Asana - Task and Project Management for Teams

Asana is a team based task and project management tool, it is free (up to 30 users) works on every platform (web based, but it does have an iPhone app).
Powerful, flexible and easy to use. Asana is making a name for itself.
Steve walks you through a quick demo of some of the main feature and how you may choose to use this excellent productivity staple.

Mike Vardy wrote a great overview of Asana, and how it stacks up against the competition in this article
http://productivityist.com/my-new-task-manager-of-choice-asana/

Links
www.asana.com.

For more from Steve
www.dottotech.com
including our weekly radio show /podcast
on Twitter
@dottotech

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Closed Caption:

Steve Dotto here. Today, we have a good one
for you: Virtual Team and Task Management.
There’s nothing more important to the success
of small businesses, and even large businesses,
as communication, making sure that we’re
on the same page and working in the same direction.
That challenge is enormous when we don’t
work for the same company, or we work in different
time zones, different offices, or different
countries. Finding tools that help different
project teams work towards the common goal
is a very important piece of the whole productivity
equation.
Now there are a lot of different tools that
people can use and a lot of different techniques
they can use, but the one that I’m really
enamoured with these days is one called Asana.
It is free for up to 30 users. You can buy
the Premium version which gives you some additional
features but the free version alone is an
exceptionally capable task management tool
designed for collaborative team environments.
Now I was first actually shown Asana by a
friend of mine, Mike Vardy, former editor
of Lifehack. He’s got this great article—I’ll
post a link to the article—on why he chose
Asana as the tool of choice for him. It’s
a good overview of what Asana gives you versus
what some of the other different tools give
you.
Let me take you on a quick little tour of
Asana abd see if it might or might not fit
your life. Asana is a web-based tool. Most
of the time, you’re just going to use it
in your browser interface. There is an app
which you can install on your iPhone, which
I’ll show you a little bit later, but for
the most part it’s a complete web 2.0 tool
that you can access through any web-enabled
device. It crosses all platforms because of
its web capabilities.
How they basically set it up is you set it
up yourself as a user and sign in for free.
Then you have Personal and different Business
profiles that you work within. You can see
here that I’ve got my DottoTech profile
which is my main work profile. If I l click
here on the Profile button, I can actually
switch over to my different Personal Projects
but I can keep all my different to-do’s
in one place.
This is really important because all the different
projects that I’m working on with different
groups of people aren’t necessarily related
to each other but they all flow into my own
Personal Task list. Here are my different
tasks. Some of them are related to projects
that I’m working on with other people and
some of them are just my own projects that
I have as my own to-do list. It’s really
important as you plan your day and as you
do different things to be able to see a snapshot
of all of your responsibilities at once. I
really like this feature within Asana.
As we move in, let’s get a team project
that I’m working on. I’ve got this Protechtivity.
We’re doing these seminars where we’re
teaching people about different productivity
tools so I work with several other people
on that. We each have an account on Asana
and we each then share this particular project,
these Protechtivity Team Tasks. We are all
on the team and as different people are assigned
different tasks, they can be assigned from
this Administrator Panel. If we want to add
a new task, I just hit the Enter key and that
creates a new task.
One task that needs to be done on this particular
project is set up our Facebook and LinkedIn
advertising. I’m going to put in Facebook
Ads as the task. Here’s how I assign it.
I click here and say this can be assigned
to me or to somebody else within my team.
It’s that easy to designate who is responsible
for any of these tasks. Now I’m going to
assign this task to me because I work harder
than anybody else.
If we look over here on the right-hand side,
now we have a detail on that particular task.
I can give it a due date. I can create subtasks
on it. For example in this one here, we might
have subtasks. The first one we have to do
is create graphics for the new ads. I hate
those little tiny Facebook ads and LinkedIn
ads. I’m going to create those graphics.
I’ve been working on those so I’ll put
that down as a subtask. You can see that we
are now building a nice tree of responsibility
and making sure that this particular task
is accomplished.
As I said, I can put in due dates. I can add
tags. I can even do things like attach different
files to it. I can attach them from Dropbox
or from my computer. I’ve been working on
some of these ads myself so I can add that
graphic to the task so team members can look
at it. Maybe I’m asking people’s opinion
on which ads do you like or which ads don’t
you like. There’s that ad and they might
say, “The text is too small.” It gives
us all of the different resources we need
in one place as we work our way through the
project.
Of course what task list wouldn’t be complete
without some success? Once a project is complete,
you can click on Complete so we have a visual
representation of how we are proceeding on
our different tasks on the project.
We have a choice of just working within this
environment here or having Asana reach out
to us, touch us, and tell us what we’re
supposed to be doing in other ways. If I go
down here into the very bottom left-hand side,
this is kind of your Account Administrative
Area. I’m going to go there and I’m go
to Account Settings. There I can choose how
my account is managed. Most importantly, do
I want to have all of my different tasks emailed
to me each day and be reminded of them or
do I want just deal with it within Asana?
That’s a personal choice. You can set it
up any way you want.
While I’m down there, I want to mention
one other area. It says New Workspace. Asana
deals with each of your identities as a workspace
so if you have a corporate identity where
we want to have all of Asana within your business
but you might also want to use Asana for managing
a softball team, managing all of the different
tasks on a softball team, or something recreational.
You can set up a new workspace so that you
can demarcate all of those tasks away from
other workspaces but it allows you to have
all of your personal tasks still flow into
your own personal window. It’s actually
pretty creative how they’ve set that up.
The other thing that we see here is this whole
Management Panel here on the left-hand side.
This has all of our different projects, tags
which will allow us to create better organization,
and all of the different people we work with
in whatever workspace we happen to be working
in.
Doing tasks and task management is pretty
efficient while you’re on your computer
but it would be silly to think that we just
spend our whole life at our computer. We come
up with ideas. We come up with things that
need to be done. We do things when we’re
out and about moving so Asana also has a pretty
good iPhone app. Actually, it’s a very good
iPhone app. Let me call it up and see if I
can show it to you. I’m actually quite impressed
with how that app works.
Here is my iPhone. I go to my Protechtivity
section on it and here is my Asana. When I
open Asana, we can see that I’ve got the
same basic management tools that I have in
the web version. Here are all my different
workspaces. Do you recognize it? It looks
almost exactly the same. Let me just go back
quickly into the web browser version and open
up Asana. There we see all of the same tasks.
Let me just put this side by side so you can
see that I’ve got all of the different workspaces
here and then I just close back and there
are all of my tasks listed out.
Now if I add another task into the Protechtivity
Team Task area, I tap on the plus button,
I can type in a new task here on my iPhone,
and then I create that task. Now you see that
it’s in the Protechtivity area here, as
far as the project there. If I want to switch
with the project that’s in, I can do it
there but I’m going to leave it in that
project. New Task—I’m going to create
it—and now it creates it on my iPhone as
a task. You can see right here. As soon as
I sync up here, look at how quick it is. It’s
already done. It’s online and it’s added
a new task here within the web browser as
well.
Asana is really worth taking a look at. I’ve
only scratched the surface of the capabilities
of this particular program. For team management
and teams up to 30 people, which for most
of us is the preponderance of our projects,
you can try it for free. Use it for free and
you may never need to upgrade. I haven’t
upgraded myself. I wonder what wonderful things
I’d discover should I choose to upgrade.
Asana— free online, check it out.
I hope you found this video useful. If you
have, please give us a like, show us some
props, and thank you very much for joining
us here on DottoTech.
Steve Dotto0Asana0January 29, 2013
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