Guide for micro managers

:female_detective: You can’t help it, you are a micro manager. You want to know every single thing that happens at work, and when Asana was brought on, it felt like a gift: you can finally see everything!

:full_moon_with_face: But now the honeymoon is over and you are buried under notifications. You can’t keep up anymore. Let me help you get the most out of Asana!

:one: Don’t follow everything. That seems obvious, but Asana will naturally amplify the amount of things to read. You were maybe able to read all the emails chains of the company, but with Asana tasks are flying around like crazy. Processes that were known by the teams are being discussed, steps that were quietly done by team members now appear as tasks… you can’t follow everything, you need to make choices.

:two: Use reports. Asana has a powerful search engine and the result of a search can be saved as a report. Then reports show up in your sidenav. For example you could have a report for any urgent task that had an approaching due date. Or another one for tasks specifically assigned to someone that has a tendency to drop the ball. Build a strong suite of reports and you’ll never have to navigate through projects anymore.

:three: Use existing reports. They are in the sidenav as well, they include « Tasks I’ve assigned to others » and that is a great way of following up on things.

:four: Use follow up tasks. When you see a task notification in your inbox, you can very quickly create a follow up task. That way you don’t have to remember to check the task, and you safely remove yourself from the collaborators. Just push the follow up task to a few days out and check the task when that date comes.

:five: Leave conversations and ask to be brought in when needed. Trust your team to know when to involve you, and remove yourself from the collaborators as soon as you answer a question. Tell them to bring you back in with a mention whenever they need.

Hope that helps. Did I forget anything?

:fr: Version française


For me creating a task to followup another task is overkill. You have a rain of tasks and yet creating more is just more brain power to deal with them.

It would be great if we could just “Snooze” a notification


What do you mean?

Example: Snoozing a notification for 24h will hide it and then come back after 24h

Just as appointment reminders work

1 Like

Love this idea!

I’m looking forward to getting the new My Tasks, so I can have a “back burner” (i.e. “snoozed”) column in Board view.

I used to use due dates solely as follow-up dates, but I can lose sight of when a task really needs to get done. I’m trying to move my workflow to use start and due dates as intended, and move tasks to a “Snooze” section within Today on My Tasks. The management gets a bit heavy, though… a snooze feature could be helpful!