It is Thursday morning. You have had a busy week with lots of competing deadlines. Your workload appears to be overflowing and you just wish it is the weekend already. This is a feeling that is not strange to me and I experience especially when I am close to key deadlines. The more I use asana and treat it as my source of truth for the work I need to do, such instances start to fade away.
To me work anxieties could be related to one of these two factors:
- There is a lot of work I have to achieve, I do not know where to start from
- There is a lot of work the team can do to progress the strategy, if only there was a magic button that explains all the context, next steps, final aim of these initiative so they can crack on
If you have some work anxieties around workload, emails are the perfect recipe to exacerbate these anxieties. With Asana, the above factors are almost entirely removed.
The beauty of working with asana is that in times of uncertainty, or excessive workload, I always go back to the fundamentals. What is it we are trying to achieve? And How will this benefit the business?
I open Portfolios and start reading through them once more time reviewing their progress and the projects they oversee.
Portfolios are a great feature to give any team a quick overview of the work their team or organisation is trying to achieve. When reading through them you can see the status of each project in that portfolio, the number milestones achieved vs overdue, and from a click of a button you can check the project status directly.
I find this feature helpful because it helps me refocus and immediately set priorities to my own tasks and workload.
Project Status Updates is another feature that I enjoy working with in times of anxieties. It is easy to focus on all the things that needs to get done and forget the things that have been done. So at time of anxiety, I open the projects I own and I start providing a status update. This is a simple way that helps focus on all the tasks and milestones that are achieved, and then talk about next steps. This feature is not only useful to share the status with all stakeholders, but it is important to keep highlighting the successes of the team. By doing so, and focusing on the next steps, I am already starting to prioritise what works need to be done. This immediately provides context and either a reminder or a further clarity for the team to know what to work on.
Whether you manage one project or a series of projects, portfolios, and the main owner of certain goals in your organisation, asana’s use of custom fields and rules means that you no longer need to worry about the little things as the platform does all this for you.
Asana introduces My Tasks as a way to give you that one stop shop to see what is being assigned to you. Ever since using asana, this is a feature I never tapped into much. With my Tasks v2, I now utilise it a lot more because I can use rules with it. With any team I work with, I have one project I create that includes the framework of work I am providing to the team and organisation. This project is a one stop shop to keep track of all initiatives, must do, achievements, and nice to have. I keep a record of all incoming requests in this project. These incoming requests are only those added value items and not just the random non stop incoming emails to your inbox. Using rules means any task assigned to me, gets immediately added to the incoming requests of my project and I can assess how to respond and prioritise it in line with the work that exists.
As you can see, asana is a tool that can help you do a lot. There is a saying in Arabic: ‘the day ends but work will never end’. This saying highlights the fact that if you do not take ownership of your own wellbeing, the workload won’t.
With asana, your workload will not magically disappear, but will certainly be manageable. You will now able to assess, focus, work, update, and delegate, all while keeping your eye on the goals and portfolios that matter and add value.
