You have so much to do to keep your business running and sometimes it feels like you can’t keep track of it all, especially as you start to hire more members to your team. Asana is a game change for all types of businesses.
What is Asana?
Asana is a project management tool. It has an online web interface as well as an app to track on your phone. You can easily assign tasks to yourself and team members, set due dates, chat about the project, and see the progress of projects.
Here are the best ways you can use Asana:
After setting up your account by creating a login, you will want to create what is called a project. Inside of this project, you can invite just certain team members. For example, you can have one project for your social media team and another project for your accounting team. This keeps tasks separate so that the team is seeing only what is needed for their work. You can setup the coloring as well so that each project is easy to see with different colors.
2. Create a different section for each of your different items you need to get done. Then create a “to-do list” for that with a to do list.
Once you have the project setup, you can create the sections. If inside of social media, you have a section for video projects, advertisement campaigns, and affiliates, this will help to break up the different tasks inside the section. From there, you can add tasks and create a to do list the project needs. When you are creating the tasks, you can add a description with very detailed information. Then you can set a due date so that expectations are very clear!
3. Add Team Members
Once the to do list is created, assign the task to yourself or someone one your team. This will show up in their individual to do list and will notify them of the new assignment. You can see below what your own tasks look like when you want to see your own assignments only.
Below you will see a sample of a project. In purple rectangle, those are the names of the different sections. In the teal diamond, that is the name of the task. You can see under assignee, this is who the task belongs to as well as the due date. You can have the individual set where they are in the project as well. This helps you to know if they have even started the task.
4. Team Conversations
During the project, questions or conversations may need to occur. Asana has a team chat feature where you can discuss different items that are going on. This helps to streamline communication. You can have a feed of all communication about one project in one place with only the necessary people involved.
5. Mark Complete and Receive Notification
When you complete your task, you click the check mark and it will be marked off your list. It will also let your teammates know that your portion of the project is complete. The notifications will let you know if you are getting closed to the due date and you have not marked this as complete.
6. Integrate your due dates into your calendar
To help you track your due dates well, you can integrate your projects and due date into your calendar so that you can see them there, if that works best for you. Once you complete the item, the calendar event will leave, showing you that you do not have any more tasks to do. This is a great way to not miss anything that needs to get done!
It can be really hard to manage a team and to set people up for success to complete everything needed to keep your business running smoothly. Give Asana a try for free and you will see the efficiency it brings to your team!