Asana, My Project Management System

Asana Review | A Team Management and Collaboration Tool

The following Asana review text has been taken from Dave and Charissa Talk, Episode 003. Click to watch the full episode.

I am a task management/project management system junkie. If you do a search for “project management system” I’ve tried Google’s top ten search results. I’m always looking to make my life easier while saving money and Asana is the task/project management system which allows me to accomplish both.

Using Asana

Asana allows you to organize individual to-do items within individual project lists. When I’m working with a client I will create a new project for that specific client and then I will create individual tasks that need to be done and label them accordingly.

So for instance, when I do work with my friend Charissa and her business, House of Bliss, I create a project called “House of Bliss” and a task titled “Update contact page with new address and new fax number.” I’ll then assign that task a due date and time. That new task will then show up on my Asana calendar with the selected date.

Asana is also great for adding detailed descriptions for individual tasks and gives space to contribute comments. Taking the example above, I will get all the information out of my head or copied over from an email and place it into the task description field. I don’t have to worry about forgetting or searching for an email when I actually get around to making the change because it’s all been saved the task.

Take your projects even further than simple tasks with Asana. Rather than having one place with ALL YOUR PROJECTS, should you want to separate your projects, you can do use using Workspace. If you want to use Asana for work and personal and do not want personal projects appearing next to work project, you can create an entirely separate workspace that will keep them separate.

Go Beyond the Basics

These are just the surface features. Asana allows you to have subtasks within any given task giving you the freedom to go as micro or macro as you’d like with any management strategy.

I get very distracted very easily and Asana allows me to get everything that’s in my head into a single place and I don’t have to think about it again until the designated time.

Try Asana for Yourself

I can talk all day about Asana, but the best way for you to decide if it’s right for you is to just try it. Asana offers a free plan which is very generous and when you sign up, they do a good job of taking you on a tour through the entire product.

You’ve got nothing to lose! Sign up!

Please Leave a Comment

What tools do you currently use to help you keep all your tasks and projects straight and organized?

7 replies
    • Dave Shrein
      Dave Shrein says:

      Hi Bill! The difference between Asana and slack is essentially real-time communication. Asana allows for you to see a task/project from start to finish but isn’t great at real time communication. You can use the comment section in Asana but then your comment thread gets long.

      Slack is a “chat room” with multi channels dedicated to various topics. Slack is not helpful if you’re only managing communication between you and yourself. If you have more than one person on your team that you need to communicate with, Slack is a way for you to chat throughout the day and eliminate emails going back and forth with 1-2 sentence conversation lines.

      I’ll be posting the slack entry in the next couple weeks, but in the meantime, you can listen to the full episode here and I’ve cued it up to where we talk about Slack.

      http://youtu.be/U9hiQPoQgEA?t=47m34s

  1. Allie
    Allie says:

    Hi Dave,
    Have your ever heard of Proofhub fot project management system. It helps you better collaborate and manage projects of all sizes. With this you can execute tasks in a scheduled and organized manner which leads to great results. Have a look at https://www.proofhub.com/. Highly Recommended!

    • Dave Shrein
      Dave Shrein says:

      Hi Allie, I’d love to hear how ProofHub compares with Asana. If you’re merely looking for a follow link back to proofhub, well, you got one… but I’d really love to hear your comments on the content I’ve written about rather than promoting a tool without any reason as to why it might be a good fit for someone rather than asana.

      Hoping to hear from you. Thanks!

  2. Lori Ferguson
    Lori Ferguson says:

    I help with content strategy/creation for a business that uses Asana – it’s been been a valuable tool, because I’m traveling, and can’t meet face-to-face. I can also see what others are contributing and co-ordinate as needed. We’ve been using it for more than six months, after trying out other options. This one is working well for our needs.

    • Dave Shrein
      Dave Shrein says:

      Lori, you can’t see it but I’m nodding my head right now because I’m right there with you. I love how scalable Asana is based upon my needs and free isn’t bad either!

      Thank you for leaving a comment… nice to know other Asana fans!

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