Mastering ASANA's Workload & Time-Tracking Features - Boost Your Team's Productivity!

if you've ever caught yourself wondering how you can get a realistic view of not just the tasks your team is working on but on how much of their time is being allocated to those tasks then this video is for you I'm going to show you how to use asana's workload and portfolio features to gain the visibility into your team's work that you've been missing we'll also take a quick look at asana's time tracking feature and how that can shed some light into your estimates and your resource management let's set the stage here quickly for you so I've got this project set up today we're building a website um I I don't build websites anymore that was in my marketing days but I've got some just quick tasks here on under copy design you've got some technical setup stuff here we're using some custom Fields just to set the status of work whether it's in progress not started waiting we've got some assignees and some roles here and some due dates so giving ourselves about three months here to complete this project so you'll see the timeline spread out over those three months so as you can see see work has been allocated assignees have been assigned and due dates have been assigned as well so what I often see is that people aren't taking the time to set up their their custom Fields properly and so what's happening is that they're trying to get a view of resource management and resource management is a topic that comes up quite often and the problem is that as your team scales the complexity of your project management also scales and doesn't always scale at the same rate so the ability to see the workloading capacity of your team is needed so you can understand who is working on what who's overloaded and who you can allocate more work to to support the team so once you have this simple system set up the one I'm going to show you today you'll be able to do better estimating and Reporting around your projects and tasks and if you haven't yet subscribe to this Channel please hit that subscribe button hit the notification so you never miss a video Let's jump in so let's get back to our our project here so again using proper custom Fields is going to mean everything so oftentimes I'll see see people using the estimated hours that was a custom field that you know that's all we really had at one point in Asana so we put in our estimated hours we'd fill that in and you know we could you know have fun like that and that's how we were setting up our portfolios as well but with the new time tracking feature within Asana it's it's not here in this project let's go to another one and we need to add that to Asana is begging you to use this new feature they want you to add this custom field so when you click on this if you haven't seen it yet it's automatically going to add this new estimated time and actual time custom fields to your projects and you'll see that in the portfolio as well it's also begging you to use these features and so if we get back here I'm just going to fill in some of this information really quick so I'm actually going to get rid of this old custom field because we don't need it anymore I'm just going to remove it from the projects and now I'm just going to fill in some estimated time here so it's going to take us two hours four hours there we go real simple let's just check out our other project I also created this dummy project so we can see on the timeline in portfolios what this can look like so again we've got the old estimated hours here let's just update this so I'm gonna get my five hours there one hour to a two hours let's just do a bunch of random stuff here let's make these all one hour for the sake of time not one minute there we go so we've got some time same people have been assigned these tasks so first off what you want to do is you want to go to your portfolio so I've already set this up for us we've got a creative portfolio here and you'll see the projects that I've added are our website design demo project and then our marketing campaign launch which is the other project this is not going to be a video on portfolios today that will be for another time but what I've done just to kind of give you a preview of what could be possible is now with the time tracking we can set up reports and we can set up budgets within our portfolio and every week our project managers can now take a look and see exactly how we're doing how we're doing against our our budget and our time allocation so what I'm going to do now is go over to the workload and as we can see this is typically what it looks like we're we're viewing um either all tasks so if you're using workload for the first time you're going to come in and it's going to default to your task count so it's going to see that Amy who's got one task on this day daily capacity is one task because nothing's been set from an effort perspective so if this is your first time you're going to see task account there it's important you set up your your effort that you're going to be measuring this by so estimated hours is our initial option but if we remember that is our old way of tracking time we're now using estimated time and actual time not to be confused with estimated hours and actual hours so that's the difference so I'm going to go in here I'm going to hit edit effort and there it is again Asana is calling it out for us we're going to click on estimated time and then we're going to click next and it's going to add it to our creative production portfolio so I'm going to add that effort and if you haven't already what this will do is all of the projects within your portfolio will automatically add the estimated time and actual time to those projects within that so let me know how we're doing so far leave me a comment and let me know have you set up your portfolios like this has this been a struggle for you love to know what your experience has been with portfolios so far so now we can set our capacity this will range depending on your team we can set like 35 hours for the week as a standard and then as we know we can go in and we can change the individual time as well if we have some people that are working half time or you know contract basis we can update these things here so I'm going to bring some of these folks down to like really low hours for the week just so you can switch it up a little bit because everyone in is a little bit different there we go now we're going to set this capacity and you'll see automatically it's going to update everything so if you rewind a little bit you'll see that the the hills and these Peaks and valleys have changed quite a little bit because now we are measuring by estimated time okay so if we go in we can see that you know Amy has been assigned this this task let's just click on it and we can see what it is so this is Define website structure and hierarchy the due date is March 31st and it's going to take her two hours but as Amy actually dug into this she's realizing it's going to take a lot longer and I'm gonna have to start sooner on this so I'm actually going to set a start date of the 21st of March to give us some time and rather than the original estimated time maybe we understood that in a stand-up meeting or as she was actually going through it looking at the resources maybe there were some blockers um this is actually going to take us 10 hours now there we go and what's nice about the the time tracking as I'm just kind of going back and forth here is Amy can actually start this timer now as she's working on this and every time that she comes back to the task she can restart that timer so it's going to be less than a minute here it's not actually going to track anything so I'm going to add the actual time and let's just say Amy worked on this for two hours okay um there we go or in this case Jamie worked on it for two hours so as Amy was coming in here we can add manual time here as well on another day or later that day worked on it for another hour and 15 minutes there we go and then we can also come back in obviously and start that timer and then it's going to add up all of that time for us which is really really helpful so we've updated the the time frame here and maybe let's just push this way over just for fun this is going to take us 30 hours and so if if we remember what our capacity was set at this would change depending on the person but now we have this task Amy's daily capacity is seven hours and in the day this task is going to take her three hours and 20 minutes which is fine right now because she's under capacity she can do that but what if we start adding more tasks to Amy's plate what if we take all this work that's been assigned to Charlotte and we start adding it all up into this one section so we're going to take this website launch all this information and we're going to move it right up here who else can we take we can take from Jamie Maybe and this would never happen because they are different roles but we can obviously take all this information and now we can we can move it around and so as you're updating these things let's see there we go update them but now let's move them back in time let's move this one over here we're gonna see what's going to start to happen and obviously there's no way Amy can take care of all this work now Amy's daily capacity of seven hasn't changed but the workload for that day has changed so now she's got eight hours and 20 minutes of time that she's got to complete these tasks and obviously that's not realistic for anyone so this is really the power and the flexibility of of workload and capacity is now we can get a really good understanding of this and project managers we can do this from the portfolio level some people may find it easier to do it at the project level if you don't say have access to the portfolio you can make all those updates and changes right here so let's take it a step further we've got all this information in here now we can see that realistic view this was the original timeline that I showed we can see the projects are a little bit overlapping but now let's let's dig into the dashboard okay so by default portfolios is going to bring in all of your total tasks the completed tasks incomplete overdue and give you some nice graphs here which can be updated and edited as you needed but what I want to take a look at here is how we can report on this information so what's really nice about this is you can obviously get a different view by looking at different charts if you want to see a number to represent how much time has been estimated over a certain time frame we can do that I like the column in this case because what I want to see is the estimated time by assignee so you can see that Amy's got you know a day and three hours of work and so if we're looking at this not over the course of three months but over the course of you know the next week we can see all right Amy's got 17 hours of work to do this week right so Amy's pretty much at capacity we obviously have to balance her time a little bit more as we saw on the workload chart but this gives us a really really nice view into what's happening so let's go back to our three months so now we can see that this Associate's got nine hours this Associates got eight hours over this time and as these change project managers you can come in and you can put on whatever you want to so on the x-axis I made the assignee what I'm looking at here but we can really do anything we can make it be the Creator we can pull it in by project we can look at task status now we can look at the completion status and we can obviously update the time period of that it's super important that when you are setting this up let's actually go and do that because I'm going to add a chart here and I'm going to make it a column again we're going to set up our x-axis as a signee or you can keep it as project it's totally up to you we can set the custom Fields whatever we want just depends on what we're really looking at here and then on the y-axis I want to look at the time entry so in this case I want to go estimated time and that's how we're getting that information what we would do on the other side is as we can see the actual time so we want to set a chart for the actual time that's been tracked so if you recall when I started that timer on on Amy's tasks it's taking that summary of those tasks that's why Amy is the only one here so as people start tracking timer either manually or they are pressing that that start timer button it's all going to get updated here and we're again looking for the sum of this and then we are looking to let's say if we want to look at this over you know a certain amount of days so the due date again is within the next three months because that was the project timeline there we go and we can create that chart as well and then we can move these around so now this makes your status updates that much better um if you are looking at reporting and you are the project manager you can come in now you can set your status by clicking on status update now you can look and see what the estimated time was for the project you can do your calculations because we don't have formulas yet inside of Asana they are coming I've heard they are coming what excited who's excited what and now we can see how we're doing against our budget so we have our hourlys we have our actuals and now we can actually set the budget to see if we're on track um and whatnot so hope you found this helpful like this video leave me a comment let me know if this was helpful if you have a question specific to your use case I'm happy to help them and I've actually created a space where we can do that we can ask questions we can be in community so to learn more about how you know a sauna can better work for you join what we're calling the system builder Academy it's a community we've created on Circle where you can take or I'm taking your questions and I can provide you with additional learning resources we're doing weekly office hours there are courses on there exclusive content and lots more so if you're loving the content you're seeing here if you've been a long time subscriber thank you so much we are taking the conversation into a place where we can just talk more about Asana learn and share and my goal is really to teach you everything that I know about Asana and answer your questions so head over to system builderacademy.com to register your free accounts and join the new Asana Community the link will also be in the description below thanks for watching we'll see you next time okay [Music]

Channel: Marquis Murray

Views: 11,322

Keywords: Mastering Asana's Workload & Time-Tracking Features, Boost Your Team's Productivity!, mastering asana's workload & time-tracking features, boost your team's productivity!, mastering, asana's, workload, time-tracking, Mastering Asana's Workload And Time-Tracking Features-, mastering asana's workload and time-tracking features-, audio mastering, mastering tutorial, mastering a song, yoga for beginners, yoga, asana, asana tutorial, asana demo, asana project management, time tracking

Id: snl_wTL8iuw

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2023