Currently we have over 35 active billable users inside of Asana, managing over 35,000 different tasks every single month. So you want to use this Asana to help grow and manage your business. Well, in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. We're going to break down how to get started on Asana and which plans to choose how to set up and use a Asana for maximum productivity with your team. The biggest mistakes that I see, even the most experienced project management users make how and when to use asana workflows to make your life ten times easier. The different softwares and tools we integrate inside of Asana. And finally, if you stay until the end, I'm going to show you exactly how we use Asana in our eight figure company. So this video is going to have something for everybody, and I'm going to timestamp the bottom of it so that you can just jump ahead if you want to, based on the different sections you want to learn about. So let's get started. I am currently on the Asana home page. The first thing I'm going to cover is pricing on Asana. So let's jump to their pricing dashboard and you can see there's three main pricing packages. The first is basic, which is obviously $0. The second is going to be $10.99 a month per user. That's premium. And the final one is going to be $25 a month per user. Let me let you know that we ran our company off of the free plan for over a year, and this is where the majority of people should look to get started. The benefits of using the premium and business plan start to come in. When you want to add some of the complex stuff I'm going to be talking about at the end of this video, such as adding in a workflow builder. Inside of a workflow builder, you can use automations to simplify a lot of the manual tasks that you're doing inside of Asana. So even though we spend over $1,000 a month on Asana with over 30,000 tasks a month, it saves us literally dozens of hours of doing things manually that we can just automate. A few other really powerful things I do like about the premium feature here is going to be the task templates. This becomes very handy when you are setting up projects like we're going to talk about later on that requires users or members to create new tasks very frequently instead of each user creating a different task the way that they want to do it. You can create a task template which allows standardization across the entire pipeline, and that's incredibly important as you start to scale to minimize complexity. And on top of that, to make sure that all of the automations and workflows you set up later all work because they're going off of the same base information. The final two things that I do like about the premium, one that you may want to consider is custom fields. I'm going to show you inside of artists on how we've used custom fields in a really ninja way so that every single piece of content has its own Google Drive folder that is held inside of the custom field inside of Asana. And the other really important one is milestone. So we actually use this honor for our client success team. And some of the things that we care about is time to value, which is how long after someone started working with us did they start to see monetary wins inside their business? And how long after someone worked with us did they see a full return on investment? And that's important to us because we offer 100% money back guarantee. If we can't give a full return on investment to our clients if they work with us. And so with milestones were actually able to compare our client success managers to see who gets that full return on investment fastest. And even more important than that, we can see if someone's coming up to a graduation date and they haven't seen a full return on investment. We can put all hands on deck to make sure that client sees that our way so we don't have to issue any kind of refund. So now that you've a better idea of which pricing structure might be better for you, you can go to the top right and click the get started button. And here you can actually sign up for your free asana account without having to pay any money. Now, to be respectful of your time, I'm going to go ahead and set up a new account on my own and I'll see you guys on the inside. So I've set up my account inside of a sauna. And as you can see here, it automatically gives me a free 30 day trial of some of those paid features that I've talked about previously. I would seriously consider setting up your account using this free paid trial, because there are some of those things that I talked about before that are going to make your processes so much smoother that later on you may see the benefit of and be willing to pay Asana the $11 a month to make sure that you keep them. But let's click on Let's Get Started, and I'm thrown immediately onto a template sized or draft version of what looks like a to do board on Asana. Now, before I go really in-depth on how to set up a sign and let's just take a step back and let me show you arguably what is one of the most difficult things to understand in Asana, and that is the hierarchy. So once you understand how the hierarchy works, then you'll be able to get a better understanding of how you should set up your asana, and it'll make more sense when I'm going inside of here. So this is my very crude drawing of the Asana hierarchy. And as you can see, there's four main layers of it here. The first is going to be the workspace, which is at the very top now, depending on how you set up. Sana, This could be the name of your entire company, could be the workspace, so you could name it scaling with systems, for example, for our company. But instead, because all of us, Sana is just our company, we simplify it by having the workspace be an actual department inside of our company. So for us, a workspace is something more along the lines of media or client success or marketing, which I'm going to show you an example of that in just one moment. Then underneath that you have projects inside of each of the workspaces here. So a project is going to be either a list, a board or a calendar inside of that workspace that is kind of houses all of the individual tasks, which I'm going to get to here in a moment. Now, there are other features of it, like there's a timeline inside of a project that you can use, but the main ones are probably going to end up using our list boards and calendars. So an example of a project could be a podcast pipeline that you have, so you know who you're interviewing on your podcast or an example of a project could be a specific client that you're working with. So it just depends on how you set it up. Then inside of each project, you're going to have these tasks, which once again could vary depending on how you want to set up your asana inside of our company. Depending on the department, the task is going to be the specific piece of content or the specific client that we're working with. So for example, if we go back to the media example, the project would be a board of our podcast pipeline, and then the tasks would be the specific podcast that we are doing. So for example, a podcast with Bob Smith and then of course, inside of the tasks you have the final thing which are subtasks, and these subtasks are going to be for us the tasks inside the task. Well, we're actually getting stuff done. So for example, in the same one that I talked about a moment ago with Bob Smith as the actual task, the podcast that we're doing is with Bob Smith. Well then the sub task could be publish the podcast with Bob Smith, So that sits inside of the actual task itself. So now as promised, I want to go through a specific example of how we use the hierarchy. So the workspace at the top, like I told you before, is going to be media. So that is this specific department that we're working with. And then inside of media we have multiple different projects. One is podcast because we host a podcast called The Rubber Bullet Show, and then one is our YouTube because we do YouTube videos on stuff like us on on Slack and How to Grow Your Business. So those are two different projects inside of the media workspace. And then of course, you have the individual tasks like I talked about previously, and these are going to differ based on which project they're in. So for the podcast project, it says Bob and Sara, because those are the two people that we're interviewing in the podcast. So each person has their own task. And for YouTube it would be in a song, a video and a Slack video. And then the final part of it is these subtasks here, which have to do with what we're actually doing for these individual tasks. So for Bob, we need to edit the podcast. For example, for Sara, we need to publish for podcasts for the Asana YouTube video. We need to assign an editor to that video. And then for Slack, we need to revise the work that the editor did. So now that you have a better understanding of how the hierarchy works, let's now go into this Asana brand new account that I created and let's walk through how some of this stuff works. So on the left hand side, you can see the workspaces here, which is my workspace. Then if I wanted to, I could add a project right here. So I'll click on Blank Project. The project name could be something like Podcast Pipeline like we talked about previously, and then I'll probably end up using the board. But like I talked about, there's a list, there's a board, there's a timeline and there's a calendar. So we'll use the board for this one here and then I'm going to click go to Project. So now this is our podcast project and you can see we have to do in-progress complete. But maybe if I wanted to make this more specific for let's say our podcast pipeline, I might do something like to be interviewed, right? So these are people that are already lined up and then next to it, it could be interview completes and then the next one could be needs editing and I could create a final section on the right hand side here that might say something like needs publishing, right? So now I have my actual project set up with the different sections that I want it to be. And now of course, I can look at this on a list view, or I could look at it on a calendar or a timeline view. But in this instance here, I like boards and that's what 90% of our projects look like. And then the actual task, this is the task itself. I might name this one like I talked about earlier, Bob Smith inside of here and now I have Bob Smith as the task. This is Bob Smith's podcast and as I was interviewing Bob Smith, I'd move him over to the interview completes and then once we completed the interview, I'd move them over to needs editing. And then once this being ready to be published, I would go to needs publishing, right? So that's kind of how you can move people through. I'm going to show you a little bit more advanced stuff here in a moment, but let's go deeper. Inside of the task for Bob Smith, and this is where we can add subtasks. So this one says interview complete. Well, for us, one of the things we may want to do is upload footage to Google Drive. By having the subtasks here is we're able to remind either myself or somebody else, Hey, once this interview is complete, make sure you upload the footage to the Google Drive folder so the editors can start working on it and you can set a due dates and you can say the due date is, for example, today. Or you could say it's going to be next week. Or you can actually say a specific time by using this little time feature here on the bottom. If I move this back down again, you can see the time feature ad time right here. And then there's also a repeat, if it was a repeating task. Okay, so I'll click clear because I want to add a timeline, but I can also assign this subtasks to someone. So I'm the only person in this workspace. So as you can see here, it says Assigned to rub your balls so I can assign it to me right here. Okay, so already on Monday, I need to upload this this footage to the Google drive. And that might work out well if the interview is scheduled to be completed on Monday. And then that's how we that's how we update a subtasks with specific signees and due dates. But what if you wanted to update the actual task itself? So as you can see here, very similar to subtasks, there is an assigning so I can say all and there's a due date as well. So an example of when you would want to do something on a task versus a subtasks in this example would be for us, we have our creative director, Jack. He's the one that gets assigned this the parent task, because it's his sole responsibility to make sure that this goes through the whole pipeline individually. But then Jack's going to be working with me when I interview people, editors, to edit it inside the subtasks. And that's when these subtasks assign you would change. So it would be my job to upload it because I'm the one that's going to be filming the podcast in person and Jack's not going to be there. And then the due date, an example of a task due date instead of a subtasks due date, maybe the date that Jack wants to publish this, this podcast. So he might say by next Friday, everything should be done inside of this task because that's the date that we want to publish it. Now, saying on this task here, you can see there's also I can add this to additional projects. So one of the examples we use when we're adding additional projects is if we had a content calendar. So we want to look at this podcast pipeline on this view right here, but we're also going to look at it on the content calendar view so we can look what is supposed to be scheduled in the next week, the next two weeks, next four weeks, etc., etc. And then the final two things are going to be dependencies, so you can make it so that this task can't be completed until something else happens first. So this is really good. If you want to keep people from jumping ahead to certain tasks or you know that for example, somebody can't edit a video until it's been uploaded. So if I had that as a subtasks, I can make editing the video dependent on someone uploading the footage to begin with. And then you have the description right here, right? So I can say anything I want. Like this is Bob's name, Bob Smith. This is Bob's email, Bob Smith at gmail.com, etc., etc., etc.. Right. So hopefully this starts to make sense to you as far as what are the basics to use Asana when you're creating these different projects and when you're creating these different pipelines. Before I walk through what some of these other features are on the left hand side here and then show you what horizontal looks like. I do want to talk about a few more important things inside of this specific project. So on the right hand side, you can see this little dropdown of the three dots. It says More actions. And this is where you can, number one, create a milestone. So a milestone is useful. Like I said before, if you want to start tracking things on a larger level. So a milestone might be used if you want to say like from the date that the podcast was created to the date that the podcast was published, I want to know that timeline inside the Dashboard feature. So I may add a milestone as podcast published. So then I know from when Bob Smith task was created to when the milestone published was completed, how long on average does it take us to do that? Right? Another important feature I want to show you is on the very top right. There's this customize button here, and this is when you can actually customize different fields like I talked about before, This could be very, very helpful If you're getting a little bit advanced inside of Asana and you want to create your own field. So an example of a custom field that we use could be something along the lines of Google Drive link, right? And then we're going to put the field type as a text and click create fields. And now if I scroll down here and I clicked on select more fields, once again, my pretty little head is in the way. You can see it says Google Drive Link. So if I click on Bob Smith's interview, I now have a place. If I move my head where I can actually put in every single task we create here is going to be the opportunity to for us to copy and paste a Google Drive link inside of here. So that way when we're moving all around and this is going and switching hands between 10 to 15 people, everybody has easy access to the same Google Drive link. My recommendation is that you don't add 15 to 20 different custom variables or custom fields because then it gets a little confusing. But some really powerful ones could be the Google Drive link. Another really handy one or useful one could be if you're using. As for client success, what is the status of the client? Are they active? Are they in trouble? Do they need help? Are they graduated? Etc., etc., etc.? Let's open back up the customize column again so I can show you something else that I think is really important, and that is going to be the task. Templates. So task templates is exactly that. It is if you wanted to make it so that every single time you had a podcast, instead of you having to type out all the information and all the subtasks from scratch, you can make a template that had the majority of what you needed on there. So for us, we might do something like new and then I might say podcast, then a little colon. Let's say I want to make sure every new podcast is assigned to me. The due date. Let's say I always want to be ten days into the future once the podcast is created, and then let's say I want to do a Subtasks, which is film podcast, and then the next one below, it would be something like upload to Google Drive. Perfect. Let's click on Done. So now, if I went back over here to this first page to be interviewed, I clicked a little plus icon right here. I can click on that new podcast. As you can see, it shows up and it's creating it out of a template. So it's automatically putting in ten days in the future, which would make it February 13. It's automatically assigning it to me and I can just easily come inside of here and say, The podcast is with Sarah. Jane. And then you can see down here that the Subtasks film podcast Upload Google Drive is already templated. So this is where it comes very handy. If you have a standardized system you want to use like podcasts or YouTube videos or clients that you're trying to fulfill. You can have them all templated on here to be make it incredibly easy to start a new one if you want to. Now, obviously, one of the main benefits of project management software is when you're doing it, you're collaborating with other people. So as you can see on the bottom of these tasks here, I have a comment section. So let's say I had my creative director Jack in here. I could tag Jack. Can you check this out when you have a moment? And I could add a question mark here. Right. And then I could comment on it. And let's say if Jack was inside of here, Jack would get tagged to check this out and he could check it out when he had a free when he had free time. So this prevents us going back and forth in Slack and all these other different softwares and having the majority of the communication for a specific tasks like a podcast or a YouTube video or a client all housed inside the exact same location. The other cool thing about a sonnet is it has these little updates here, as you can see. So it keeps kind of a running tab of all the different things that are going on for that client. Whether you're doing something automatically through automation or you're doing something manually. So that way, in case something goes wrong, you can kind of audit what this task here looks like and you can go back and try to fix it. Okay, So now what we're going to want to do is we're actually going to want to show you what the top left of Asana looks like. So there's all these different kind of tabs on the top left hand side here. So first I want to click on home and you can actually customize your home page here. So this is kind of cool because this is probably where I spend the majority of my time. I actually remove almost everything inside of here except for my priorities because I don't want it to be cluttered up. So I'll remove projects, I'll remove task that I have a sign and I'll remove people and I'll just keep an eye on this. My priorities every single day. So one of the first things that I do is I come inside of here and I look what I wake up in the morning, what do I need to do inside of Asana, or has somebody else given me something to do inside of us on as well? If you wanted to, you could come in here and click, customize and add different projects and people and you could add stuff like a notepad if I wanted to jot notes down there. But I really like just keeping it super clean and organized, so I make sure I don't get overwhelmed with stuff I need to do. This is also a great place for you to put like very quick little task yourself that you know you need to do. Like, for example, let's say I want to subscribe to Ravi's YouTube channel, right? Because I think everybody should do that. It's very important. If you click tab, I could say I want to do it today. And let's say it doesn't actually fall into an individual project like subscribing to movies. You to gym is not going to be in the podcast pipeline, for example. But I do want to make sure that I see it. Then I can add it to no project and then you can see that it shows up right here and then I can come in here and type in like, you know, make sure you subscribe, and then I can maybe put the link to rugby's YouTube channel right here, right. YouTube.com. I support YouTube. Right? So this is pretty cool because I one of the problems I was having previously was like, okay, what about all these random tasks that pile up? Or what about the tasks in my personal life that pile up? Well, I like to combine both my personal my business life because it makes things a lot smoother. And so I can put personal tasks in here, such as buy my girlfriend flowers. At the same time I can put business tasks on here. And then when you have a team, I could put a personal task such as, you know, buy my girlfriend flowers, and then I could assign it to my executive assistant who could then go out and do it herself. On the left hand side, you also see we have my task. So this is going to be a list view, a board view and a calendar view as well. And all transparency. I don't use this. My task. I think keeping it right here is so much more organized. I think it can kind of get
overwhelming to look at all of them right here. And then the final place I want to show you inside of the tabs on the left hand side that I think are important is going to be the inbox. So the inbox is where you can have conversations with different team members and you can see where people are messaging you about specific projects or tasks. This will replace Slack for a lot of the communication that you're doing, and that's what we used. We should do everything inside of Slack, but then all we were doing is referencing things inside of a sauna. And so now we probably use Asana 70% of the time and Slack 30% of the time. Now, the secret you want to set up here so you don't get overwhelmed and bombarded with notifications all the time is I like to filter out anything that is only mentions because for me personally, if someone is commenting back and forth about random stuff and they don't tag me specifically, I don't really care about it. Now granted, I'm the CEO of the company, so I don't need to be involved in every single decision. But maybe if you're not the CEO, it would be helpful. And then the other one I'd like to check is this unread only as well. So that saves auto saves that. So when I'm coming inside of here, if I wanted to, I could go to the inbox and it's automatically going to always have the two filters that it's only messages that I've been tagged by me or tagged with me in it and that they're unread. And then when I'm done reading things, I can, if I check the unread only off and I turn off the mention, you can see this little archive notification right here. I can click on that and that would market as read. And that way I'm not overwhelmed with that. So. I promise you, we do over 30,000 tasks a month. I'm telling you, it seems silly, but the importance of having a home screen that's very clean and very organized, that has a due dates and that doesn't have it cluttered with all the other different things on there. All are looking at that and having the inbox with those two filters I talked about there can keep you very focused and efficient, but more importantly, it can keep your team very focused and efficient as well. Okay. So the final thing I want to show you before we jump into our workspace is a sauna workflows. And this is arguably going to be one of the most important things and one of the most recent updates that Asana created. So I'm going to go back over to the podcast pipeline and you can see workflow is at the top here. And inside of workflows, this is where you can add automations using. And if this then that sequence. So that means that if this happens, then set this automation to happen. So for example, if someone has been moved to this to be interviewed section, then I would like you to assign a task or add a collaborator or add to another project. So let's just use one for interview complete. So let's move over one. So when an interview is complete, then I want you to add a comment that says something like at Ravi. Great job on the interview, exclamation point, and then I'll click Create Rule. And now if this is done correctly, if I go back over to the board and I move to be interviewed over to Interview complete, it should say that there's a task running which there is a task running right now. And if I look at this, here is a comment that just went and it said at Roval, a great job on the interview and I'll move my head as usual is in the way. So great job on the interview So it's gonna do that on its own. So now hopefully your wheels are starting to turn and I'll show you how we're using this a little bit in our pipeline in a moment. But you can really use workflows to get really, really creative. So another example would be to be interviewed. If someone gets moved to the to be interviewed section, then maybe what we want to do is now assign the task to myself, because now we know that the person's going to be interviewed by me so we can assign the task to Ravi. Abuela, I'm going to click Create rule. We go back over to the board side of things, and this one technically is already assigned to me, but let's say it's not assigned to anybody. If I move it over to to be interviewed, then in one moment it should pop up and it should say Ravi Wala. It just ran the automation. And now what assigned to me inside of our company, we literally have hundreds of these automations that are running both in Asana and in different softwares, like Zapier. And these are some of the things that we help our clients set up so that they can scale their business. But at the very bare minimum, your wheels and your mind should start to turn about how you can start automating a lot of the manual tasks you'd be doing inside of your asana pipelines. So as promised, for those of you that have stuck around to the end, I do want to reward you by showing you what does it look like inside of a 35 person asana workspace with over 35,000 tasks happening every single month. So like I said, this is the actual workspace that we run ourselves and this is our homepage. And what I say, our home page, I mean my home page. And as you can see, there's only one thing on there, like I talked about previously, some of these are inside of project, some of these are not inside our projects, but this is what I look at as a CEO of a bigger company every day by myself without having to talk to anybody else. Then the other thing you can look at is the inbox tab over here. And like I talked about before, there's those two filters here so I can see people that are tagging me, like Jack, our creative director. I said, Hey, what's the update on this? And he said, I didn't see this until now. I'll have this by Friday. And then here are the exact things I requested so I can click on these, I can open these, I can archive these and I don't have to go back and forth and slack to figure out exactly what these people are talking about. Then on the left hand side, if I scroll down a little bit more, you can see these are all of the different teams and these are the workspaces. If you remember, like I talked about at the very beginning. So the first ones are to do one. So these are all the different CEOs, I'm sorry, all the different department heads each have a different to do task inside of here. Then we have marketing, we have client success, we have appointment setting, we have media and we have technology. I was going to dive into the media one really quickly to show you an example what this looks like. So here's our podcast Pipeline. So here are people that on the left hand side, we're potentially thinking about speaking too. Then these are the people that we've actually pitched to come on to our podcasts. These are people that are podcast applicants. So these are people that have applied to be on our podcast. These are people that we've requested, like after they've we've confirmed they are pre qualified, that we've requested to have them on. These are people that we are going to have an interview with here in the next few days. I actually have both of these next Thursday. And then there's an in-progress pipeline here, which means we're working on it and then there's some really fancy animation that moves them to our full media pipeline, which is down here. But I kind of wanted to show you what it looks like to have a fully built out asana workspace. So finally, let me show you just a fraction of some of the automation that we've set up inside of these pipeline. So if I click on workflow right here, you can see that whenever somebody is moved to potential, then we're adding two subtasks, which is enrich the data and pitch the guest. And this is should happen the exact same day that someone gets added to potential. Or if we move over to let's say me new podcast application, then it sends a Slack channel message to our channel saying tagging our creative director is saying, Hey, you have a new podcast that needs to be reviewed. Then if we go over to, for example, booking confirmed, it adds to subtasks as well. So the first thing is we need to make sure that the photo and video waiver is signed. So we have a photo and video waiver that we send out to our podcast interviewees so that that way we can make sure we can legally publish all our content online. And then you can see, like I talked about before, something assigned to me to upload the podcast footage. So that way, that date that we're having, the booking, I can actually remember when I get in there after I'm done shooting the podcast, I'm not done yet. I need to then take the SD cards and upload them onto a Google drive. So that way we make sure that we have everything we need in order for our editors to then start the workflow without being bottlenecked at all. If there's any other videos on a of you want me to create, make sure you comment them down below.
