If you’re drowning in a sea of tasks, or otherwise in need of an Asana safe harbor, here’s a life vest and some approaches to help you get your sea legs for smooth sailing ahead (without any further nautical mixed metaphors!).
These tips and best practices, some very quick and easy, will keep all your Asana projects afloat (whoops!).
(For help with My Tasks, as opposed to these project-related tips, see Your Simple (or Advanced) Strategy for Asana’s My Tasks.)
Project clarity in ten seconds
Here’s a quick and lasting upgrade for most projects, and especially those with many completed tasks: Hide completed tasks by default.
Your project may look like this–a lot of completed work that you have to scroll past:
Click Filter > Incomplete tasks > Save view:
And here’s the calming, compact result:
Basic project organization
Make sure your project is not too broad; that it has one purpose to which all of its sections and tasks relate.
Ideally, tasks are generally homogenous (of the same type) because custom fields are defined at the project level. If you need to have tasks of different types in a project, those might be candidates for multi-homing–a task belongs to more than one project–each with its own appropriate, related custom fields.
Organize project tasks into meaningful chunks, usually using sections (list view) which equate to columns (board view). For example, a deadline-driven project might use “Kickoff,” “Phase 1,” “Phase 2,” and “Wrapup,” and an ongoing process project might use “New,” “Ready to Do,” “In Progress,” “Blocked,” and “Done.” An alternative to sections is to use a single-select custom field, say “Stage,” with those values as the choices. After creating that Stage custom field, click Group then change “Section” to “Stage,” and then click Save view to achieve groupings in this manner instead of using sections.
Project tab views
Multiple tab views are a highly compelling yet underutilized Asana feature to view your project’s tasks from different perspectives. Many are unaware that you can fully configure the tabs at the top of any project. Add new custom ones, eliminate the unused ones, and pick the one to be the default–all in just a few seconds.
I almost always add at least these valuable tab views immediately upon creating a new project:
- List: Me: Shows only those tasks assigned to you, the logged-in Asana user
- List: Date: Organizes tasks in automatically-generated, date-based, ordered buckets starting with overdue tasks (if any)
To create those tab views:
- Click the List tab twice, then choose Make a copy, rename this new tab to “List: Me.” Click Filter > Just my tasks, then Save view.
- Click the List tab twice, then choose Make a copy, rename this new tab to “List: Date.” Click Group > Due date, Ascending, then click the “…” overflow menu > Hide empty groups, then Save view.
For more info on tab views, see also:
Design magical tabs with group, sort, and filter!, and
The #1 Game-changing Asana Feature of the Year: Saved view tabs.
I hope you find this collection of best practices to be a projects lifesaver.
Thanks for reading,
Larry Berger, Forum Leader, Asana Services Partner, Trilogi Solutions