10 Reasons why Asana is the best project management tool (NEW VERSION AVAILABLE)

hello welcome to this brief video where I want to share 10 reasons why I think asana is the best project management tool out there now if you've been following my videos on my blog for a little while you'll know that asana is my favorite task and project management app out there I've been using it for a number of years now and I absolutely love it it's probably my favorite productivity tool for staying organized and getting things done now of course in the interest of kind of self-improvement and improving my processes I do look at other tasks management tools I've experimented with a couple in the past not all of them there are obviously lots of really good options out there and I try not to get too bogged down with trying lots of tools and sort of wasting time on these seemingly prep tasks but I have tried a few and I always come back to asana I'm very invested in a sauna by now as well but I always come back to it for a few key reasons so there are 10 reasons I'd like to share why I think one is the best project management tool out there so number one is you can add tasks to multiple projects this is a simple feature but something that gets overlooked and allows you to do some really cool things so for example here I have a task you actually just created it on my task list at the moment and I can add it to a project so I can add it to my business project I can even put that into a section if I like and now I'm going to actually add it to a second project so I can add it to let's say sales and now I'm going to put that in I don't know speaking and so now this task is accessible from these two different projects if I go to my business project on the left here I can see here it is this is a task here it is in the business project and if I click on the sales project scrolling down here it is here this is a task so this isn't a duplicate of the task it's the same task it's just accessible from two different places so if I make a change this task if I add a sub task change the description market is done it's going to be reflected in both of these places now this is pretty simple but it allows you to do some pretty cool things first of all it means that you can organize tasks in multiple places for example if this task is relevant for the business and sales project it's just useful to have it accessible in two different places so that you can be a bit more the other reason is that you can create and use what I call sort of summary project so on the left here I've got my kind of primary projects but then I have this Kanban board I'm going to talk more about boards later and I add tasks to here from other projects so here we are hire a virtual assistant something I'm working on right now this is in the business project but I've also added it to my Kanban project and so I use this summary project to kind of prioritize lots of different tasks from all of these different projects and I move them through these stages planning in progress waiting and complete and it means that I just sort of only try and have a few things in progress at once and this is made possible by that very simple feature of having tasks in multiple projects so that is the first key feature which I really love it's actually one of my favorite features of asana second key feature is that you can communicate right within tasks so this is great when you're working in a team I use asana mainly with my wife and hopefully with my virtual assistant in the future but yet you have this comment section down the bottom and so this is where most of the communication happens in asana and it means when you fully invest yourself or your company in asana you can reduce a lot of internal email because the community capital communication happens right here in the comments why is that good well email can very easily get off topic it's not always clear who's responsible for what and what actually needs to be done in a sauna you've got the assignee you've got a due date and the tasks if written well you know it's it's action orientated and so the communication is always brought back to getting the work done getting this task complete in it it keeps the conversation tied to action where email can get off topic very easily so I can write a comment in here and I can post it and any followers to the task actually it's just me at the moment but any followers would get notified I can even loop in other people to this task I can type some on it and I can tag them and add them to the task via a comment as well so this conversation area is really useful for managing communication within team lowering internal email email and just you know keeping the conversation kept tied to the actual work so that's second key feature third key feature is that you can customize projects with custom fields now this is a premium feature but a very useful feature at that so for example if I flick over to my content calendar this is where I plan my the content for my blog so here we are 10 reasons why Center is the best project management tool out there first I'm working on right now video on recording and I have this this field called status this is a field that I've set up specially for this project and if I go to the settings manage custom fields here it is so I can edit this field I called it status and I've got some drop-down options that I can that I can use within this project I can create another custom field if I want create a brand new one and I could set it up as a text or numerical field as well and so what this allows me to do is I can add unique bits of information to my project so in this case I'm tracking the status of my blog post I have other custom fields for example if I look to my business project where I'm actually tracking the amount of time I expect a task to take so if I click on this project hours to complete I put in a number so 0.25 is 15 minutes it's just a nice way of kind of budgeting how long I want to spend on a task and actually if I click on a couple of these numbers you can even see that asana adds up the values so it says 0.6 total so just a little extra feature when you use those numerical fields and again this is a very selectable feature when you start using it allows you to do some pretty powerful things so custom fields is a really nice feature of asana then we've got posting project updates so for example if I go over to my Kanban project I don't think I've actually posted any updates in this project but when you're working in teams quite nice too to keep everyone sort of updated on how the project is going so we have this on the progress tab the update status I could set the status of this project and I could say hey this this this project is going well good job and I can I can notify certain people for example I can add Haley I can add her in and I can set the status and now everyone will be notified of this status update so it's a really nice way for project owners managers to update their team or offer the workers who are working on projects to update their managers on how projects are going you've also got this nice progress chart down here which shows you the difference between the number of tasks created and what's been completed so that's a nice little lung nice little bonus you've got helmet but yeah the project updates I haven't seen this in too many project management tools out there really like this little feature and if you do use this honor on your own I actually sometimes use these project updates almost like writing a journal entry just to myself just to kind of record how how different projects are progressing okay number five is see what's next with my tasks so here we are actually we're in the my tasks screen right now the my tasks page summarizes all the different tasks that are assigned to you from all of the different projects so tasks that are assigned to me from the business project products sales content they all appear in here as well as if I create a new task for myself this is a task this is now you can see up here it's private to me so this is also a place where I can kind of keep my personal to-do or you know private to do is my own little to-do list as well and this the microscope page is is particularly useful because when you have a few dates on your tasks a father can kind of tell you what to work on so for example when I when I create a new task for myself let's create a new one up here okay let's create that task you see it it's this new section new tasks of this section has been created so and it's got this blue dot next to it to show that it's a new task kind of like a new email now what I could do is I could actually say you know what this is not due for a while it's due at the end of the month so what I might do is now click on that dot and put it in one of these three sections so because it's not due for a while I'm going to put it in the later section so now we scroll down to the bottom if we look at the later section I can expand it it's collapsed by default but I can expand and I can then see all the tasks in that later section so here it is on the 31st of March now are a week away from being from fallen view a week away from this date the tasks will appear in the upcoming section so if I move it into upcoming you'll see this is where it would show it was sure at the top of this section which this section shows all the tasks coming up in the next seven days so you can see here I've got tasks for tomorrow Wednesday Friday and so on and I've actually created a few subsections here things that I'm waiting on things that like next actions quick little things I can do my tasks for this week and then the following week so I actually I will manually sort these tasks but you don't have to do that you can just rely on asana moving the tasks through this section for you and then on the day it falls to you on the 31st of March it'll have here in your today list so what this means is that on a given day you can open up a sauna and all of the tasks to you today will automatically populate this today section so you can just open up an asana and get right into that first task on your to-do list and it means you don't have to go hunting through projects or scanning your list to find what to do , kind of just puts it right in front of you and says hey this is what you need to do today so seeing what's next with my tasks is a really great feature of asana probably my one of my favorite features and this page that I'm on right now my tasks this is probably the page that you'll be on that you'll use the most as you're using a sauna it's where you prioritize your tasks you see what you need to work on next and other project management tools have similar features you know they show you the next seven days but these sections today are coming later these sections or what I think make hashanah particularly powerful is it moves them to in sections for you so that's number five number six six is you can stay organized with sections so you've already seen I created these headings here these are called sections in my my tasks you can also create them in projects as well so you've got sections I've created planning analysis systems and so on and these sections are a nice visual way of breaking up the work I've tried other tasks management tools and that I think to do is the one that comes to mind you have projects new curtains can create a long list of tasks but there's no way of really visually breaking up the work into logical areas and I really like I really like two sections for just kind of organizing the tasks into different areas based on how you like to work and so for my content project for example instead of having kind of areas I've actually got sections for months so I can organize content by months and I'm actually sorting everything chronologically here so the sections are a really powerful way to just kind of stay a bit more organized in the sauna again very simple feature but something I don't see in a lot of tough management tools so that's a really simple but very useful feature of asana and then expanding on that you can then break tasks into subtasks and section so you can see I'm inside this task line now record an edit video this is what I'm doing right now and I've got a bunch of subtasks these are the points that I want to talk about and so using subtasks is a really great way to break down the work and one of the most common mistakes I see people make when they first get started with the Shona if they go a bit crazy creating lots and lots of project on the left here for all the little kind of things they have going on and it's much better I believe to keep this project list much more consolidated and concise I've actually kind of used these projects almost as areas of my business you know business sales content these are sort of quite broad projects really and then I use the sections and tasks and subtasks to actually break down the tasks a lot more so for example I'm actually in on the third level here if I actually click back up a little you can see this is the actual tasks that I'm doing which is the content I then have a bunch of subtasks this is the sub task I'm working on right now record and edit so I can click into this and here we are these are the points that I want to talk about so you can see I you can get quite granular in asana and the other useful thing you can do here is you can use sections to further organize your subtasks so for example I could create a number of sections to just kind of break up these tasks even more and this is one of the best ways that you can avoid that problem of having too many projects is by using the subtasks and sections effectively to organize everything in a logical way okay number seven number eight set up projects as a list or a board so traditionally asana has always allows you to create projects as lists which is the classic view as you really like the list view it's very clean and simple you can see a lot of tasks at once but you do have the option to set up a project as a board as well very similar to how Trello works and Trello users who are maybe thinking of switching to asana this is a great feature that you'll really enjoy and you can see I've got columns here for planning and progress waiting complete boards are great as well for planning ideas and brainstorming so I have an ideas project of different some sort of products that I might make in the future and they're great as well if you have lots of attachments and images on your projects I don't have many but I'll scroll down here and find an example for you keep going here we go create upside-down home page so you can see this image here this image is actually attached to the task here it is and it shows of a thumbnail on tasks if you have tasks with lots of images using the board there's another one using the board can be a really nice way of just getting a bit of more of a visual perspective of your work but you do have the ability to set up into projects at lists or boards and right now as of today you can't switch them so once you set up as a board that's it you can't switch it but my understanding is if Sanne will be releasing a feature soon maybe even when you're watching this video that feature will be out where you will be able to actually switch between board and list view but there we are that's the that's another really great feature again very useful for Trello users who are thinking of switching you can set up lists as a board another really simple thing really simple UX user experience kind of not really a feature but I guess design design well design feature is that you can see everything at once so for example if I click on this task if I close that again here's my head my um projects I can see my description and if I click on a task the prototype pane appears on the right-hand side so I can still see my project I can still see all of my tasks I can click around and I can still see them all without having to close this window and it sounds simple but I've used other project management tools where when you click on the task the task kind of fills the whole page a bit like how it does here see if I click here the tasks kind of fills the whole page I have to now click to close before I can look at another one and that's a guess like a slight limitation of the boards but at least in the list view when you click on a task you can still see the entire project and you can click around and you can you can even bulk select I can hold my control key I can select multiple tasks at once I can change who they're assigned to and dates and things this is a really simple thing a brief simple design feature but something that's incredibly useful and just makes using the app that much quicker and more more satisfying so there we are that is a look that is number 9 and number 10 is the fact that asana if you're lucky enough will when you complete the task give you a little celebration in the form of the unicorn or a narwhal or a Yeti or something so here we are let's see if I can get one to appear I found as brand is pretty fun and this is obviously this doesn't really serve any productivity perfect it's not really going to help you other than the fact that maybe the little celebrations kind of keep you motivated to complete lots of tasks so hopefully if I click a sub task here that they don't appear all the time and I hope I can get one to appear Oh running out of subtasks oh dear ok let's try again there we go there's a unicorn so again they don't show up all the time and it doesn't really serve a huge productivity doesn't give you any huge productivity benefit but when you do get that little unicorn or Narwhal kind of appear on the screen it's pretty um it's pretty satisfying and it's going to help you - I think maybe maybe motivate you to get a little bit more done but yes I mean it just communicates the fun is very fun brand you've seen the colors as well you can customize the colors of your project I've got I just use kind of primary colors to customize my projects I don't use any particular color scheme here although in my content projects you may have noticed I've color-coded the status so it goes from red orange and green so it's sort of a traffic light light system and you can you can customize the colors of tags as well so bugs and things and maybe you want to come up with a color scheme where certain types of projects maybe all maybe your client projects like projects you're worth lots of clients maybe they're all blue and all kind of business admin projects are all red or something like that so you can customize the color of projects and it just makes the experience of using asana a bit more fun and it might serve a little benefit for you for helping you to identify projects but there we are those are the top ten features why I think asana is the best project management tool out there if you have any questions comments about your use of asana how a user sign up please feel free to leave a comment under this video and thanks very much for watching

Channel: Paul Minors

Views: 168,426

Keywords: asana, project management, task management, todoist, task list

Id: jhj7VNPB7x8

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2017