things off, assuming that it's later in the week and we've already done these things, so it's pretty apparent. But on the left hand side of each task, there's a check mark. You can click it to mark the task as complete, and you'll see it disappear from your list. You can always go back and see those completed tasks by clicking on the view Incomplete tasks button in the upper right hand corner. In that case, you would show completed tasks or show all tasks, and that will show you a list of all of your completed and incomplete tasks. Personally, I find it really nice to see a large list get much smaller, so I always hide the completed tasks unless I'm specifically looking for something similar to completing tasks of the highest level. You can also complete sub tasks on the individual tasks. So, under clean up house for showings, for example, we're gonna check off open curtains, clean countertops and put things away. Since we've already done them, Asana has some cute settings where it will show a unicorn fly across the screen. You can turn this off if you really don't like celebrations. But there's a little tool tip in the bottom left hand corner that will show you what you saw. So this is it. For the first part of the class, you can probably see there are a number of ways you can use asana, and we're going to use the project section of this class to play around with some ideas on how you can use this on A to help organize your life. I'm here to help, So if you have any questions along the way, feel free to contact me and I'll get back to you