Asana Beginner Tutorial: How To Use Asana's Free Project Management Tool

if you want to be a successful business owner you need to stay organized and it's a lot easier to do that when you use the right tools today I'm gonna teach you how to use one of my favorite project management tools it's called asana and it's totally free and this is really the one tool that I can't live without plus I'm going to show you how we use asana both at the digital marketing agency it's the same way you can use it if you're a freelancer and we're gonna show you how we use it a laptop empire's to organize all the content that we put out through our blog or podcast and right here on the YouTube channel howdy Mike Jana here and welcome to the laptop Empire show I'm excited to dive into this asana tutorial with you and show you how to use this incredible free software we're gonna start off looking at what just the format how its laid out how all the pieces work together before I go in and I show you the features how it works and then if you stick around long enough I'm really gonna take you behind the scenes what we do at laptop Empires and at the agency and the different ways that you can use this software because it's incredibly flexible and then to wrap things up I'm gonna go ahead and take you onto my phone and show you the mobile app because that's one of the things that makes us on a great it's very clean it's very easy to organize it's very flexible works great with teams and allows me to do a bunch of things that it would have taken me multiple apps to use otherwise but that mobile app is such a big feature of this software and it's one of the things that makes it great with the mobile app I can see how things are going I can keep track of projects with the team I can assign new projects if I need to or I can just have a nice place to put ideas that I can come back to later but what I really love about it is it allows me to get away from the computer to step back I can still take care of work when I need to but I'm not that dad that's always attached to a computer instead of focusing on the family so let's go ahead and dive into this tutorial and head on over to my laptop alright so here we are on the home screen for asana and this home screen is actually pretty new you can see tasks that are upcoming people have assigned to you your favorite projects that you'll use and recent projects that you've used now I need to explain to you first like what are projects like how is this whole thing work and really what you need to know is that you've got your dashboard which is this home space you're gonna see more about in a second and then you have your navigation toolbar whatever you want to call it here on the left and there's a lot of great tools that you can do here but basically everything in asana can be broken down into projects and tasks so projects are the bigger buckets there are these categories that you see on the sign so you can see I have a lot of different projects that you know or for different things and so we organize tasks inside of projects we use these as our buckets so to speak the tasks themselves are going to be what is the action that you're taking what is the thing you're creating you know so creating this video for the YouTube channel would be a task and then inside of that we would have different information subtasks all of those kind of things but you need to understand that big picture of how it all works together before we dive in now from this toolbar you're gonna be able to create different projects what you're gonna show up here on the left you can set privacy settings and add different team members of different projects so not everybody has access to everything if that's what you choose to do you can assign favorites which are going to show up here on the home page and here in the sidebar for ones that you go to repeatedly and then you're gonna have these other features at the top so the home screen what you can see here you're gonna have your inbox which is where the communication and things happen if somebody moves a task completes a task leaves a comment for you it's going to show up here it's a really useful tool and then you've got my tasks which is one of my favorite things about asana because especially when you have a team like I do if you've got multiple people that are working on different things and maybe they need you to review their work or they need you to do something they can assign you a task and you're gonna get a notification but you can also go into my tasks and see them all in one place and so here you can see mine I've kind of set up my stuff for today and these are the things that I want to get done today like record this video but you can also see things I have upcoming I can drop this down and see all the assignments I have that are upcoming that are already on the calendar and that have been assigned to me and then when the date comes right so if I have any tasks assigned to me tomorrow then they're automatically going to move from upcoming up here into today they're actually gonna fall underneath under here at the bottom so you can add them but if people are adding new tasks for you if you're being assigned to things there pop up here and so you're gonna be able to see you know I've had a bunch of tasks that have been assigned to me I need to go in and I need to check these off some of my added myself to review later some of them our team members have assigned me to review some of their work or you know for something that I need to get done but they're all in one place and so I go through I sort those out set dates all that kind of stuff this is one of my favorite features of asana because I can have my to-do list I can see things that are assigned to me and at the end of the day I just go to these new data tasks I look at all of them I put them in the correct projects I set the right due dates I kind of set them and forget them and then can go back to him later now once you're in here when you're creating a if you want to create a project that's kind of how you start you're gonna go over here to projects you're gonna go to you can see red dirt marking Co this is the name of my dashboard so my asana project that's the name of my company okay and you can see here I can add I can invite team members I've got tons of team members here or I can add a project now when I add a project asan has created all of these great templates for you so if you have a template that works for you you can just grab those templates you can sort by the different types of templates you can use the ones they recommend up here or you can just create a blank project for me I'm creating a blank project most of the time and building something custom based on what I want and so you're just going to name your project and so we'll say example project and now from here you're going to be able to choose you know one the privacy settings is it public to everybody that you've added to your asana or is it private to only specific members right and just depends on what it is but then you're gonna choose one of the two primary layouts there's the list layout and the board layout and I want to show you what these look like really quickly before we create one so the list layout I'm gonna go ahead and use an example we'll use our podcast this is the list layout alright it's just a general to-do list type thing you're going to be able to see kind of you know you can set headers like this you can set the individual tasks and then you can go into the individual tasks and you can add more information if you want it so if you wanted to create a task you could create one you could assign it to people set due dates and all kinds of things I'll go in more depth than those in a second now the other option is to create a board and so a good example of a board is the Rd dashboard this is our agency dashboard and you can see here the tasks now instead of looking like you know lines in the to-do list our tasks are going to look like cards on a board very similar to Trello so we can set the names of our columns for us at the agency we have next actions we have in progress needs review and completed and we can add projects here and people work on them and as they get completed you just you simply you drag and drop the card so if this one was in progress it gets moved to needs review right and it's assigned to the person that needs to do it so a really good example signed in my team earlier today I needed them to go into you know some materials that we had and I needed them to pull some information for me and create a checklist so I signed it they worked on it now it's in review and they've assigned it to me so I know now that I can go here and get the information I need once I grab it I can move it to completed to be cleared out later these ones are different projects the agency and now they've been completed they've been assigned to the appropriate person to check that work or to take it to the next step before it gets moved to completed so this is what a board looks like and we already showed you what you know a list looks like so if you're creating your task you're gonna get to choose which of these that you want to do alright now we're here creating our new project we're gonna go ahead and choose a blank project we're gonna call it example project we're gonna do a list it's just real simple we'll make a to-do list and there's so many things you can do here you can customize it in a lot of different ways but you know some of the easy things you can do you can change the name up here you can click the star to add it to your favorites on the sidebar you can decide who from your team you know you're gonna add into this who you're gonna give access to if you didn't make it open to everybody you can also change it to private if you decide you want to do that afterward then with this drop down menu you can do a lot of other things you can save it as a template you can add tasks you can even set the color like if you want what color you want the label to be in the sidebar so then from here it works just like any to-do list you can start writing task 1 hit enter tasks to you know put whatever tasks you want in there you can create section headings so if you want to like separate these so it's section one or maybe this is like a to-do list right to do to-do list now you can move this up here you can have those tasks underneath it and maybe you have stuff you know that you want to do you just want to keep ideas right this could be ideas and then underneath it you could write idea one idea to just things that you come up with over across over the course of the day and you can use this for all kinds of things you'll see inside of my projects we've got our laptop empires projects we've got the red dirt my agency projects I've got some personal things like links to things that I want to read and watch content ideas we've got different things for our different courses we've got training and resources this is inside of agency this is where we keep all of our systems and processes so if anybody wants to know how to do anything inside of the agency like create a Facebook ad for a client or set up business manager or create a new project in the sauna inside of training and resources they'll be able to select the task with the name they want and then it's going to have video documentation all kinds of things because on these tasks there's so much that you can add to them not only can you assign them to people and assign a due date you can add descriptions or you can put as much information as you want you can add attachments and you can even go in here and create subtasks so if there is something that you're trying to teach people for example how to create let's say how to create a YouTube video right so this is how to create and upload a YouTube video then we can have different tasks so it could be one of those things like research research topic create script record video create thumbnail image upload video create tags on video write video description promote video right so you can put all the different steps on here and then you can actually go assign people and due dates to these or you can even go further into it and then do a description and even subtasks of that sub tasks like what goes into researching topic you could have all the information there on how that works so to give you a little more clarity on how that how this actually functions in real life instead of me just creating a BS example like this I want to take you back behind the scenes of how we do it in our business so we're gonna start with the agency and I already gave you a little bit of an overview of how this works when I was showing you boards but if you've got moving pieces like this can work really well with production calendars we use this board to figure out what everybody at the agency is doing because there's multiple people that work here and so what we're gonna do we have next actions in progress needs review and completed and these are our four key pieces of this board this is like that Kanban style or Kanban on how you pronounce it that kind of style approach this is what you see in Trello and we actually used to do this in Trello but what I found myself doing is I was using a list software to manage all my to-do lists and ideas and all those kind of things and then I was using a board like this for the agency and I wanted a tool that combined all of them and that's why we ended up finding asana and moving over from Trello we also have things like active projects so if we have projects that are long term these are here and so we can kind of keep track of those but it's very simple I'm just gonna go in here and I'm just gonna add you know task number one or I'm gonna put a client name right it's gonna be you know example so it might say you know the way we do it it'll say client name and then it'll say you know something like create new campaign and this is in reference to a facebook ad campaign and so we would go in here and I would put in the instructions I might write instructions and a lot of time so I'm gonna take a loom video like this one I'm recording and I'll put that in there or I might say you know please create a campaign for blah blah blah right whatever I need to put in there and that's gonna go in there and then the team when they're done working on whatever they're working on they're going to grab this they are going to assign it to themselves and they're gonna move it to in progress and now I can see who's working on what and then so I you know if I was picking this up I was on the team I would pick it up when I completed the work I would move it to needs review and then we check our work and so I would assign it to another person in the business that you know would be the person to say you know check my work alright and so that's how we do that and so at the beginning of the day there tend to be a ton of things you know in this next actions and just throughout the day they complete these tasks they get them done and complete that work and then we might through the day add more tasks so this is kind of how you can use a board and you can use it for all kinds of things you could have it set up you know differently you know for example you could have all of your ideas for content you could have your content listed out here so in like a calendar view of like these are the next videos so you know which ones are in production which ones are posted you know there's really whatever you can imagine that you could do with this you can probably do inside of the list view you're gonna have something like we have for our podcast or a blog where we're gonna have our content we're gonna have it scheduled out and so you can see here we've got our last few podcasts we have this this one coming out tomorrow I started a blog what now and so this one is in editing and it should be scheduled for publication by the end of the day and ready to go for tomorrow we also are doing a bunch of batch editing tomorrow so I'm gonna end up adding probably four to six podcast episodes to this calendar later today and the tomorrow will record all of them and assign them to dates for them to be produced by now we actually have created a template so we've got a temp it for what this looks like so whenever we create a new topic we are actually going to go here and we're gonna duplicate this task that has all of these assignments but this is a good example of how you can use the sub task feature and we've listed the things we need to do for a podcast we need to record it we need to edit it we need to feature image we need show notes we need it reviewed and we need it published and so we're able to go in here and you know bobbi and i record so we have that once that's done then somebody on the team edits it someone creates the feature image we create the show notes Erin who's kind of our project manager do it all superstar she's gonna go and review it make sure everything's good and then the team is gonna schedule it for publication on the appropriate date so you can actually build all of that stuff in here and keep everything organized now I don't want you to be intimidated by looking at my asana and seeing all these different projects the editorial calendars the production calendars of the agency stuff all the different things that we have because the reality is it took a long time to get here we've been doing this for a couple of years and we've just built it up slowly over time an easy way to get started is if you have a YouTube channel or you have a blog or you have a podcast or something like that create a nice production calendar where you can keep track of the things that you know the the new episodes you have coming out or the new blog posts that you have coming out keeping that organized and just plan everything ahead of time or if you just need to use it for your personal to-do list it works really great for that also so now what I want to do is I want to take you over to my phone and show you how the mobile app works so I'm gonna go ahead and start recording my screen so you can see this and we are going to dive into it all right so I am inside of the asana app you can see here it's defaulted on to my task list so this is the same thing we saw earlier or you can see the projects I'm working on for today you can see upcoming projects but up here at the top you can actually you can change this to a variety of different things you can also add tasks directly from here this is one of the things I use it for most so I'll actually click this little pink orange button at the bottom and then if I have something I need to remember I you know have an idea whatever it may be I can right here I might say something like you know don't forget to go to the post office and get stamps on the way home right and so I'll do that I'm going to go ahead and set a due date I'll set it for today and now that when I create this is actually going to pop up right here inside of new it's going to be this top one and so I can actually drag it down do to do and I'm gonna go ahead and put it at the very top of my to-do list and there you go and so that was a really easy way you know if I need to add something really quickly but you'll notice it went up here in this whole kind of like new tasks catalog at the top and so like I said at the end of the day I tend to sort through that and get all of that organized but it's a really great way if you have an idea you know content idea something that needs to get done you just throw it in there very easy and it's automatically going to show up on your computer as well another thing that you can do you can click over to the Bell you can see your inbox and stuff like I mentioned earlier you can search so if you need to find a specific thing you can go on here so if I want to find the podcast you know counter I can type podcast and you know it'll pull up up there it is the LE podcast now I can see our podcast editorial calendar I can look it up very simply I love that you can also this one that's the third one projects you can see all of your projects you can either see favorites or you can move over to all and you can see every single one of your projects that you have and you can go over and click to it so I can click on the dashboard and I can see that board view that I just showed you from my team and I can actually look at the tasks I can see what's in progress what needs review what's been completed I can go through it I can go ahead I can clear things I can move things over if I want I think I can turn it sideways nope I can't okay so good to know but this thing needs review I've reviewed it I want to move it to complete all I got to do is click on it and drag it over and there it is like real drag-and-drop stuff it's really nice so as you can see the mobile app is killer it's so easy to use it's so clean I use it all the time a lot of times what will end up happening is like I'll be hanging out with my family evening the boys are playing me my wife's watching The Bachelor or something like that that I don't care about and I might get in there if I've got an idea I'm reading a book and I'll go there and I'll add some ideas I'll organize some things like it's very nice it allows me to kind of be there you know and be present with my family but kind of get some things done that I want to get done because you know let's be real I don't care about the bachelor but you know my wife's gonna watch it so it is what it is so that's it for today that sort of song a tutorial I hope you enjoyed it please do me a favor and subscribe to the channel and set up turn on your notifications because I don't want you to miss an episode we're gonna be putting out more tutorials like this if you want to know more about asana if you want to know how to use a particular feature or a way that you might be able to you know use it to organize a specific thing that you do in your business please let me know in the comments I'm happy to help you come up with ideas and figure out how you can use a sauna in your business also if you check in the description we have a guide if you want to learn how to create an editorial calendar the way that we did or a production calendar if you're a youtuber if you're trying to build your YouTube channel your blog or whatever it may be we actually have a 12 minute walkthrough guide that shows you how to just do that in pretty excruciating detail it's totally free so just click grab that guide check it out and that's it we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Laptop Empires

Views: 80,664

Keywords: Laptop Empires, Mike Yanda, asana beginner tutorial, asana tutorial, asana vs trello, asana tutorial for beginners, asana review, asana demo, how to use asana, asana how to, asana project management, asana demonstration, how to use asana for beginners, project management, project tracking, how to use asana effectively, asana product tour, dottotech, paul nicholson training, paul minors, asana demo youtube, asana overview, asana app, asana software, asana

Id: 2gAd11-TKLg

Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2019