Whether you are working remotely or in the office, do you sometimes feel overwhelmed when faced with a pile of chaotic work items? Here are four practical tips on Asana from MindMeld Tech to help you systematize your daily work. Try implementing these four methods and see how they can help you stay organized at work!
1. Start Your Day with My Tasks and Inbox
The best way to organize your work is to start each day with a clear understanding of your to-do list. By using “My Tasks” and “Inbox” in Asana, you can quickly see all the work assigned to you (My Tasks) and any relevant notifications (Inbox).
Start your day by reviewing My Tasks. If this is your first time using this feature, organize your My Tasks using sections. Use Tab + N to create a section and better organize your work by task type, priority, task scope, or work block. Check out some “My Tasks” organization strategies for more inspiration.
Next, check your “Inbox” for any new notifications. In the Inbox, you will receive any notifications related to your work, projects, and tasks. To use the Inbox most effectively, process and archive to reduce clutter. After viewing a notification, you can reply immediately or create follow-up tasks to organize your work, and then archive it.
2. Use Project Overview to View Key Information
When you enter a new project, it can sometimes be difficult to understand the project plan and goals. Asana’s four main board interfaces are great for managing and executing work, but you also need a project overview to plan, organize, and view the big picture of the project.
That’s why Asana introduced Project Overview, a one-stop shop for your team to understand the situation and share background information. With this feature, you can organize all the most important planning information in your project, such as project summary, project roles, important resources, and key milestones.
How to Organize Project Overview?
- Fill out a Project Overview for every project you manage.
- Whenever someone shares a new project with you, go to the Project Overview. From there, you can get all the information about the project plan and goals.
- Check the Project Overview regularly. You can find all the status updates of the project and important information about ongoing activities.
3. Use Rules to Automate Daily Work
Small tasks that take up brain space and valuable time are often a reason why we feel so overwhelmed at work. The average employee spends 60% of their time on administrative work rather than strategic or skill-based work. To strengthen your organization and focus on important tasks, use Rules to reduce some of the manual work. To create Rules, you first define the trigger conditions, and the next steps will be generated automatically when the trigger conditions occur
Here are some examples of using Rules:
- Assign tasks to the appropriate team member. Make sure your project has a custom field related to teamwork (for example, create a custom field called “Request Type” mapped to different work done by each team member). Then use Rules to automatically assign tasks based on that custom field (for example, assign all “Illustration” tasks to Dave or all “Copywriting” tasks to Blaire).
- Categorize form task submissions. If you have a form set up for your project, each new form submission will show up as a new task. Create Rules to automatically add you and any other project roles as collaborators to the task so it doesn’t get lost in the clutter. For example, if you promise to respond to all form submissions within 48 hours, assign the task to yourself and set a due date of 2 days from submission.
- Add tasks to other projects. For example, if you’re tracking all sales transactions in a major departmental project, you don’t want every new transaction in a team project to be manually added to that project. Create a Rule to automatically add these tasks to your main departmental project once a custom field is updated (for example, “Completed Transactions”) or when a task moves to a step in the project (for example, “Transactions in Progress”).
- Automatically move tasks in your board project. If you work in an engineering team, you may use Boards View to track ongoing processes such as bug tracking or sprint planning. The beauty of the board-style project view is that you can easily understand each task’s current status based on its list. Create Rules to automatically move tasks to certain columns based on custom fields rather than manually moving them between lists, so you and your team can focus on your next plan.
4. Use Portfolios to Get a Comprehensive View of Your Work
Managing multiple projects can sometimes feel like juggling. To reduce mental clutter and increase organization in your work, use Portfolios to group similar projects and plans.
Using Portfolios is a good way to organize if you have the following situations:
- Managing a small team but finding it difficult to insightfully organize the team’s work. With Portfolios, even if work spans multiple projects, you can see all content in one place. This way, you don’t have to dig and search for relevant projects to understand the work of the entire team from a central location.
- Managing cross-functional plans and complex processes. Without diligent oversight and an organized work review system, projects can easily get off track, but it’s hard to remember to update each project. In this case, put all the projects you supervise in a Portfolio so you can see the status of each project from one place. This way, if a project is stalled or executed in the wrong direction, you can dive into that work and help the project get back on track.
- Want to start managing workload? Workload management is a good way to support teams and prevent burnout. With Portfolios, you can also understand the team’s workload, so you can accurately understand the work content of each person in multiple projects you manage and whether anyone is assigned too much work, and easily reassign tasks.
Incorporating these four Asana tips into your workflow can help you establish effective work habits and make progress toward achieving your business objectives. We trust you will find these tips valuable for optimizing your productivity and achieving success in your professional pursuits.
