Hello everybody, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity. If you clicked on this video, chances are you are already an Asana user or at the very least you are considering using Asana as your own personal task manager or perhaps to manage projects with other collaborators. They could be other team members or people that you are working with on a regular basis.
Well, today I want to share with you five of my favorite tips to get the most out of Asana. These are a few simple things that you can apply to be more effective and efficient as you manage all of your projects and tasks here within Asana.
We’re going to start off quite small and work our way up to a few more complex things, but they’re all very simple to implement. Some of them you may have heard of before, and some of them may be so simple you’ll wonder how you’ve ever worked with Asana without knowing them. I know that’s the case for me, and I want to thank ahead of time some Simpletivity users for providing some of these tips in one of my previous videos.
So, to get started I…
Sections
I want to start off with sections within Asana. You know, when I first was introduced to Asana, I was very impressed that you could add these sections. You can separate out your tasks, and here in this particular example, you know, I've got a phone call section, a pending section with things that I'm waiting for, and some office tasks.
So, you can sort of view these as folders—a nice way to segment the different tasks all within this particular project. But when I look at this, I’m probably saying to myself, “You know, pending should probably be maybe at the bottom of the list here. I don’t want it to be here.”
So, let’s take the pending section and move it to the bottom. And then, wait a minute—I just grabbed this section, and I was really puzzled when I first attempted this. I just assumed that everything else that was underneath that section would come with it.
Well, there’s actually a very simple and easy way of doing this. First, start by clicking the section…
Moving Sections
itself and then hold Shift on your keyboard and select the last item in that section. Just like you would in many other applications, including Excel or a spreadsheet, it has selected everything there.
Now, I can select that section and drag it down to where I want it to be. Now I've got my entire pending section, including all of the items that were listed down below.
Of course, I can still move these individual items. I can move them out of a pending state and put them somewhere else in this particular list or within this particular project. But just select again the section header, hit Shift on your keyboard, and then select what else you would like to move. I can move pending all the way to the top of this list if I like.
So, a great way—a very simple way—of moving your sections around. A big shoutout to Jeff Brown who actually shared this tip with me on a previous Simpletivity video.
Now, the…
Full Screen View
next one is also rather simple, but I find it very useful myself. I'm just going to switch to another project here for a second.
You know, it can be very helpful to see your entire list of tasks here on the left-hand side of the screen while you are working with an individual task on the right-hand side of the screen. It can be helpful to see how you want to change the wording of this or what other information you want to add in relation to some other tasks over here.
But I have to admit, sometimes I feel that this view is a little cramped. If I’ve got multiple images or files, or perhaps a long list of comments between myself and another team member, I find that this view can be a little cramped.
Well, there are two ways that you can view this in full screen. The first one is if you click the little three dots here and at the very bottom there is a full screen option. Now I can see everything within this particular task in full screen. I like this view a lot; it’s just a lot more comfortable for me personally, especially if I might be spending a few minutes with this task.
But there’s another and even easier way of doing it, and yes, it’s telling us right there, and that is Tab + X. So regardless of which task you have highlighted, just select Tab + X on your keyboard and you will see that task in full screen. Here’s another one where I’ve got an image and maybe I’ve got some more information down below. I can see it in a nice, comfortable view. Just Tab + X again, and I’m back here.
So, you can toggle back and forth—Tab + X for full screen and Tab + X to get back to the default view. I have started using this shortcut on a very regular basis and I find that you'll probably find some good uses for it as well.
Again, I'd like to thank with Seem to here who shared this tip with me on a previous YouTube video. Thank you so much for showing me how to get this full screen view beyond just clicking this More button. You know, having additional clicks, I can just hit Tab + X and go back and forth whenever I like.
Alright, now the…
Multiple Projects
Third one is maybe no not so much of a tip but something that I think goes underutilized and that is when we want the ability to add a particular task to multiple projects.
Okay so often you may have something that is applicable to beyond just the project that you're currently working on and maybe in this case I've got something here titled submit budget for a quarter three and quarter four but this is something that needs to be done for all of my projects or perhaps it's a task that I want to see visible in all of my projects because it's applicable to all of them not just to one of them it's applicable to more than just this one maybe it's applicable to every one of my projects maybe it's just applicable to a handful of them.
So within your task once you highlight the project area up here you'll see that there is a plus button or a plus icon by selecting this plus icon you get a new field where you can start to type in the name of your project.
So here I want to add this to my new website development and while I'm here I'm going to add it to yet another one my client consulting project.
So now this individual task is now going to appear in not only my personal to-do list asana project it's going to show up in my new website development and my client consulting project.
Again this may seem rather simple but you would be surprised at how many other project management tools do not support this type of functionality.
It's just as easy of course to remove this task from those projects as well if I just hover over the new website development project I can select the X and it is no it will no longer appear in that particular project.
Alright tip number four and this has to
Status Updates
Do with something again which I think is underutilized amongst Asana users and we're going to get out of the ListView for just a moment we're going to go over here to the progress tab.
Now if you haven't selected the progress tab I think you're missing out on a very helpful feature if you only use Asana for yourself well this may not be necessary but there's real power when you collaborate with other individuals or with other team members.
And under progress Asana gives you the opportunity to provide a status update. Now here you can see they actually go beyond just adding text information you can actually use a traditional traffic light system and if I hover over these colors you can see that green is going to mean that this project is on track yellow this project is progressing but there are some risks worth addressing and red would being this project is not on track and needs attention.
Now they're not actually going to see that helpful text down below so you can select these different colors and give your own description or if you don't want to add a color you can just add text directly right I can just say you know great job thanks for working late last night okay and I can say set status.
So in this sense I'm not so much I guess updating a status but I'm sending a message to everyone attached to this project right because this message it's still I guess a status update I'm complimenting my team and I want them all to see it not just a particular task not just a particular individual.
So I'm going to say set status and now where does it go of course it shows me right here down below and it gives me a timestamp as to when I added it but when I go back to the list view you will notice over here in the right-hand side of the screen here is that status update says who it's from it gives me the text down below and now everyone who has access to this project is going to see that update.
Now if I want to update the status I can just click on this link here I don't necessarily have to hit progress since I have a status update I can click this link and it's going to take me directly back.
Let's use an example where we are going to use the traffic light system here I'm going to say red and I'm going to say hang on what happened oops with my cursor go what happened with our newest client let's adjust the deadline okay I'm going to set that as my status and remember I added a color code so I've got this red label along with it.
If I go back to the list view now I've got a new status update and you may be wondering well what happened to the to the previous message right what happened to that first status update that I added.
Well of course the status update should really be its current status right it should be sort of where we feel this project is currently in its current state you know is it in a good shape but in a bad shape middle-of-the-road that type of thing.
So we can always go back to progress and our previous updates right we can see a history of the different updates that we've added here among our status updates but we're only going to show the latest one here in the top right corner of the screen.
Looks like it's taking a bit longer to display this time around now it doesn't interfere when we are dealing with our tasks as I click on different tasks it's not going to take up more real estate but if I don't have an active task displayed then I'm going to see that status update.
So make use of the progress section a great way to not only communicate with the rest of your team but add a little indicator whether you use the colors or not so that everyone on your team can see it.
Calendar Sync
Very last tip I want to share with you is going to allow us to access a Senate information outside of the application itself and probably one of your most used productivity tools is your own personal calendar right you need to know where you're going to be today you need to keep track of all of your meetings other things that are on your daily schedule.
Now of course Asana does have a calendar here and we can see upcoming tasks with due dates we can get a calendar view here within Asana but you may not be using the Asana view here terribly often right this may not be an area of Asana that you make use of especially if you're comparing it to your own personal calendar.
So let's see how we can sync Asana with our calendar if you select the little down arrow here beside your project and we're going to select sync to calendar we can either sync to our Google Calendar or we can use the iCal format which is something that Outlook and many other calendars use.
In my example I'm going to show you how to add it to Google Calendar so here it gives us a unique URL I'm just going to copy it and then what we want to do is we want to get in on over to our Google Calendar itself and if you use Google Calendar you're going to go to other calendars and we're going to select add by URL and this is where we want to paste that information.
I'm going to select add calendar and look at that here I have the same information that we saw in the Asana calendar we see it displayed here within my Google Calendar.
Now of course only tasks that have a due date are going to show up within your calendar sync if that task is already complete or if that task does not have a due date it will not display here but anything with a due date is going to display over here.
You may be asking well why does it show up as an all-day event the simple answer is that none of these particular tasks have a specific time associated with the due date if I did have a specific time well then they would display somewhere else on my calendar but since these have only been assigned to a particular date they're going to appear on the all-day event.
So there are five different tips five different ways that you can make use of some Asana hacks some Asana tips some Asana tricks so that you can be more effective you can be more efficient with dealing with your projects and your lists.
I would love to know what was your favorite one or what's something that I didn't share that you find is very helpful when you are dealing with Asana if you've got a particular tip that you use all the time please share it here in the comments below.
Thank you so much for watching today's video if you liked it please give it a thumbs up be sure to subscribe and I'd love to hear from you in the comments.
Remember being productive does not need to be difficult in fact it's very simple.
