4 strategies to keep anxiety at the door (thanks to Asana)

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I am not an anxious guy, but from time to time I feel it creeping in. It is no secret Asana has been, is and will be a big part of my life, so naturally I developed a couple of strategies to battle anxiety!


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Regain clarity on what is important

Some days are just too much: emails everywhere, unread WhatsApp messages, overflowing Inbox, ridiculous mess in My Tasks… When I feel like throwing my computer out the window, I always apply the same strategy: clearing channels one by one. Each email becomes a task, each WhatsApp message is answered… until the only thing remaining is the My Tasks view. And then I clean it from top to bottom, sometimes several times until I am at peace.

Make sure my personal tasks move forward

When you spend all day in Asana working on professional tasks, you can feel bad seeing your personal tasks did not move forward. That’s why I decided to mix my professional and personal tasks into the same Asana account. I created a personal private project and I am adding a specific emoji (through a custom made automation) to any private task to make it stand out in My Tasks. And I treat them (almost) like regular tasks.

Get energy from my team mates

When you work in a team, not everyone is at their energy peak at the same time. So we decided to create an asynchronous written daily standup to share with the others how our previous day went, what the day ahead looks like, and how we are feeling. When a team mate is anxious about the day ahead, we make sure we help them!

Be honest with non urgent non important work

This has been my biggest personal step forward in the past years: being at peace with non urgent non important work. My own My Tasks view has sections to organise tasks by priority: top priority, important, secondary. The Secondary section is where things go die, and that’s ok!

I hope those strategies help.

:fr: Version Française

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Its so hard to manage a good work-life balance. I like the idea of sprinkling in personal tasks in with the professional ones throughout the day. Out of curiosity, why did you choose to create a separate project and not just add your personal things into My Tasks?

I actually laughed at my desk when reading this, because its so true! I have a section titled ‘Things I wish I had time for’ and there are tasks there that are a wishlist for our organization, but I honestly am not sure when I will ever be able to get to them.

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I like the idea of being able to see all my personal tasks together. Without a dedicated project, I could not do it. And I wanted to have this emoji auto added, I needed a dedicated project.

I actually take care of those on Friday afternoons, Sunday morning with a coffee, or just a really quiet day. And it feels amazing.

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Very stress-relieving article, thank you!

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Thanks @Eline_Claes

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I bring back this post to ask you about something similar to this.

In my company work by teams. Inside teams whe have projects to manage request, follow-up repairs.

Sometime I receive request that are not urgent but maybe are important and takes time to reflect about them, normally we make comments inside the task.

I don’t like the mess this kind of task causes inside the “Requests Project”, because the project is to make things happen, not to talk about task.

I’m thinking in creating a new project to store this kind of task. Normally this task are assigned to me and like you said in your post I feel anxious about this task.

If the task where non urgent and non important I feel fine deleting it, but if it’s important I need a place to manage it while it doesn’t mess another project.

What do you think about it? It’s a kind of Someday/maybe project for the team.

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Moving those tasks to another project seems like a good move. You could also unassign yourself and have a recurring task saying “Check out project ___”

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