When you’re working with a tool like Asana, here’s one very important tip: document everything you do.
Got a task to fix a piece of software? Use the comments to write down the instructions you plan to follow. Paste in the links to the docs you used. Drop in a few screenshots of your progress.
This applies to any task. Document the decisions you made, the reasoning behind them, the reasons for choosing one approach over another, and even the options you decided not to try.
Why? Because there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself in the exact same situation weeks or months from now. And when you do, you’ll be grateful to stumble across that old task with everything neatly documented in the comments.
What to do if there are people as collaborators? I’d say: don’t worry about them, but let them know you are entering deep work mode, this is a complex topic, and you’ll be dropping a lot of comments. Let them know they can leave the task if they want to.
I cannot count how many times I was thankful for a bunch of silly comment I wrote months prior.
This is great advice, and something we’ve been starting to advocate for during meetings when someone mentions some work they’ve done related to an Asana task. Several of my teammates have also picked up that ball, so it’s more and more common these days to hear “That’s great insight and sounds like it was hard to figure out. Can you drop a summary in the Asana task so we can avoid solving this problem again later?”
The team is picking it up and it’s giving us a great place to track our accumulated wisdom in near real-time.
While I agree it’s great to document anything important in Asana, frequently the Comments contain a lot of noise, and the task Description can be a better alternative, often for this kind of information.
Updating the Description instead of adding comments will avoid notifying collaborators. On the other hand, if you want a notification generated, a good best practice is just to add a “See Description change” notification, and optionally summarizing it in a phrase, or just letting anyone click the diff link that appears in the task detail pane’s All activity tab:
I believe that decisions should always go in the comments, so we clearly see who decides and when. But the result of discussions should go in the description (or be pinned)
