Why we love Asana!

With work days getting busier and teams growing both office based or virtual, the digital world has opened so many new doors to apps and software that can help improve workflow and project management.

At KM, organisation is at the heart of what we do, so finding the perfect app to help us with this took a bit of trial and error, but we’ve now found one that we couldn’t be without – and that’s Asana.

Asana is a work management platform that does wonders for organisation, productivity and project management, it’s easy to use, and has transformed the way we prioritise tasks, allocate duties and hit goals for our clients.

How it works

Asana is very much about bringing everything into one place. Gone are the days of frantic list-writing on stray bits of paper (which are easy to misplace if you aren’t careful) and instead, welcome to a place where your lists can ALL be in one place, added to and edited regularly, and prioritised out into client projects and individual team tasks – you need never lose anything again!

Asana can be downloaded to your desktop, phone and used online – so you can access it anywhere. When you log in for the first time, you can create profiles and logins for all your team members – so everyone can create their own lists. You can also set about creating names and colour codes for your client projects – this is fantastic because you can then allocate your tasks to the appropriate client, so everything is neatly colour coded and minimises confusion!

At KM, we have lots of clients, and consequently lots of tasks and projects to stay on top of. We also have a number of team members and Asana is a place where we can allocate tasks, prioritise and keep everyone in the loop of progress.

Organisation

Asana is brilliant for getting you organised, as each day, you can have a list set out of all your tasks that are due. You can allocate tasks by time, day and date and so that you’re working in line with deadlines.

For example, on a Monday morning, you might have five task requests come in from a client, but only two are critical, and the rest are less time sensitive. In this case, you can create the tasks, add in what you need to do, and then prioritise accordingly – you can set the urgent tasks to have deadlines ‘today’ and then schedule the other tasks in for later in the week.

You can also allocate the tasks to the correct client project code, and then allocate it to a team member, or to yourself. This means that you can view every task for a particular client in one place – which is super-efficient.

Why not take it one step further and invite the client to collaborate on a project or task with you?

Using Asana in our business has changed the way we think and work, I literally couldn’t run the business without it!

Working as a team

Asana is great for when you have multiple team members, or several people working on one task – everything is accessible in once place.

Firstly, you can allocate tasks as they come in to team members, letting them know what’s needed and when it needs to be done by. Within each task, there’s the facility for comments and notes, which means as someone is working through a task, they can send regular updates on progress, so that someone else knows exactly what’s going on and can pick it up if necessary, or simply know that it’s in hand.

You can also upload files and photos to each task, so that you can share documents for review, photographs for reference and ensure that everything to do with that particular task or project is kept in one place.

You can also use the Inbox to send messages and alerts and shift priorities and deadlines where necessary.

Things we LOVE the most about Asana

There are some extra bits on Asana that we particularly love, which are well worth mentioning!

You can set tasks to ‘repeat’ so that nothing gets forgotten. For example, if every day you need to monitor a clients’ inbox, you can set that to repeat daily – once you’ve ticked it off for the day, it will automatically move into a task for tomorrow. This is super handy! Or if you have a monthly task for a client, you can schedule it to repeat on a monthly basis – you’ll never forget to do anything again!

You can also look at tasks by category, such as ‘tasks I’ve created’, ‘tasks I’ve assigned to others’ and ‘recently completed tasks’ – it can be great to see the recently completed tasks in case you need quickly reflect on something.

Asana is also fantastic for keeping a record of things. If you need to look up something you did two months ago – it’ll be there stored in Asana if you search for it!

Ticking off and completing tasks is so satisfying too, and what we really love is that if you’re lucky, you get a little unicorn or happy creature dance across the screen to celebrate the completion.

Oh and did we mention that it integrates with lots of other useful applications too, like Outlook and Slack!

Of course, this is just our opinion. But you should check it out for yourself, it’s free on the basic version, (which isn’t very basic at all!) so you really have nothing to lose!

Click here to go to their home page

If you have any questions or would like any tips on setting this up, drop us a message, we are always happy to help!

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