Common Asana Mistakes to Avoid

hello my name is Paul miners welcome back to another one of my Asana training videos over the last few years I've been very fortunate to have worked with hundreds of different businesses and a different asani users and what I'm going to show you today are the most common mistakes that we see coming up again and again this video is actually a remake from a video I made a couple of years ago and I wanted to update it with an even bigger list of some of the common mistakes that we see if you have any questions feel free to leave me a comment below and if you would like one-on-one help with setting up your Asana account learning how to take advantage of all the different features training and onboarding your team then click the link in the description below to learn more about my Asana Consulting options now the first and maybe one of the biggest mistakes that I see people making in Asana is not using the my tasks page the my tasks page you will find here on the sidebar this is the page that shows you everything assigned to you from all of the different tasks subtasks and projects that you're working in basically if a task or a subtask is assigned to you if it has your name on it like this then it's going to show up on this my tasks page now the mistake that we see a lot of people make is instead of using and working from this screen throughout the day we see a lot of people clicking through all of their projects to go and sort of find their work and they look for anything with their name on it or maybe they actually even create a project for their own tasks and I'll actually come back to that in a sec so you spend a lot of time hunting around just kind of trying to find your work but the best practice in Asana is to use and work from the my tasks page I have separate videos all about how to use this screen to give you a brief overview you can see what I've done here is I have some sections to show what I'm working on today I can see what I have coming up later this week and then even some tasks that are starting to populate my next week section here and I've even got some rules that help me to automatically move tasks through these sections as the due dates fool you but go and check out my other videos to learn more about how to use this my tasks page okay the next mistake we see people making a lot is assigning too many tasks to yourself including non-tasks or really things that shouldn't be in Asana for example articles or books you might want to read I think a lot of that type of thing can can clutter up Asana quite a lot so here's an example of uh my this is in my demo account you can see this is looking really messy I've got loads of stuff jammed into my recently assigned section my today section is full there's a lot of things that are overdue here I'll come back to that um but really the volume of work is is too much and this happens a lot with new users because what I find tends to happen is when you get started with Asana you're really excited so you jump in you create loads of projects and loads of tasks for everything that you need to do which is great in theory except that now you have all these tasks on your my tasks page and you quickly start to feel overwhelmed and just sort of drown in the volume of work now there are a couple of ways you could manage this slightly better one is as I showed you before on the my tasks page you could use sections like I've done today this week next week and even I have later down here and you move tasks into the various sections to hide them so I actually when I'm working in Asana on a daily basis often don't even look at this week and next week I put tasks into this week and next week obviously based on the due date you can see I have here tasks due tomorrow and Friday anything due more than a week away you can see I have quite a lot in here anything due more than a week away I hide in this later section and so that helps me to keep my my tasks page really nice and clean and minimal and organized and it really helps me to focus on only what I have to do today another option is uh and and this is where you might want to think about and have a conversation with your team about how you're going to manage the work but another uh thing we see clients do sometimes is only assigning tasks to yourself when they fooled you so what I could do here is with some of these tasks that are occurring later on in the project I might actually leave this unassigned for now and then only assign this when when the task is now ready to be worked on so we sort of move through the project in phases and assign blocks of tasks when it's time to work on them that's going to make make it so that people are less overwhelmed with a huge volume of tasks on their task list I would also caution you to not use Asana for things that aren't task based or task related I've seen clients do funny things where they put things like articles or even emails that they want to respond to into Asana as a way of trying to collect everything in one place and again the intention is there it's good it's yeah I want to have everything in one place but then Asana is full of not just tasks which you need to work on but also articles that you may or may not read someday or an email that you need to respond to and I would argue that those types of things really don't belong in Asana the next very common and very big mistake that we see people making is not checking the Inbox and really not dealing with the notifications correctly so the inbox in Asana up here on the sidebar this is where you get notified about all tasks that you are a collaborator on down here at the bottom so anything I'm a collaborator on I'm getting notified about whether it's a task like this where the due date has changed um or maybe a task that's being completed like this one or if somebody is commenting on a task I'm getting notified about anything that I'm a collaborator on now the mistake we see people make is number one not checking this inbox enough if you don't check the inbox this is where important updates and just work in general slips through the cracks you end up in a situation where somebody says hey Paul you know you never gave me feedback on that on that task and I say oh I didn't even see it's probably because I wasn't checking the inbox so the first best practice is to be checking the inbox a couple of times a day you'll actually see there'll be a little orange dot up here when there's a new notification in the inbox checking it regularly is going to mean that you're more up to date with the task updates comments and questions that teammates are sharing with you and then the next best practice is to Archive the notifications as you go so you can click this little archive button here once you've dealt with a notification you've either looked at it or you've responded with it you click that archive button I'm going to go ahead and archive all but this is the screen we want to get to on a daily basis which is Inbox zero this means that I've dealt with all of my notifications and I'm completely up to date I would also recommend if you are working from the inbox as I suggest managing your notifications and turning off email updates for activity updates and maybe even mentions and summaries you don't really need the email notifications if you are checking this inbox regularly another mistake we see from time to time is leaving tasks open and not completing them so not using the markers complete button up here or or checking the tick here when I ask clients about this the excuse or reason people often give me is they'll say something like well I I did the work but I didn't want to lose the task you know I still wanted to chat with the person who assigned it to me I wanted to maybe get some feedback before I I was confident in you know fully completing the work and so I left it open so again I understand the intention it's there it's good but um the better way to I think manage a situation like this is Mark the task as complete as the assignee that's your responsibility sometimes people feel like am I allowed to complete the task if they're not the one that actually created it or assigned it in the first place there's often a bit of hesitation about being able to complete it but in my view as the assignee it's your responsibility to actually complete the task the assignor the person who gave you the task they will get notified in their inbox that you've completed it they can then review the work they can go back with any questions they could even reopen the task if they're not satisfied and there's something else that still needs to be done but you completing the task in the first place sends a clear signal that you're saying this is now done another common mistake along the same lines is changing the assignee back and forth as the work changes so what we see from time to time is maybe somebody assigns me a task so they put my name on it up here and then when I'm finished with the task when I'm I think that I've done the work I then change it back to the person that assigned it to me and yes the intention there is you're saying well you know I've done the work so I'm going to assign it back because they now need to check the task the issue with doing this though is that you lose visibility of who's responsible for this task if you assign the task back and forth it's very easy to get into a situation where maybe it isn't assigned to the right person because you've assigned it to the person that assigned it to you you've assigned it back and they actually want you to go and change something else but they forget to assign it back to you so the whole assigning back and forth thing I think just opens up a can of worms and it creates a lot of opportunity for human error to result in the task just falling through the cracks again the best practice is leave the task assigned to the person who is ultimately responsible for doing the work when that person is finished they mark it as complete like I mentioned before and the original assignor can then jump in with any comments questions or feedback or again they can simply reopen the task if they need to another very common mistake I see all the time is leaving tasks overdue so this happens where you've got a bunch of tasks assigned to you let's collapse that maybe in my today section I had the intention to do this work but for whatever reason I didn't get it done that day that's fine you know stuff happens emergencies come up so we can't always get all of our tasks done but leaving the tasks here on your my tasks with the red overdue dates I think is uh just just results in the tasks building up over time this task list gets very messy and it very quickly leads you to feeling quite overwhelmed by all your work I think a better way to deal with overdue tasks is instead of leaving them overdue like this at the end of the day and you should make this part of your sort of shutdown routine at the end of the day is I look at anything that I have left on my task list that I just didn't have time for and I changed the due date so I'll say okay let me do this maybe tomorrow or maybe I'll come back to it on Monday and I change the date and then I'll sort it accordingly so if it's next week maybe I'll put it into my upcoming um and then I've got rules that will automatically move it into today when it's due so the long and short of it is don't let it go overdue or don't leave it overdue update the due date to reflect when are you actually going to come back and work on it again that way you can avoid having this massive list of overdue tasks and you've actually now got a clear plan of when you're going to come back to it later the next common mistake we see all the time and this is the reason a lot of clients reach out to us in the first place is that maybe as the owner of the business they have dumped Asana on their team without any really formal introduction or training this is a mistake that's not unique particularly to Asana but with a lot of tools and apps that different businesses choose to use is the business owner says right we're going to use this tool like Asana and they kind of leave it up to their team to figure out figure out how to use it let's just kind of work it out as a team and what we tend to find happen is you'll see some people are good at figuring it out because they're quite tech savvy but inevitably there are people on the team who aren't very tech savvy who or who haven't you know can't figure it out on their own and need a little bit more help so you end up with this kind of half adoption half usage of Asana where some people use it other people don't but the people that don't are kind of dragging down the entire team so what we recommend and this is part of the service that we provide is thinking about why are we using Asana in the first place and actually talking to your team and saying this is why we're using Asana here are the problems we think it's going to solve and how we expect everyone to use it if you need help with training and onboarding your team then check out the master Asana program on my website which lets you book private one-on-one Consulting sessions with experts on my team you get access to weekly group coaching calls and you even get access to a full online course that I've developed that guides you through how to build out your Asana account how to plan your Asana role out and how to train your team directly something else we recommend when rolling out Asana to your team is identifying an Asana Champion or what I call the chief Asana officer basically somebody on your team who's ultimately going to be responsible for asana's rollout and adoption unless you have somebody that's ultimately responsible for it we find that everyone tends to use it in their own different way and so the purpose of having that Asana Champion is they're someone that can help to train an onboard new employees and there's someone that can work with different team members and departments to make sure we're all using it consistently another common mistake we see and this is the result of not using the my tasks page that I talked about at the beginning is creating a private project for your work instead of using that my tasks page so because people often don't understand how to use this my tasks page what they do is they'll create a project a bit like this where they say you know pulled tasks and then what they do is they create their own task list in this project but you don't actually need to do this because the my tasks page is kind of like your own private project if I create a task directly on here so this is a task if I don't put this in a project this is just going to be private to me nobody else can see this I can also choose to view my tasks as a list like this or I can use the board layout or even the calendar view so this is in a sense my own private project and it really is you know creating your own private project like this separately is sort of a waste of time the next mistake we see all the time is people not using due dates this one is really confusing to me because putting a due date on a task is one of the most important bits of information about the task you know a task should tell you what you need to do who's doing it and when is it due when I'm working with a client and I ask why didn't you put a due date on that the reason people often give me is they'll say something like well it didn't really have like a strict deadline it's just something we need to do soon in situations like that I actually recommend still putting a due date on the task even if it doesn't have a strict or hard deadline that you need to hit it's still good to use the due date as a way of setting your intention and saying I'd like to do this by Friday even if you end up changing the due date and pushing it back to next week because other more important work comes up it's still better and it's a more effective way of working to have a due date that you maybe even change later versus having no due date at all the issue with having no due date on a task is you might find that lots and lots of tasks that which none of them have any due dates all kind of build up and there's no sense of urgency or way of prioritizing the work whereas if you use put some kind of due date on the task and say I'll do this one today this one tomorrow this one Friday again even if that changes later that's going to be more efficient more effective compared to not putting any due date on the task at all the next mistake we see coming up a lot is when people are too vague with task details and really just not providing enough information about a task so an example of that might be Simply Having a very vague task name uh maybe not even putting an assignee or a due date on and not elaborating here in the description or not including things like attachments and documents that are relevant you want to really be thinking about when you assign a task how is the other person going to know what to do you know am I providing enough information so that when they click on this task are they going to know what to do without having to come back to me and ask lots and lots of questions so here's an example this is a task that I assign to my virtual assistant Judy it says exactly what she needs to do create WordPress post and she can see it's a subtask of this earlier video that I made and I've actually included a big old checklist of everything she needs to do so this is sort of how I use Asana to store standard operating procedures or Sops you can check out my video on this and how I use templates for Sops you can click the video up here so you can see from Judy's point of view when she receives this task she knows what she needs to do she can click back to the parent task and she can see what parent her subtask is related to and she's got this checklist here of everything she needs to do so hopefully she can just do the task she doesn't need to come back to me and ask any clarifying questions okay and finally the final mistake we see a lot coming up with Asana users is using too many channels for communication and what I mean by this is not just Asana but also other tools and apps and services that you use for communication all tend to overlap quite a lot and there's not enough distinction about when to use different tools and services a common example might be something like slack we work with a lot of clients who use both Asana and slack and they're often because there's lots of different ways we can communicate obviously we've got email as well we often find there are conversations happening in multiple different places and so the advice we often give is that you need to clearly Define when to use each tool for example with Asana we recommend if you're talking about a task or a project which by default is probably most of the conversations you're having are should be task or project related then really that's a conversation that should be happening inside Asana and the benefit of doing that is then we can keep the conversation linked with the actual work that we're doing so when I click on a task I can see the conversation taking place I don't have to go switching over to slack to go and find the conversation but if I've got some of the conversation in Asana some of it's happening in slack where I've got different threads going on maybe I've got a couple of email threads going I've now divided the conversation up among multiple channels and it's really hard to make sense of where are we at and what do we need to do next so when you adopt a tool like Asana because this is one more tool that you can use to communicate in you want to clearly Define to your team when do we use a sign of a communication and how does it fit and how do we use it alongside other channels and other tools that we can communicate in like slack email instant messaging texting and so on and so there we go those are some of the common mistakes we see people making again and again with Asana as I mentioned before if you have any questions leave me a comment below and if you would like one-on-one help with setting up your account training and learning how to get the most out of Asana and onboarding your team then check out the link in the description below to learn more about our Asana Consulting options one more time thank you very much for listening and I will catch you in the next video

Channel: Paul Minors

Views: 21,304

Keywords: Common Asana Mistakes to Avoid UPDATED, how to use asana, how to asana, asana, asana tutorial, asana demo, asana how to, asana training, common mistakes, asana project management, asana how to use, how to use asana for beginners, how to use asana project management, how to use asana for business, asana tips, asana tutorial for beginners, asana review, how to run your business with asana, how i use asana to run my business, how to use asana 2022, asana demonstration

Id: Wuh823UNhYM

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 07 2022