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)
I know you don’t mean this because of , but I’m surprised because I thought it’s Subtasks about which we most like to debate, not Comments !
But re that original 2020 topic, I actually convinced you then, partially at least, and you changed your OP there! And since that was several years before AI, I’d update my stance to say it’s more important to document details, even if it had to be in comments.
One can make cases for documenting in the description or the comments, but I think the most important thing, which (going out a little on a limb) I think both @Bastien_Siebman and @lpb are pointing at, is the importance of, and the value of Asana, for capturing institutional memory of decisions made and a summary of the discussions that led up to them.
Capturing institutional memory helps to preserve organizational knowledge and context so as to avoid repeating the same mistakes, and to help make better-informed decisions over time. It can also help with onboarding and with continuity after job turnover.
Which we started doing with “toolboxes”. Those are projects where the data is clean, organised and consolidated. And it also makes everything easier with AI, because in most cases it only has to look at those toolboxes instead of all projects
I totally agree! This habit is so helpful in the long run or even for people like me who sometimes can’t recall decisions that were made last week or after a vacation lol. BUT, our operations team prefers not to see all our project set up comments. My solution is to create a subtask for project set up comments and on handoff the operations team can have their own comments tab. Any better ideas?
Asana is missing today the ability to track who saw the comment and whether from Asana app itself vs email vs other (something monday.com has been doing for a long time)
Related, below)
