Perhaps you have heard of Asana from a friend or you have seen articles that are related to Asana. But you are not sure exactly what it is or why you might want to take a closer look. I’ll share not only what Asana is, but how it has transformed the work that I am able to do in my small business. 

What is Asana?

Asana is a work management tool. Some will speak of Asana as a project management tool or a task manager. And they are not wrong. But if you are using Asana simply to manage individual projects or keep a detailed to-do list, you are missing out on some important pieces of the equation. 

As a work management tool, Asana coordinates all work on your plate, pulls together specific projects and processes, and allows them to live in a single place giving you a single source of truth and next actions for you and everyone you work alongside. When running a business, a work management tool is absolutely necessary.

Why use Asana?

Recent studies show that knowledge workers, those who spend their days handling information, spend close to 60% of their time on work about work. So what is work about work? That would be the things you do before doing the actual work you should be doing to grow your business. This could be looking through email, searching for documents, looking for status updates about projects, scanning spreadsheets for information, or asking questions of a team member.

Of course, this means that the actual work that moves a business forward – strategic planning, creating, marketing, selling –  gets only 40 percent of the time in your day. This begs the question. How can I personally organize my work so that I can flip the script and move the numbers even higher? Perhaps even shooting for 80% of my work being this actual work that moves the needle and 20% of it being work about work. 

Researchers have also found that for the average worker, 

• 3 working weeks per year are spent on duplicated work.
• 3 working weeks per year are spent on unnecessary calls and meetings.

This means that 6 weeks of your year could be recovered if processes were improved.

Perhaps you look at this research and wholeheartedly agree. But you just don’t know how to get around the facts and make a change to how you manage your workload. That’s where Asana comes in.

The Vital Link

There are two very important pieces of the puzzle that all businesses much have in order to function and grow. 

Documentation

One is a place to create, maintain, and store all documentation that the business needs to survive. For most businesses in the 21st century, this typically means a cloud-based drive such as Google Drive. It’s a place where documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and videos live until they are needed. 

Communication

The second large piece of the puzzle is a way to communicate with your team members and your clients about the work. For most businesses, this is typically email or perhaps Slack or another messaging system.

It’s important to note that using Asana will not eliminate or replace either of these essential pieces. Instead, Asana links these essential pieces together to form a smooth and streamlined platform to manage all your work.

Perhaps you have experienced what I have when working with a cloud-based drive. I find that the drive quickly becomes a huge mess of unorganized files. A dumping ground of sorts. In my experience, if you are lucky and persistent or both, you might be able to search for a document that you know is in there somewhere. 

Or perhaps you have your own personal organizational system to find the documents that you need the most. However, your disorganized teammate can never find what they need and you spend your valuable time helping them find the needed documents. 

Does this scenario sound familiar? When your teammate needs to collaborate, you receive an email with questions or information about the work with a couple of others cc’d. That email soon becomes an email thread that is hard to follow as the work progresses. At some point, someone on the email thread sends a Slack message related to the joint work. So you are tracking conversations in two places. Keeping up with the conversation about the work quickly goes off track.

One place for all pieces

Both a place for documents to live and a place to communicate about your work are essential to running a successful business. Asana streamlines your work by acting as a link between both of these pieces. 

When you use Asana to link each piece of your work together, you will add documents (or links to them) right on the projects and tasks in Asana. In addition, Asana gives you a place directly on the tasks to ask questions, provide comments, link to other work, and even celebrate when the work is complete. 

This means that you have everything you need to complete the work in one place. And you have a history of how and when the work was completed. Everyone involved in the work has direct access to this information, providing a clear and transparent view of where the work stands.

Top 6 Reasons real users choose Asana

As we work with clients here at Tessera, we have found that there are many common reasons that teams choose to use Asana. Here are the top 6 from our clients.

Work is scattered in many places. 

Documentation and communication happen across many platforms, causing you to stop and start multiple times. You can never get into a good flow of work because you have to leave where you are to search for something you need.

People work in silos.

Silos may be great for Chip and Jo, but in a collaboration context, they can spell disaster. Workers are unsure of what other people are doing and if they are duplicating the work of others. Having a single source of “truth” for how the work is progressing eliminates the feeling of siloed work.

There is a lack of clarity on who is doing what by when.

This causes stress for the person who is ultimately responsible for the outcome. 

There is a lack of clarity on how my work relates to the full project.

Perhaps I have a few tasks to complete to move the full project forward. But I’m unsure how and where this fits into the full picture. Seeing the full body of work in Asana gives me that view.

Work is falling through the cracks.

Small pieces of work can easily be missed. Seeing the full scope and having my part assigned to me eliminates that possibility.

There is a need to streamline repeated work.

All businesses have processes, whether they are written out or in the head of the one who does that work. Once the process is written, it can easily be templated in Asana to cut the time needed to do the task and makes sure that it is done in a uniform way each time it is needed.

Next Steps

Asana is a work management platform. It’s not a simple project management system, nor is it a glorified to-do list. When set up well and used consistently, it has the capability to turn your inefficiencies into streamlined workflows that will increase your productivity more than you thought possible.

Go ahead and create an Asana account and see how using Asana can change how you work. When you are ready for some help, enroll in the Asana Simplified course or get in touch with us and we will steer you in the right direction.