You might have noticed already that I’m a big fan of Asana ;). Asana is my go-to project management app not only because it shows flying unicorns every time a task is completed, but because it has all the important features to organize my tasks & projects. Today, I’m sharing with you my Asana Hacks and some often-overlooked features that will make you love Asana just as much as I do.
Asana Hack 1: Asana for Personal To Do’s
Let’s face it, as business owners, the line between our personal life and our professional life is very blurry.
That’s why it makes sense to manage our personal life using the same tools as we use for our businesses.
Asana is my go-to tool to not only manage all my business projects but also to house my personal To Do list.
If you’re using Asana as an organization (you have to be registered with your @domain.com email address for that), I recommend using “Teams” to separate the different areas of your business and create a separate team for your personal projects.
In the “Personal Team” you can create different projects such as a Shopping List, Birthday List, Wish List, Travel Plans, Goal List, and Weekly To Do’s or even plan bigger projects such as holidays, parties, events or a move.
The advantage of creating a separate team for your personal tasks is that you’ll find all your To Do’s in your “My Tasks” list and you don’t have to switch between workspaces. You are able to see the full scope of your tasks for the day, so you can easily create your schedule.
Asana Hack 2: Track time within Asana
Make it easy for you to see how long you or your team members spend on a specific task or project by connecting Asana to an app called Harvest. This integration allows you to track time from the tasks they’re already working on in Asana, without having to switch apps to start a timer.
I love this feature as it gives you insights into how much time you spend on revenue generating aka highly important tasks vs. repetitive tasks that could be outsourced or automated.
If you’re working with a team, this integration is super helpful to see where the majority of their time goes to and it can also be used to create end of the month reports for invoicing purposes.
Asana Hack 3: Create tasks within your Gmail inbox
While email is the most common way to communicate about work, your inbox is not a project management app. The good news is, you can now combine your Gmail inbox with Asana with the Asana for Gmail add-on.
From directly within Gmail, you can now turn an email into a task, assign it to yourself or a team member, set a due date, add it to a project, and include attachments. Once an email and a task are linked, any actions taken in either Gmail or Asana will automatically appear in the Asana sidebar in Gmail or the task in Asana.
I often receive actionable tasks right into my inbox and this feature has helped me to keep my inbox clean and make sure I don’t get lost in answering emails. Whether it’s following up with a potential lead that I exchanged emails with, a client asking to make changes to a sales page or my tax advisor asking for certain information – instead of answering every email right away when it lands in my inbox, having 7860 starred emails or an overflowing “important” folder, I just add it to my To Do list and get to it when I have time.
Asana Hack 4: Set Up Recurring Tasks
Do you have recurring tasks on your To Do list such as creating content, creating tax reports or doing website backups? Stop wasting your time by creating those tasks over and over again and set those tasks to repeat.
Click on the due date of a specific task that you want to set to repeat. You’ll see the “repeat” option below the calendar, and when you click on that you can choose whether to repeat periodically within a certain interval or to a certain date.
I use this feature for all of my recurring tasks. This has not only eliminated the time I spent to re-create or copy those tasks but also made sure I never forgot to schedule a recurring task again after I completed it.
Asana Hack 5: Assign Tasks to Multiple Projects
Do you have projects that share the same tasks? Then I have good news for you because you are able to use cross-indexing to add single tasks to multiple projects, without having to duplicate them.
To use this feature you simply have to assign a task to different projects by clicking on a plus button that you see in the task details and typing the project name you want to assign it to.
I use this feature to display all my marketing tasks that are listed in different projects in one master marketing calendar.
(Read how I organize my Marketing Tasks in Asana here)
No time to set it all up?
If you’re new to Asana or you just don’t have time to set it all up, let’s hop on a call and see how I can help you in getting your project management tool on lock so you’re able to stay on top of your To Do list and 10x your efficiency.
Love the Harvest app idea for time tracking!