How to use Asana for free in 2024 ?

hey guys so today I want to talk about using as sauna for free in 2024 there are of course some paid tiers that you can sign up for but there's a free version of a sauna that has quite a bit of functionality you can have unlimited projects with unlimited tasks you can upload an unlimited number of files and you can actually collaborate with up to 10 different people in that space so whether it's for personal task management or even for a small business there's quite a bit that you can do and I'm going to go through a couple of examples to show you that functionality today we're going to start with something B basic like a grocery list and we're going to work our way up into something a little bit more complex like managing invoices for clients or maybe a client schedule so that you can see all the different features and as we go through those I'll point out what is available for free and then what's not available that you might want to consider upgrading if you think it's worth it so let's Dive Right In I'm not going to walk you through how to create an account in a sauna it's pretty straightforward I think you can do it just go to asana.com click sign up walk through the prompts you'll find your way in this home page in no time on this homepage you're going to have a couple of widgets that are essentially links to all the information you have elsewhere in a sauna when you click on this customize button you can see the full list of widgets you have access to some of which you don't in the free version but some of which you do so you can drag over what you want the two that I'll point out is this private notepad it's kind of like your replacement sticky note where you can take notes maybe about a phone call you had or um maybe a gate code you don't want to forget or you can even tie direct links to tasks and projects within AA second you have this awesome widget that I love if you forget to actually post a comment so if you're collaborating with someone and you needed to ask a question it's actually going to show you what you forgot to hit post on so you can quickly hop in and click comment then it'll disappear from your draft comments area awesome okay so from there let's hop into our grocery list so every project in N sauna has to live in a team so I've got my team right here down at the bottom when I click on my team it's going to show me all of my projects in that team and I've got my grocery list right here when I open up the grocery list you can see that I've created sections for each store that I want to go to and I want to track a list for so that way as I'm going throughout my week if I think of something else I need to buy at that store I can hop into my grocery list maybe I also need to get pepper I can add that there then when I go to the store I open it up I go through my aisles and as I get things off my list I can check those off you also have fun animals that will fly across your screen as you just saw that is available in the free version they want to make sure everybody's having fun you don't have to pay for that so something for you to point out or something for me to point out and for you to notice is that as I Mark these things complete they're actually still showing here so of course if we continue to use this grocery list that's going to get quite long and a little bit annoying so what's awesome and for free in this version of a sauna is you can actually filter this so when you click on filter you can actually filter this by incomplete tasks so that you're only seeing what you haven't purchased yet so that's super helpful to clean that up and make sure it's only showing you what you still need to buy next the default behavior when you create a new project in a sauna it's always going to have this assign column and this due date column so of course for grocery list we don't need this so we can actually hide these columns we can rightclick or just click on the arrow and hit I hide column and so we've essentially changed the way that we can see and view this project and the reason I'm pointing that out is because we have over here this save view button what that does is that now I don't have to run that filter every time I come into this project it's going to remember that this is how I want to view it so I'm going to click save view so that I don't have to keep filtering out the incomplete tasks that's just always how I'm going to see it so now when I Mark something complete it's automatically going to disappear for me next what I want to point out is you do have a couple of other ways that you can view this project you have list view you have a board view maybe you prefer it that way you have a calendar view which can also be viewed as a month and you have a couple of other things some of which you have available in the free version but some that you don't for example the dashboard that's not something you can use in the free version and you also have a few other that might be showing on your screen like the timeline or the Gant those are not available in the free version you do have available this files tab which we're going to talk about a little bit later but just know that you can use use that in the free version okay so let's get a little bit more complicated now so we've looked at our grocery list let's talk next about maybe you want to track your credit cards and your bills that's something that you do need to assign and it does have due dates so really similarly I've created sections one for my credit cards one for my bills maybe you don't want those sections built out and you can just put everything in one section or you don't have to have sections at all that's totally optional so for these you can see I've assigned everything to myself and I put due dates on these bills immediately what I want you to notice is that there's this arrow on the due date what this means is that it's actually a recurring task so when I have made this payment I've got that done let's say that I paid this Chase Visa a little bit early I can mark this complete and what it's going to do is it's actually going to prepopulate that next Chase Visa payment for me so it just recreated that task and its due date is June 30th because this credit card is due every June 30th so something available in the free version is recurring tasks in order to set up a recurring task let's say I have another bill that I want to make sure I pay every month maybe it's my phone bill I can assign this to myself and when I plug in the due date let's say it's due on the 13th of every month I click down here set to repeat I want to make sure it repeats monthly and it's not on the second Monday but if that was something that was repeating for you you have that option it's going to be on the 13th and now it says set up that's all I have to do so every time I Market complete and I pay that bill it's going to create my next month's bill for me something else you may have noticed is that I've already have some filters and some sorts on here so I filtered by my incomplete tasks just like we did in the grocery list and I put my sort on the due date so it's in order of those due dates you can also see that I deleted those extra tabs that I need didn't want so I only have my list View and my calendar view so you have the ability to delete any views that you don't want if you want to keep this nice and clean okay let's continue to step it up what else can we do maybe we need to start talking about collaborating with other people so I have this project for traveling documents and planning so I want to go on some trips and I want my friends to help me plan this so I'm going to assign them some tasks for example I want to plan a trip to Nashville in June of 2024 I've actually assigned my husband a task to make a list of restaurants to visit I can actually see that there was a like on this task and we've got two comments posted here so when you want to start collaborating with other people and you need to assign tasks what else do we need to do for this Nashville trip let's say that we also want to reserve dinner reservations that doesn't make sense let's say make dinner reservations and I want my husband to also do that I click on his name and I put the date that I want it to be done by thanks babe so this is how you can collaborate with other people simply putting them in the assign list is going to send them an invitation into your ass space the other things I'm doing a little bit more complicated in this project is I have attached files so if I want to remember for example what hotel I booked because I will confess I have made hotel reservations and then when the time came completely forgot which hotel I booked and could not find my email confirmation anywhere that was a moment of panic and so I can actually attach that in my ass task so once I've completed it I me I have done this as you can see I marked it complete and you can see I don't have my filter on incomplete tasks because I still want to be able to find that information so I have attached to this task my hotel booking I also use the description box to just quickly put in the name the address of that hotel in the booking confirmation number again you might not be as crazy as me and might not need all that information but that's one example of what to use your description box for basically to provide more context or just things that you might need to remember on this tab ask that I'm collaborating on with my husband we can scroll down and we can see the comments back and forth we've got this comment where he suggested a particular restaurant and included a link to it I clicked on that link thought it looked delicious and so I let him know looks great let's book it we can also see here I have a task for the itinerary so you can also use the description box as a way to put in those notes about where you want to go maybe you just want to type your itinerary straight there or you can paste links to any outside documents like a Google doc file or a Dropbox file or anything like like that I also have a subtask here where I want to share this itinerary with my friend who lives in Nashville I want her to know what's going on if she can join us for anything she can see this itinerary so maybe she's not about as she's not in here but I just want to remember to share that with her I made a subtask assign it to myself with today's due date so I want to make sure I do that today as you can see if we keep scrolling I've got another section for my trip to Costa Rica I have all the same tasks I've assigned Li a little bit differently and I'm including my friend Allison in this one and I also have the Sim one for Paris France I want to go to Paris in March of 2025 this one I haven't even assigned out yet but it's something that I want to do I don't want to have to type these tasks every single time that I have a new trip so while you cannot template anything in the free version you do have to pay for that in the paid version you can have template tasks and you can have template projects in the free version the work around here is you can actually duplicate sections so I could either duplicate my Paris France trip or any one of these trips or I can create a little section that I'm going to call my template I'm going to click right here on more actions and I'm going to hit duplicate sections it's then going to ask me what all I want to copy and whatever I may not want to copy I can rename this so let's see where do I want to go next I want to go to somewhere in the mountains let's go to Patagonia and we're going to go in August of 2025 so I can choose to copy over if I wanted to copy the assignments Tas subscription subtasks Etc I have that option so this is pretty powerful and available in the free version you don't have to utilize the template um that you would have to pay for so when you do that it created that section for us and it created all of those tasks I can now drag that section above my template or if I wanted to prioritize it above France I could drag it above France and maybe I can collapse France or maybe this trip got cancelled I can actually delete this entire section and delete the tasks so the tools that we just covered in the free version that were a little bit more complicated here we can collaborate with others we can create subtasks we can like the tasks we can comment on the tasks and we can duplicate sections I mentioned earlier that we were going to talk about that files tab this is where that could come in handy as I showed you I attached my hotel booking to this um task and I attached my flight booking and if we have several other trips going on here maybe that files tab is helpful so if I go to my files tab what that's going to do is it's actually going to show anything that's been attached on those tasks as a quick reference they're not going to be organized in any particular way just something to note but again still could be helpful for you okay let's keep going and get to a little bit more complicated examples let's talk about that small business let's say we're running a small landscaping company with one or two other people and I have created a CL a project for my client every time I have a new client I'm going to create a project for them so that I can track important information like their client information how to access emergency contact info maybe this is where I want to list the services that they've requested and then I've made a section for scheduling so every time I need to go out to their place I'm actually going to create a task I'm going to assign it to the person responsible to do that work and then I'm going to put the day that I'm doing that work similarly I have a section for my invoices so every time I need to invoice my client I'm going to put that in the client project then I have the section for miscellaneous actions so none of that's new but again just showing you how you might want to consider structuring a client project what is new that I want to touch on and mainly focus on here is what's called multihoming multihoming is super powerful and again free to use multihoming is where you can put one task in multiple different projects so I have this column here showing what other projects these tasks might live in we can see at the top none of these tasks are in a different project but right here I've got a landscape schedule project what that's doing if we click on this project it's going to a calendar view to my landscape schedule project and it's going to show me every schedule item for every client rather than just my one client so that is really the power of multihoming is that I can have one project for each client so that when I need to focus on my client I can go to the client project but if I want to look at my schedule as a whole every time I schedule something for a client regardless of what client project it is I can then multi-home it in this landscape schedule so I can see that on Wednesday I needed to be at 5678 2nd Street yesterday I was at 9123 Street and today I'm at 1 2 3 4 1 street so today this is what I need to go do to do my schedule for my clients so multihoming is super powerful the way that multihoming works let's say that this was not in the landscape schedule yet all you do is when you are open up on that task here we have this task open the details are over here we can hit more actions and we can actually hit add to another project this is where I'm going to type in my landscape schedule and I'm going to add it to that landscape schedule for me it's then asking me if I want to put it in a different section which for my landscape schedule I don't really care about sections there if I accidentally multihomed something or I didn't need it multihomed anymore you can simply remove it from any other projects by hovering over that project name and hitting the X however here I do want that in that landscape schedule so I'm going to leave it there if we scroll down you can see that I did the same thing with my invoices so every time I create a client invoice it's also going into this invoice project another super helpful way to use multihoming is let's say that my accountant Allison she doesn't want to have to go into to every individual client project to see the invoices this is where we can consolidate all of the invoices that she needs to be managing regardless of the client in one place so you can see we have a completely different setup in this project in this project we have sections for the phase that that invoice is in so Allison has two invoices that she needs to create she has three that she's sent out to the client that are awaiting payment we've got one that's late and we've got a couple that are paid so this is the power of multihoming whenever you're ready to create another invoice we can do something similar to what we did when we duplicated our section so like I mentioned you don't have access to template tasks but you can duplicate tasks so if we rightclick we can duplicate this task we can rename it let's say we need to make this our April invoice invoice for this client and then it's asking me what I want to copy over I want to copy over the assign the subtasks the attachments I don't want to copy over because I'm going to attach my invoice to this file so I have a quick reference later maybe I want to cop copy over collaborators I definitely want to copy over projects that's what's going to get my multihoming to work and I don't want to copy over my due date so we're good there so we're going to hit duplicate and now we can see it's populated right here if I open it up I can see it's in my invoices project however it is in the wrong section so I need to make sure I put that in ready to create and so that's the next next thing I want to touch on when you are using multihoming and you are using the free version something you are lacking is access to rules this is available in the advanced tier when you have a rule what you could do is you could automatically well one you could have a task template but two you could also make it so that it will run a rule based on criteria you give it so when a new task is added to my invoice project always put it in the ready to create section for example so when you're in the free version there is some manual upkeep that is required but it's still super powerful and a great way to run that small business and a great way to come into the platform while maybe you're testing it out and seeing if it works for you and when you're ready to power up you can so let's say this is something I want Allison to work on on Tuesday make sure she creates that by then I give her that due date maybe I want to post a comment so this is how I can collaborate with my accountant maybe she works virtually maybe she only works part-time and so I'm not able to call her all the time whatever it is we can consolidate our conversations in the tasks that we're actually talking about the last thing I'll touch on here is that similar to the fact that we don't have task templates we don't have project templates either so whenever I'm ready to create a new project um for my new client I don't want to duplicate this existing client project since it's got a bunch of tasks here that are completed and have assignments and different things like that I might what I have done as a workaround is I've actually C created created if I go back to my team I created for myself a template landscape client project so this is a project where I created the sections I wanted the tasks that I wanted and I made that template invoice task for myself as well that's already multihomed in my invoice project what I can do here is I can then duplicate this project so it serves like a template again the template functionality is available in the starter package and it does have a little bit more functionality so a little bit less maintenance than youd have to do but again when you're using the free version this is still a great option to have so we can name our client whatever we need to name it we can copy over what we want to copy over and create that new project not bad so a couple more things to touch on and this is really the bread and butter of a sauna this is why you get a sauna yes multihoming is awesome filtering unlimited projects all these things I've touched on but really what makes SAA amazing is my tasks so we just talked about all of those things that we're working on whether it was personal for the grocery list or the credit card builds or the traveling or maybe it was a client action or an invoice that I need to follow up on whatever it might be your my tasks is where you're going to have that list of what you need to do today regardless of the project so it's going to house everything in one place for you so I can see quickly I have two tasks P do that one of them is for my client I needed to create a new schedule item for them and one is my mortgage payment this is actually past due I better get on top of this then I can see okay today here are the four things that I have due today this one has is a work item I need to go mow the lawn this is for traveling I'm going to book tickets for the grand doll opery this is my subtask um to share that itinerary with my friend and then I have my credit card and my bills um I got to pay my AT&T today so my tasks is really just amazing and this is why you get a sauna you are able to see everything you need to do in one spot and it consolidates all of those different projects together for you and so really more than anything else you'll probably be in your my tasks more than your actual projects because this is really telling you everything you need to do you're only going to go into the project when you need to create new tasks once I've paid this mortgage payment I can just mark this complete and it will create that new one for me so when we were in my credit cards and bills project when I marked those things complete and it generated that new task for me it does the same thing when my I'm in my my tasks so I've marked that complete if I scroll down I can see this next mortgage payment automatically popped up for June and so this is the beauty of AA and so lastly we'll touch on inbox so your inbox is really going to be helpful for you if you're collaborating with other people so in the free version you still have this inbox and it's basically a notification center so if people have commented on those things if they've assigned you new tasks things like that so we can see here this comment that my husband had left for me that we were looking at in the project the notification actually came through in my inbox so this is where I can quickly become up todate with any changes that have been made to the tasks that I'm following once I've read this notification and I've responded however I needed to as for this one I already posted a comment that it looks great let's go ahead and book it I can archive that notification so that I know that I'm done with that I don't need to do anything else I don't want this to become a second task list for me so here I can see that my accountant Allison had Chang the due date this is something that's pass due and you know what I actually already did this so I can mark that complete archive that notification this last notification is something that a will send you it basically gives you a preview of your tasks for the day that's great I'm going to Archive that and not spend too much time on it now I'm up to date with my team's work awesome as I mentioned earlier in your my tasks if you mark something complete in your my tasks it's getting marked complete in those projects the same thing with your inbox you can see that I had marked that task complete right from my notification if I go back to my my tasks we can see I no longer have any tasks that are passed due and now I can just focus on the task that I have today and so that's my review hopefully that inspired you it showed you some features that are available in the free version that'll make you want to hop in there and maybe create some either basic or complex projects for yourself to help manage your to-do list or maybe your small business and to be be honest I could keep going there's a lot about as sauna a lot that can be helpful and if you want to see a complete list of the features that are available and not available you can actually go to asana.com pricing and see that comparison for you some of the things that I touched on today that are not available are task templates project templates um some of those views on your projects and several other things that I didn't have time to get to such as goals portfolios custom Fields so again that full list is going to be on the asana.com pricing page but this is a great way to get started on the platform and try out some things create some projects do some collaborating see what you think that my tasks View and if you're ready to upgrade you can go up to that starter package or up to the advanced if you want access to um rules and portfolios and extra reporting things like that but as a small business owner maybe a stay-at-home mom and you're just trying to get some organization out of the chaos of everything going on this is a great way to get started

Channel: iDO, your Asana experts

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Id: DQUwDTX4LLU

Length: 23min 25sec (1405 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 18 2024