Common Asana mistakes to avoid (NEW VERSION OF THIS VIDEO NOW AVAILABLE)

hello my name is Paul minors and welcome to another one of my asana training videos in this video I want to go through some common mistakes that I see new asana users making so that you can hopefully try and avoid these these common pitfalls now if you have any questions please leave me a comment below and if you do want to learn more about how to set up asana optimize it for your business on board your team and what best practices you should be following on a daily basis then have a look in the description below my video where you'll find details of my master asana online course group training program and where there's options to get private consulting with me as well so let's get into this video I've listed some common mistakes right here and the first one I see quite a lot is not checking the inbox often enough the inbox is where you get notified about updates to tasks that you are a collaborator on here in asana and so the mistake is that people often just don't check it the the reason that's an issue is because then you're going to fall behind and important updates about tasks are going to get missed especially if people are commenting down here and they're trying to communicate with you if you are not checking the inbox those important communications are going to get missed and generally trust in asana will start to break down because people feel like you know i'm commenting Paul's not replying and so adoption within a bigger team can really be hindered if people aren't checking that inbox enough so that's number one is just check the inbox with the inbox as well I would recommend coming to your notification settings and disabling activity updates that means you won't get emailed every single time there's an update here in a sauna because I know that can get really intense so uncheck that box but then yes you do have to be checking the inbox on a regular basis when you do make sure you are marketing tasks as archive of the notifications as archived once you've dealt with them so this little archive option here or it's just the e shortcut will archive the notification so that's a really important habit to get into because when you've archived all your notifications in your inbox you have a nice empty inbox like this and it means when new notifications come in it's really obvious what you need to now go and deal so that's my first common mistake not checking the inbox second mistake is leaving tasks open and not completing them it's really strange to me because I know it's a ticking off tasks is so satisfying I would have think a lot of people would do this but it is quite common I work with teams and they say I'm going through their tasks with them and they'll say all that task was actually done I just haven't I haven't checked it off yet and it's really important to check them off because you want to keep asana up to date sometimes there is confusion about who should mark the task as complete and I think that's just something like a conversation you should just have with the team but sometimes people feel like if I give you a task that I should be the one to market is complete but I'm personally of the opinion that if I've given you a task you should mark it as complete because you're the one doing the work as the assign or if I have an issue or if I have any questions I will get notified in my inbox and so I can go and look at that task I can even reopen it if I need to but as a general rule it's the assignee that should be marketing tasks as complete once you've done the work and once it's complete you can still have discussions and you will of obviously see those notifications in your inbox third common mistake is not using the my tasks page this my tasks page is here on the sidebar this is the page that shows you all the tasks assigned to you from all of the projects that you're working in and so some users will literally click through all of their projects here to try and go and find their tasks and they click through and look for the tasks that are theirs well they work in one or two projects and that's it but this my tasks page is a really powerful player page because it groups together all the tasks that you're working on in one place and there are a few ways that you can organize your tasks there's you've got this today upcoming later view that I've explained in previous videos you can look at your tasks in the calendar layout you can just look at your tasks over here sorting by project or by due date so there are a number of ways you can sort your tasks whatever you choose to do use that's up to you there's a little bit of personal preference there but my big my big takeaway here is use this page to keep up to date with what you have to do and to plan your time a little bit I find if you're just clicking through projects to go and find your tasks you're more likely to miss something but basically anything assigned to you will show up here and you're much less likely to miss it along the same lines of that is some people will use a private project for work that they are doing instead of actually using this my tasks page so they might set up a project where they go you know pulls tasks and they set that to be private like this and they basically just use that project as their own to-do list now you can do that but to be honest I feel like it's unnecessary because you have this my tasks page and one of the things you can do on here is you can create a task a bit like this one that I've got here and this is actually private to me because I haven't added it to a project you can see here it's not in a project it says I can add it to a project here but because I haven't added it to a project it's just private to me so I don't need to have a private project for my tasks I can just add them to my tasks and again have everything in one place and that means there's just one less project on the sidebar I think you'll find it's just a bit cleaner another common mistake is not using due dates this is a real shame because I think the due days feature is really useful way to obviously set expectations around when tasks need to be completed by now I think sometimes there's a hesitation around using due dates because people think well this task it doesn't really have a due date I just need to get it done soon you know in the next month and so I'll just leave it blank and so the danger with that though is that there's no urgency and there's no way to prioritize your tasks between this one and others and so if you when you are on your mind tasks you're not you're then not going to see it on the calendar or when you're sorting by due date it's not really going to show in this list because it's it's going to show down here because it has no due date so not using due dates just means there's no urgency no way of organizing your tasks into a sequence and so what I like to do is put some kind of due date on my tasks and often I will use the due date to kind of set my intention in fact most of my tasks don't really have strict deadlines but they have due dates which I basically used to say look I'd like to make this video on Monday if it doesn't happen on Monday I'll change it I'll do it on Wednesday or whenever but I'm gonna put a due date on to basically say I would like to do it on Monday and so that's what I mean when I say I used the due date to set my intention it's kind of my plan of when I'm gonna do this task even though that might change later long story short use due dates I think it will create more urgency and help you to prioritize your tasks another common mistake is being too vague with your task details and this is particularly an issue when you are assigning tasks to other people sometimes you might assign a task where the name up here is too vague it's not really actionable and so using a verb an actionable word to describe the task is a really good way to give somebody a really clear task but also make it make sure you are taking advantage of the features this asana has given to us so you've got the description here where you can type notes you can upload files you can add tags you can set date ranges but just take advantage of all those different features to make sure you are putting enough information into a task remember as well you can comment back and forth with the person that you're working with to talk about the task and collaborate but I think if you're not putting enough information into a task that's almost where asana is going to become more of a hindrance then it's actually going to help because somebody might receive a task and they think I don't know what this is about I'm gonna have to go an email Paul and talk about it and so just before you assign a tasks to someone make sure you are putting in enough information attaching documents and a really useful tip actually that I'll give you as well is recording videos actually can be really useful this is something I do with my virtual assistant is I will use loom loom comm to record a video with instructions of what I need that person to do and then I'll put the link into here and so that person can just watch a video and it's it's brilliant because it it communicates a lot more information than can in simply a few sentences and the final task excuse me final mistake that I think people often make is setting up too many tasks in asana and what often happens when i look at some of these tasks is they're my tasks page is completely full they've just gone to town they've gotten really excited and they've set up loads of tasks for everything they need to do and they've broken everything down into individual tasks the issue with that is it can just feel really overwhelming and so my solution for you is to take advantage of subtasks a bit like I'm doing here so rather than creating lots and lots of tasks you might group group lots of those tasks together into some kind of big parent task and take advantage of the subtasks to minimize what's what you're actually seeing on this my tasks page another tip that you can use is you don't have to assign everything to yourself so let's say I'm working on some tasks here maybe these couple of tasks here they are my tasks but they're not due yet so what I could do is I could leave them unassigned so you see the assignee here is blank but then when it's time to work on them I assign it to myself and that way it shows up on my tasks up here and so now I can start to work on it but being more strategic about when you assign a task means that your my task list here can be kept a little tidy a little more minimal a little less overwhelming but that's my final mistake to avoid is take advantage of the subtasks be strategic with assigning your tasks to make sure that your task list doesn't become too overwhelming what I do see is people get overwhelmed and then they just feel like a sauna sauna is not for me I don't like it when really it's not really a sauna it's actually your use of a sauna that just needs to be thought of in a different way so that is my final mistake if there are any other big mistakes that you find yourself making and you want to share those please leave me a comment below thank you very much for watching and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Paul Minors

Views: 58,597

Keywords: asana demo, asana tutorial, asana, project management tool, project management, task management, common mistakes, asana training

Id: exV_yvoJJf8

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2020