Hello! I’m still pretty new to Asana, having been hired two months ago to lead User Education. One burning question I have for the greater community is: How did you learn Asana? Did you use any specific resources? Or perhaps you just “played around” with it until you got it? I’d love to know!
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I used in no certain order
- The user guide How to use Asana, Asana tutorials, onboarding tips, and team use cases | Product guide • Asana Product Guide
- This community with great moderating by @Alexis and her successor and the members
- Asana Videos Video Tutorials
- Great video series from @Todd_Cavanaugh at projectmanagementpros.com
- I started with the free version but the premium version brings a lot of great features
- Previous experience with collaborative software
- Participating in the development of sendana
- Hiring a programmer to gift a CSV converter to community taught me a lot about CSV files CSV To Asana Simple List Generator- My Gift To Community - #42 by James_Carl
- Very responsive Support Team
- Very cooperative Asana employees moderating this board and always willing to help
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First I read the user guide.
And then I spent time reading topics on the Community which is a great ressources of information, and gives exemples of use cases.
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Hi, and Congratulations!
I think The Guide was my main resource initially (years ago). It was thorough and beautifully done. Videos were great too. And I did lots of experimenting, using Asana both for personal and professional use, wherever possible. I participated in several key Asana beta programs which helped sharpen my skills too. I also very much appreciated the “open sourcing” of Asana (the company’s) best practices; all the blog posts, videos, talks, and articles offered the other side of the coin that was key for me. Learning both the product and the workstyle together was powerful and each fostered understanding of the other resulting in efficiencies and depth of understanding.
Now this Community, all those that administrate, answer and contribute posts, are great resources and I skim or read most everything.
Best wishes in your exciting role,
Larry
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I just muck around and around. Uses the original Google community the started to actually read the help guide…
So now if I was doing it I would
- Muck around
- Read the Help Guide
- Join This Community
- Ask questions
- Do the training
And I would try as much as possible do them all at the same time.
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I started learning it by using it. My company started using it without much explanation of how or why. So it was very much a figure it out for yourself situation. But you can understand the basics of Asana pretty quickly.
When I wanted to really learn the ins and outs I went through the guide, which is pretty good documentation.
Now I test on my own and use the community.
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I just tried things on Asana and learned from doing. When I got/get stuck, I just Google what I’m trying to do and I’m able to find the documentation related to what I’m trying to do. I also enjoy reading this community forum to learn different ways in which people are using Asana.
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If someone is truly starting from “no understanding” then I always recommend a set of videos released by Asana that really gives the high level understanding. Find it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJFG93oi0wJAiUwyOhIGWHdtJzJrzylBv
Once you have a basic understanding, then I would agree with those above saying USE IT. That is the best way to get a good handle on it. And push yourself to try things and figure out how features work. Sometimes it’s easy to learn a handful of things and then just run with that, but you could be missing out on some of the really powerful functionality. So use it every day and push yourself to go deep with how it works.
And of course, when questions do arise, this community is invaluable.
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Similar to everyone else, first I jumped in and started messing around with it. Then I read the user guides on the website and watched videos on YouTube. I signed up for the Community pretty early on too, and that was a huge help. Other than that, it’s been trial and error and seeing how other people use it.
I think different individuals’ circumstances greatly affect how quickly they pick it up. In my case, I was on the project team that initially rolled out Asana to our wider team, so I felt I had to know it inside out in order to train people on it and answer random questions as they came up. For many of my colleagues, they’ve grasped the basics but, despite offers of extra training, haven’t gone beyond that. They don’t have the same curiosity to find out all of the extra things that Asana can do.
I think Asana is so user-friendly that pretty much anyone can pick it up and get going with it, but moving first-time users on from the basics to the more intermediate features is a big challenge. I could book a meeting room and show my colleagues some of these features again myself, but I guarantee most of them would feel they were too busy to spare the time. However, if I could send them a link to a single, 15/20-min video that explained how to use tags/custom fields more effectively, make the most of My Tasks, organise projects more effectively, etc., I think they’d probably watch it.
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