How to organise your 'My Tasks' in Asana

hello my name is Paul miners welcome back to another one of my Asana training videos in this video I want to give you some tips on how to clean up and organize your my tasks page in Asana this is an area of Asana that we see users often struggling with maybe you don't even use the my tasks page at all in which case you're really missing a really useful part of Asana or maybe you're like one of the clients we've worked with where your your my tasks is full of lots of tasks but there's no structure or sense of priority and it makes it really hard to decide what to work on next so stay tuned I'll be giving you some tips in this video but if you have any questions at the end feel free to leave me a comment below and if you would like one-on-one help with setting up or optimizing your Asana account or if you'd like team training for your team so that we can improve the adoption of Asana within your company then click on the link in the description below to learn more about my Asana Consulting options so without further Ado let's get into this video now let me start by clarifying what the this my tasks page is all about or what is its purpose firstly you'll find it up here on the sidebar and this page basically shows me any task that is assigned to me so if I click on this task here you'll see the assignee is me Paul Miners And so anything I assign to myself or if other people assign tasks to me whether that's a task in one of my projects or if I just create a standalone task it doesn't have to be in a project you can see here I can just create a random task for myself that's that's not in a project it could even just be a subtask so I could create this subtask anything with my name on it that's assigned to me will appear on this screen and the purpose of this page is it's the page that shows you everything you need to do and I've said this in many of my videos before but it's probably the page that I spend about 80 to 90 percent of my time using rather than having to click through my projects this is what we find most people do is they click through all of their projects to go and find their tasks and you're actually making life harder than it needs to be if you use the my tasks page properly and you organize it correctly you can actually just work from this screen and Asana will tell you what you need to do today tomorrow and this week and so that's what I'm going to be showing you here now when you first sign up to Asana you'll probably have some default sections similar to what I've got here you should have something called recently assigned this is the sort of default section or that really the section at the top of the page this recently assigned one this is where tasks go when they are assigned to you so like when I assign this subtask to myself it goes into the topmost section which as I've said is probably called recently assigned you might have slightly different sections to me and then I also have some additional sections for what I'm working on today this week next week and what's coming up later and if you want to create new sections of your own or just copy what I've done here you can add a section up here or you can add sections here and give it a name just remember that the section at the very top that's going to be the one that tasks go to by default when they're assigned to you now how I recommend using this page is to set up some rules which is going to have a sign automatically move tasks through these sections as they forward you and there's only two rules that we need to set up so I'm going to go to my customize menu here and if I scroll down here is where I can create some rules you can add a role here and what we want to use is one of these due date is approaching rules so if I click on this template here I can I recommend having a rule where if the due date is approaching and it's due today we can have a sign up automatically move that task to your today section and I've actually already got that rule set up here so here it is if a task is due today move it to the today section pretty simple the other rule is if it's due or when it's due rather one week before move it to the next week section so those are the two rules we set up now let me explain how they're going to work in practice and how I recommend using this page so as I mentioned before when tasks get assigned to you either tasks you create for yourself or if other people on your team assign you tasks they're going to arrive in this top section here which mine is called recently assigned now the trick here is this should be a temporary holding place for your tasks you should not leave tasks in this section and that's kind of probably the most common mistake we see people make is they don't sort their tasks they just leave them here and then you end up with a big mess like I have here all these tasks some of them have due dates some are overdue some of them are coming up today but it's all just really unorganized what we need to do instead is then triage these tasks into the different sections and we can do that by clicking this little arrow here and you can move the task to one of these sections so because this task here is due today I'm going to move this to my today section and you'll see it will appear down here in that today section if you have anything coming up in the next seven days like this one here is coming up on Tuesday I would put this in your uh I would put this in your this week section or actually rather actually this is next week so sorry I'll put mine into next week because it's the next working week some people by the way if you've just created your Asana account you might have a section called upcoming which kind of acts the same as these two but I've just sort of customized mine slightly differently here and then anything that you have that's due more than a week away so like this one here that's due next month in June I'm gonna move to later so very simple you just triage the tasks into those different sections based on the due dates if you have any tasks like this with the red dates because these are actually overdue I recommend updating the due dates because we can't plan our time towards a date that's in the past I can't plan to do this yesterday it doesn't that's not how time works so I am gonna what I might do is say okay well I didn't do this yesterday I'll do this on Friday instead so I'm going to update my due date and then I'll rearrange this I'll put this into this week because that's this working week and then any tasks that don't have a due date like these ones here you see there's no due date assigned I would actually recommend trying to put a due date on them because if I don't have a due date and I move it to one of these sections let's say I put this into next week so it goes down it goes down here it's now going to stay there because there's no date on this task my rules that I've created which I'll be explaining shortly those rules can't run because there's no due date on the task so my suggestion with these ones is try and put a due date on all of your tasks even if that's what I would call a soft due date even if it's a date that's flexible maybe you change that later I think it's better from a time management and planning point of view to put some kind of date on your tasks so that you can plan your time and so now what I'll do is I'll go through I'll sort the rest of these tasks and I'll sort them into my today this week next week and later sections based on these dates so here we go that's step one complete you see my recently assigned section is now empty I've triaged and I've sorted all of my tasks and that is the best practice well that's a habit that you really want to get into and be following every single day as new tasks come in sort them into today this week next week or upcoming if you have an upcoming section or later based on the due dates now with that done let's explain how these rules work so if I go down to later here if I have a task like this assign parent task to designer you see this is due on the 22nd of June and this rule that I created remember if it's due or when it's due seven days out move it move the task to the next week section so what that's going to mean is on June 15th when this is seven days away from being due Asana will automatically move that up into my next week section and that's going to run at midnight and that's an important um clarification I want to make with these rules is the rules run at midnight I often have people asking me you know oh I've changed the dates you know maybe if I assign this to today people are expecting that if I assign that to today the rule here should move that to today that's actually not how it works Asana runs the rules at midnight because it's a due date approaching tasks it waits till midnight and when the date changes it looks at everything due that's coming up in seven days and it moves them from later into next week and then anything that's due today will move into today so if I have a task like this which is actually due tomorrow this will move up into my today section at midnight tonight so what that means is every single morning I can open up my Asana and my today section here has been refreshed and it's showing everything that's due today or if I use a start date let's say I have this starting tomorrow and finishing next week it should now move based on the start date and so this is basically how I've been using Asana for the last 10 years or so since I started using Asana back in 2012. I simply move the tasks from that recently assigned section into my today upcoming and later sections and then I let Asana take care of the rest because I have those Rules running in the background each morning I open up my Asana and my today section just shows me what I have due or starting that day and this highlights the importance of using start dates even if it's a flexible sort of soft deadline that I move and I you know maybe I want to postpone that task to later it just means I have an opportunity because Asana is going to put it in my today section I can look at it I can be reminded about it and if I want to I can change the date move it back down to later and those rules will rerun later and I will and the task can resurface when I'm ready and the other reason I really like working in Asana this way is that it keeps my my tasks page really clean you can see actually most of the time I keep my this week next week later section closed I really just focus on what I have due today and you can see this is a really clean simple list that helps me to focus and prioritize what I'm working on today now I know that not everyone is going to like working this way you know we all have different preferences and ways we like to work fortunately on this my tasks page there are a few other ways that we can view our tasks there is a board layout but really it's not that different to the list view it's just switching the rows into columns but there we go you can look at this as a board if you like there's also a calendar view where you can look at the upcoming week you know slightly more sort of just different visual way of of looking at what's coming up today and what's coming up this week or at the uh at the weekend you can also if I go back to my list view there are some sorting options here and what I find a lot of particularly new users do in Asana is they will sort their tasks by due date because this makes a lot of sense let's just sort them in order of debt but as you can see here this is just one big list there's no real structure it's quite hard to sort of prioritize and it just is a big list that can feel quite overwhelming if you have a lot going on so I personally don't like sorting by due date there is also the option to sort your tasks by project if you want to see kind of project by project what you have coming up this might be useful to you but again I'm not a huge fan of this because it's just a very big list personally I don't apply any sorting I sort by none and I work within these sections and I use the rules because I find like I said it's the cleanest it's the more sort of minimal approach where it keeps my lists my list of tasks really clean and again Asana kind of tells me what to do the rules run at Mid night move the tasks around for me I open up Asana the next day and I can get to work nice and quickly the other common mistake that I see a lot of people making is simply assigning too many tasks to themselves it's very easy when you're new to Asana it's exciting we put everything in there but I see a lot of people adding things to a sign are like articles they want to read they just put random notes in there or even tasks for things like they might want to do someday they're just kind of ideas but they're not really committed to doing that work yet so they put all these things in Asana they assign them to themselves and again that list gets really overwhelming it gets really messy so for tasks like this you know articles or books I want to read notes that I've taken in a meeting or maybe ideas that I'm still working on but I haven't really committed to or decided that I want to proceed just yet I don't think these things belong on your my tasks page I think we want to keep your my tasks page for the important time sensitive tasks that you've committed to working on in the upcoming days and weeks and months so we need to unassign these because that's going to remove it from this page but I also don't want to lose track of these tasks so I've created this project here called someday and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold my shift key and I'm going to shift click to select these three tasks and then I'm going to move them to that someday project so I put them in that someday project here we are down here we can see them there we go and the last thing I'll do is I'll select them again and I'm going to remove myself as the assignee by clicking that X next to my name so now they've disappeared they're no longer on my tasks that this page now is only those time sensitive important things that I'm working on in the short term and this Sunday project I could review this once a week once every couple of weeks every month and if there's something in here that I decide you know what I'm ready to move forward with this I want to work on this idea I would then reassign this to myself I would put a date on it so maybe I decide I'm going to work on this next week and then now if I go back to my tasks here it is in the recently assigned section just like before I will then move this to the appropriate section so because this is due on Tuesday I'll put it into oh I'll put it into uh next week and then because I have this rule running here next week on the due date that task is going to resurface and it's going to appear in my today section on the due date I don't have to worry about forgetting about it so that I think is a useful way of managing those sort of less important uh you know tasks ideas and things you don't want to lose track of but they're not really time sensitive you don't need to do them in the short term so that is a look at how to organize your my tasks page as I said this is often an area of Asana that people just don't use or they're not really following good best practices so I encourage you to adopt the rules that I've shown you here today or try some of those other methods of sorting your tasks and make it a habit each day of looking at your my tasks page keeping it up to date keeping it tidy and if there's anything you didn't have time to complete that day because sometimes you you run out of time or urgent work comes up then make sure you update those due dates at the end of the day you can change them to tomorrow or the next day or next week and then sort the task accordingly that way you can keep your my tasks really clean there's nothing overdue and it makes just keeping on top of your work and planning what to do next that much easier if you have any questions feel free to leave me a comment below thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Paul Minors

Views: 21,429

Keywords: How to organise your 'My Tasks' in Asana, asana, how to asana, how to use asana, asana tutorial, asana how to use, how to organize my tasks in asana, asana how to video, asana how to organize my tasks, how to organize my tasks on asana, asana tips, asana demo, how to create recurring tasks in asana, asana project management, how to create tasks and subtasks in asana, how to organize tasks, how to create recurring tasks in asana 2022, how to organize team tasks

Id: 7lO5GXSsY8c

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2023