How to use ASANA for Getting Things Done (GTD)

what's going on everybody lucas here and today we will take a look at asana and see if we can make it work as a personal productivity tool rather than a collaborative project manager which it is built for so we're gonna take it in a bit of a different direction than what it's meant for however i think you'll be surprised to see how well it can function i built a complete system and i'll show you how you can rebuild it from a to z and use it it is gtd inspired and it's actually a video i also made last year but i got some feedback letting me know i may have missed a few features here and there basically i wasn't using asana to its full potential so i took a deeper dive here and i think i've come up with something that can work really well let's not waste any more time and dive right in so you can be the judge before we dive into how we can actually use it on a day-to-day basis let's first have a look at the settings and make sure everything's in order there you can go to the right top click on your picture and then navigate to my settings from there you already start to see a lot of this is related to collaborative project management your full name i guess that's understandable but things like your role department or team about me that's all for others to read if you were to use the software together with others and it's why i've left all of this empty because we're gonna use this just for ourselves here notifications that's where it starts to become more useful of course you can get notified about certain things like new tasks mentions again that's more collaborative but daily summaries may be helpful weekly reports etc you can set these up in any way you see fits helpful that it's kind of segmented and you have some choice there where it gets really useful is email forwarding this is one way to capture to the inbox and we will look at other ways to do that in just a moment by forwarding any email to this address which you can also set up in your email client with an auto forward rule etc it will become really easy to forward whatever you capture in your email inbox into asana and they will appear including the full body of the email and i'll show you another way to do that as well you can set up various account settings such as the organization name again not really relevant here i just named it after myself because this is about managing your own life so to speak you can set up your theme language when does your week start all of that is helpful and there's various integrations that you could activate or deactivate now the one that i would want you to search and install is the gmail add-on if you use gmail of course they also have outlook and maybe a few others but this is one additional way to capture to the inbox flow sauna is one that i've tried and it does work but in the end for this system we won't need it and i won't get into it they just provide some additional if then ruling and automations if you want to get more granular in advance but we won't need that here lastly we have hacks which is not really interesting for us just keep this or set this up in any way you want it doesn't really matter for this system so first up what we're looking at here is the asana home screen and while it may look attractive at first sight it is pretty well designed it is honestly not that useful you can only have four widgets here and they are saying that more are coming soon which may be interesting but as of recording you can have a notepad for jotting down quick notes and frankly i think that's the most useful one of all you can have a collection of projects either recent one or only your favorites i've toggled on favorites at this point and i'll show you why i did that in just a moment my priorities and this is where yeah it's just a collection of all tasks based on certain due dates or whether or not they're blocked by other tasks we'll get into that later as well but you can't really filter this for what you consider to be a priority you have upcoming overdue based on due dates and completed and i don't even know why that would be here why would a completed task be a priority doesn't really make sense to me and again people not really necessary because we are just using it ourselves right if you have an account that you share with others because you're working on this with your business then it's another story but this is honestly one we can just deactivate you have some ability to customize full size means it obviously spans the whole screen we're going to actually remove this one i wouldn't be looking at this at all honestly if i were to use asana another screen i won't be looking at much at all is the inbox and that may sound strange because you'd think especially if it's for gtd well an inbox is something you desperately need and that is true however in asana the inbox is more like an internal communications tool you get notifications if other users again the collaborative nature showing itself commenting on a task mentioning you etc and that's just not going to happen if you use this on your own and therefore this is something that will be inactive and something that you will not use so why am i mentioning it it's because it is present very prominently on the left sidebar here i just want to make sure that you know how to interpret this and that's important as we will be doing some heavy reinterpreting of some asana features to make it work from a gtd perspective so let's finally look at a screen that we will be using a lot which is the my tasks view this is a collection of all kinds of tasks that live in your asana system you have some flexibility though in what shows up here and we could take this very far and if you want to then you certainly can by adding specific sections and specific rules which you can customize here however we kept it pretty simple here and added two sections and that is it all you have to do here is add one section and you name it inbox and another one that you name processed the inbox that is actually the place where new input will land new tasks that you add from wherever whether it's email or as you can see here very easily we can just press add task and it automatically adds them to the inbox and as you can see we have these columns here due date projects and attacks you can customize what you see here so just toggle all of these on and then you will also see these columns and as you can see these are empty and that's the point right we are just capturing raw input at this time into the inbox so they're not associated with anything you won't see this task anywhere else until we start to associate it with something and that's something we'll do later when we explain clarifying for now let's first look at some other ways with which you can capture to this inbox for example email i've got an email here this is actually a marketing email from todoist hey todoist meet asana because we're gonna integrate this email into the asana inbox and here's what we can do we can go to the right hand side which is the asana for gmail integration so make sure you've installed that then we select create new task and from there you can already see the task name changes to follow up on whatever the email title is that is well thought out because it may think this is an email you need to take action on later but it doesn't have to be it could be an email that you want to add to your reading list for example like it's a newsletter or a reference even the good thing is you can change the title that's what we're going to do we're just going to give it the original one from here you can also give it a due date and a description we make sure add email to task is activated and we can also select this option frankly i don't think it really matters again because you're the only one using it and i think this is about the organization name i'm just going to press it but it doesn't really matter we press create task and now you can see already from the integration that in the body of the task the email with all its text and links though i will say it doesn't look that pretty is at least integrated within asana let's see how it looks from asana directly now we're back into asana and we can see that the email was added immediately we can press it and inside of the comments it says edit from gmail see more and again the layout is not as pretty especially the links it doesn't seem to take hyperlinks into account you can obviously copy paste them and it will work but i would have rather seen more attention to full markup however you can click the link here and it will take you to the full email in your web browser now let's see how we can add several of the needed lists for gtd into asana and this is where the aforementioned reinterpretation starts to really appear because what i've done is actually navigate to teams and in there i've created four different lists so to speak the first one is my projects the second one is agendas the third one is someday maybe and the fourth is reference the good thing is that you can rename teams usually they would probably want you to put in marketing sales development and other teams in there and it also prompts you to invite people but you're kind of gonna have to ignore that and it will still work the reason i did this is that these are categories of sorts within which you can have several other lists for example individual projects in this example i pretended to be a car salesman one project could be that we have a bmw that we want to put up for sale there's a few cool things that i want to show you here the first is that you have several views that you can use to view the same project you have an overview you have a list view which is very useful but also a board view if you have more time sensitive stuff you can have a timeline view a calendar you can even add custom automations if you want to we won't need that here but it is there as an option there's a dashboard for detailed analysis of how the project is progressing messages again we won't need that we also have files a collection of every attachment that is part of this project and here's how i interpreted it for this specific project so if i'm a car salesman then if i want to sell a certain car i put bmw here i may have to follow the following steps the first is to complete paperwork let's say i want to purchase it first i need to complete the paperwork once i've done that i can wait for the delivery after i've received it i need to wash the car after i've washed it i need to take pictures of it and lastly i need to post it on my website and then my bmw is officially up for sale and we can mark the project complete the way i interpreted all these steps is by using tags and that's something you will have to get used to if you want to use asana in this way let's look at the first task for example complete paperwork we can press details and we can see a couple of things the first is that it is assigned to me and the second is that it is part of the processed list under the my tasks view if you remember this is one of the two sections and this is simply because if it isn't part of this it will automatically default to the other one however this is no longer part of the inbox we've already completely processed this item we've associated it with a project we have assigned text to it in this case a context attack for office a time tag and time estimate for 20 minutes or less and an energy tag which we think it's going to take medium energy we even have something called dependencies and this is one thing i really love about asana as this means tasks or items will automatically open up in a predefined way what you can see here is that only complete paperwork has a check mark for being completable all the other items here don't and that is because we can't wait for the delivery if we haven't completed the paperwork yet to actually receive it it just doesn't make sense and the same is true for all these others in other words this is a sequential project and every single task here is dependent on the previous one being completed here we have another one wash car the contacts are already defined however it is blocking the task after it which is take pictures but it is also blocked by the delivery which we first need to get and all of that you can set up here add another dependency blocked by or blocking something else and you can select anything that you've added into your asana system here and that is how projects can be organized in asana to recap make sure it is assigned to yourself even if you're the only one using it make sure that you have tags and that you have dependencies set up appropriately if it is a sequential project like this one of course if every task can be completed simultaneously you won't need any of those and all of them will appear completable we also have a section within this project which is support material in this example the bmw that we're putting up for sale we want to also include the maintenance history i just added a pdf to show how you can add attachments which you can do by adding comments to the task and here you can see you can add a attachment and again those will also show up in separate view under files so you won't even necessarily need a separate section i like that it is separated in this way though now of course not everything is going to be part of a multi-step outcome some are standalone actions that can receive a separate list which i gave it here i named it standalone actions and it has a couple of dummy tasks all with different energy estimations different time estimations and also different contexts so if you want to see from a project level how things are progressing right you can use the overview you can use the dashboard to really see a kind of progress chart then this is how you can do it make sure that the status is also filled out at least on track at risk off track on holds that doesn't matter as much if you want to use that for your own reviewing that is helpful but make sure that anything that is finished is actually set to complete that way it won't clutter your view here what i've also done here is favorites these two projects which you can do by pressing the star right here as well as here and that will make sure they appear in the widgets in home so if you were to use these widgets and you want to get an easy overview of your projects this is done by selecting favorites you can also see it here and making sure only actionable active projects have the favorite status because we want to make sure it's differentiated from another type of list named agendas this is for questions talking points you may have with others in your life people for example let's say that we have a client and we want to ask them whether they're still interested in the bmw you can add sections for individual people in your life in the boardview this is maybe better to do it this way because then you can have them visually next to each other you could even use tags to tag them by family for example like the communities you have in your life that's all possible and up to you same is for meetings which i gave a separate list here sales department meeting present quarterly figures and organizations again if you may interact with another company a car salesman might interact with car parts incorporated regularly you can add anything that you want to discuss with them whenever you see them next up we have the someday maybe list in other words the kind of bucket list or the incubation list and here i did something interesting i added another project first i added it to my projects and then maybe the salesman the car salesman decided i'm not going to be able to sell this tesla right now but i want to do it in the future i changed the title to on hold and moved it to someday maybe but most importantly i unassigned the actions that are part of this project here you can select assignee you can also bulk select by holding and pressing shift as such and then changing the assignee why is this so important this is important because we can view our next actions from context based on saved searches and to me saved searches is really where asana starts to become powerful what you can do is set up a search here and then press advanced search you'll be presented with a lot more options than just searching for these pre-defined filters or a name here i've created a context already based on the laptop tag but not only on that so let's click refine search to see exactly the conditions for appearing in this list the first one is that it is assigned to you yourself again for tasks that aren't actionable at this point those should not be assigned anyone otherwise they would show up here and this someday maybe project would also show up as if it was actionable and that's what we want to avoid so make sure assigned to equals actionable at this time we leave these empty but we make sure that the tag for the context that we're filtering for is included and also importantly that they are not currently blocked because this sequential project i showed you before all the actions were already assigned to me as it is an active project but if the action is currently blocked even though we've predefined the context doesn't help to show it here we want to see what can we do at this time in this context those three are used to create this search you can save the search and then name it and i use an emoji to spice it up some more and i did that for these contexts as well for the salesman an example context can also be office and here you can see the complete paperwork tasks that we saw from the project view first and we can even press the project name here to view it from that view so we can shift between views which is really nice to see additionally we can have an overview of every next action in total for example the standalone actions show up here but the complete paperwork item also shows up here in other words if you want to have a total list of every next action then you can view it here and actually i made a little mistake here as from the inbox i already assigned it to myself which is something that makes it show up here refined search is make sure that is not a waiting for item which i'll show you in just a moment as well and that is not blocked but it is assigned to me and that is what makes it show up here next up though the waiting for filter currently there is nothing here but i'll show you how we can make something appear in just a moment has waiting for as a tag and also not blocked now this is an interesting one and it can be a bit confusing but i'll show you what i mean in this project here if you remember we have complete paper as the very first task but after that we have delivery as waiting for now it can seem as if the blocker is already enough to indicate that but it isn't the task or the item i should say delivery is dependent on the paperwork being completed however the nature of that item is that it is a waiting for item and thus that is separately indicated with attack and we couldn't do it with just one or the other so let's pretend like we've actually completed the paperwork and in good gtd spirit let's do that from within the context list the saved search so i'm going to press complete and now i'm going to navigate to the project that it was related to and as you can see delivery is now completable and that happens completely automatically and if we go to the waiting for filter now we will see that it is suddenly available but it isn't suddenly of course we pre-programmed it to function in that way so now that you know how these things interact with each other let's take a look at that email that we forwarded and see how we can process it what we can do is go to the inbox select the task and go to details and the first thing is to select a project let's just pretend this is a standalone item for now then we add attack we can do that either by navigating to the menu here and press add tags or by just pressing tab plus t from here we can assign it an energy level so i defined low medium or high and once you type them they will also show up as such let's pretend this is low energy then let's think about the time we need let's say we just need five minutes so that's another label we add and the context will of course be reads but we don't have a filter for that yet a saved search so we'll also have to create that i will create it right from here which we can do and then we can also give it a color i like to be consistent in my coloring for whatever type of label we have contacts usually get turquoise for me the item is already here so we don't need to do anything else except for of course moving it out of inbox to process because that's what we've done now and we never have to look at the process section but this is just a way to make sure it's no longer in the inbox okay now let's make sure we can find it from a saved filter that we will create so as i said we'll press search advanced search and first of all it needs to be assigned to us so you type your name here next up we need to make sure that it is actionable so we add a filter and we select more dependencies and not blocked and finally we add a tag hash tag and we select read we double check it looks good we press search and there we go it is right here now we want to make sure to save this search inside of this menu here we just press save search and from here we can also change the name i like to add a bit of an emoji to it you can for example select the book to indicate it's about reading read save search maybe move it so it's alphabetical and there we go that's it that's how you create a context list in asana so now we've covered the ground level as it's called in gtd but what about the higher horizons of focus for example how do we organize things by their area of focus this is something we can actually do with portfolios now honestly i don't know how this is originally meant to be used and i'm pretty sure this is not how it is meant to be used but it does actually work what you can do here is create a portfolio based on a specific area of focus here i just added three dummy ones work family and health the cool thing is that you can associate specific projects with an area of focus in your life so as a car salesman if that is my job then obviously that's work and therefore the bmw sales project is part of this portfolio from the portfolio we can view things like the progress based on the number of projects within there the workloads obviously messages again not really useful but especially here in the list view you can see the progress that the project is making and you can imagine if you have multiple ones or you want to kind of reflect on how things are going how much time energy etc you're spending on each particular area of focus that these portfolios can help you with that next up we have goals which you can define under the goals view conveniently right under portfolios here i had an example goal of 500k in revenue by pressing it we can take a look in a bit more detail you can see that this is highly aimed at businesses having this percentage or currency based goal in there which you will have of course but you may also have others where you may need to do some more interpretation you can select how well it is going you can close the goal at sub goals very cool is that you can add supporting work which is an area of focus which is a portfolio so you can relate these goals to specific areas of focus which i like to see having that connectivity basically a time period can be selected again you can see the business minded approach here with quarters collaborators parent goals if you need them you can add those here or obviously the other way around sub goals descriptions and asana prompts you to also think about hey why is this important how you define success i like defining my goals in a smart way and i think this meets all those conditions and lastly we have reference as a separate type of information that we want to store in our system it is doable it is not the best but not the worst either in my opinion comparing it to other task managers because you do have the ability to kind of note take which is probably what you'll do the most here or add attachments one of those too i added a separate team for reference and within that team i added one project which is a list for car maintenance manuals and this is an example category obviously you'll have many more but within this list i added specific brands if i'm a car salesman and i want to fix my clients cars as well in my garage then i can easily find and reference specific models of cars based on brand and then having a task for the model and using the attachments to for example upload the pdf this is a bmw 5 series it's a pretty extensive pdf so it takes a while to load but you'll see in a moment that you can read them directly from within asana which is a nice touch similar to how evernote enables you to read documents directly from within the app rather than having to press the link and navigate to it and here it is so you can zoom in and out and read everything here download it separately that's a nice touch that really enables you to reference items quite well of course if you want to add notes you can do that in the description and then read it from there you can use tags if you want to apply further levels of organization this is one i'm not too strongly opinionated about i like tags in that you can kind of associate them with multiple items at the same time but this list-based approach i think can also work well so think about your life how you reference and organize information and decide based on that if you want to look back on how you're doing kind of review and reflect the reporting dashboard actually shows a few interesting data points as it can show you which projects have the most incomplete items for example the completion status for your tasks the number but i would take this with a grain of salt i always say this because after all all of this is just a symbolic overlay a representation of the work you actually need to do and maybe sometimes you just want to quickly check something off from the inbox and that may be counted here as well even though it's not real work you did right so i wouldn't use this too heavily but perhaps you will find a great use where there's a lot of options here adding specific charts now again a lot of these are aimed at collaborative project management so not all of them will be useful but certainly cool to see cool to have custom fields may also apply for you in that they can give you a tailored experience play around with it and see how you can make it work for you and that's it to conclude safe searches are going to be your best friend that's the place where you'll be working from the most so make sure that you set up the filter correctly make sure that actionable items are assigned to yourself that they're associated with a project even if it's a standalone action and that they have the tags that make them show up in the filtering that you've defined and saved in one of these searches and from there you can take action based on whatever context you're in in true gtd spirit all right and that wraps things up for this video let me know in the comments what you think if you use asana let me know how do you use it would you consider using this template this setup how would you improve it do let me know others will love to know as well and then i will implement it and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Lucas Prigge

Views: 9,830

Keywords: asana, asana gtd, asana getting things done, asana 2022, asana gtd 2022, asana getting things done 2022, asana tutorial, asana review, asana tutorial 2022, asana review 2022, asana project management, getting things done, gtd

Id: tVhsw99M4mc

Length: 30min 22sec (1822 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 27 2022