Hi all,
In Asana Together Japan member-only meetups, we use quizzes to learn updates and fun facts about Asana. I’m sharing some from the quizzes used in 2021 plus some new questions.
This is the English version of 楽しく学べるAsanaクイズに挑戦！2021年版 for global Asana users to enjoy the quizzes 
There are sixteen (16) questions in total. I’m excited to see how many questions you can answer correctly!
Please select an option then click “
︎See the answer” for answer and some additional information.
【Company questions】
Question 1
To which company did Asana’s two co-founders commonly belong?
Image source: Asana Leadership - Meet Our Leaders • Asana
- 1 - Google
- 2 - Amazon
- 3 - Facebook
- 4 - Apple
See the answer
The correct answer is 3 - Facebook.
On the left, Dustin was a teammate of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard and they co-founded Facebook.
On the right, Justin worked for Google and Facebook as tech lead.
The tool “Tasks” created internally for Facebook was what is now Asana.
This article shares great details about Asana’s history. (It’s very long, so please enjoy it after the quizzes!)
Question 2
What’s the name of Asana as a company?
- 1 - Asana, Co. Ltd.
- 2 - Asana Corp.
- 3 - Asana, Inc.
- 4 - Asana, Ltd.
See the answer
The correct answer is 3 - Asana, Inc..
“Asana” originally means yoga posture, which is pronounced as /ˈɑːsənə/ (ahh suh nuh), while the name of the software has been “Americanified” to /əˈsɑnə/ according to https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-pronounce-Asana.
Question 3
Which word means Asana employees?
- 1 - Asanaites
- 2 - Asanans
- 3 - Asanas
- 4 - Asanese
See the answer
The correct answer is 3 - Asanas.
Boh company and employees are called “Asana” and its plural form is “Asanas”.
The suffix after the countries/regions/companies are called demonyms.
There are various patterns like America→Americans, Japan→Japanese, Israel→Israels/Israelites, and Tokyo→Tokyoites.
Question 4
Which is the name of the JavaScript framework Asana developed?
- 1 - Lana
- 2 - Lena
- 3 - Lina
- 4 - Luna
See the answer
The correct answer is 4 - Luna.
I’ve seen the frontend part is called Lunascript and backend LunaDB.
In 2008 when they started developing Asana, there was no good framework to support realtime web services. So they developed their own framework, Luna and later Luna2.
For details, please see Asana Engineering blog posts like The Evolution of Asana's Luna Framework.
However, according to some resources like this article, Asana moved to TypeScript/Scala around in 2015, due to the complexity of Luna. Scaling Scala: How we chose our backend language and tooling - Inside Asana • Asana
【Conceptual questions】
Question 5
We call the space for group of people sharing the same email domain as “workspace”. True or False?
Image source: https://asana.com/guide/get-started/begin/quick-start
- 1 - True
- 2 - False
See the answer
The correct answer is 2 - False.
We call the space for group of people sharing the same email domain (who belong to the same company) as “organization”.
On the other hand, we use the term “workspace” for the space of people not sharing the same email domain.
(We sometimes collectely call both organization and workspace as “workspaces” but I don’t judge it as the correct answer for this quiz.)
Question 6
Which keyword means the network structure showing the connection between tasks and their metadata?
- 1 - Areas of Responsibility
- 2 - Pyramid of Clarity
- 3 - Team Brain
- 4 - Work Graph
See the answer
The correct answer is 4 - Work Graph.
This talk by Justin is a great demonstration of the concept of Work Graph. You can see English subtitles at my website.
All of the four options represent important concepts of Asana. I created a post explaining the keywords: Keywords to understand what's innovative about Asana
Question 7
Assume it’s December 12th noon in Japan time now (2021-12-12T03:00:00Z in your local time). It’s December 11th 7pm in San Francisco. An Asana user in Japan set a task’s due date to “Today”. Seen from a user in San Francisco, when is the task’s due date?
- 1 - December 11 (Today)
- 2 - December 12 (Tomorrow)
- 3 - December 12 (Tomorrow) 7am
- 4 - December 12 (Tomorrow) noon
See the answer
The correct answer is 2 - December 12 (Tomorrow).
We can set either 1) only due date or 2) both due date and due time.
When we set only the due date, that date is the deadline regardless of the time difference. That timeframe is different depending on the location of users.
On the other hand, when we set the due time, the time difference is taken into account. The timing of the deadline is the same across the globe, wherever in the world the users are.
Real life example: At 9am in San Francisco, 1am in Japan:
PM “Please do this today (we still have 15 hours).”
Me “The task due date is yesterday…”
For global teams, it might be safer to set due times, not only the due dates.
Question 8
Asana focuses on managing tasks, so the tool doesn’t have a direct message capability. True or False?
- 1 - True
- 2 - False
See the answer
The correct answer is 2 - False.
There was a time when tasks lived in Asana and messages lived in other places like Slack. However, Asana implemented its own messaging feature this year.
Introducing Project Overview, Project Brief, and Messages
Of course it depends on the preference of the users, but technically we can manage everything in Asana now.
P.S. Asana positions itself as a work management software for making every part of work smooth, not a mere “to-do management tool”.
【Feature questions】
Question 9
In Asana, we can assign multiple assignees to a task. True or False?
- 1 - True
- 2 - False
See the answer
The correct answer is 2 - False.
Asana intentionally limit the number of task assignee to one.
If the responsibility is spread across several people, the work doesn’t move forward with the idea of “I believe the other person will do that”.
As explained in keywords like DRI and Areas of Responsibility, by clearly defining who takes care of which area of work, they can work motivated with responsibility.
If you’d like to use multiple assignees, it’s recommended to create tasks, one task per person, and ask everyone to take responsibility in completing their task.
“Assign duplicate tasks” is a time saver because we can create many assigned tasks at once.
Question 10
We can create a task by sending an email to Asana. To which address should we send those emails?
- 1 - w@mail.asana.com
- 2 - x@mail.asana.com
- 3 - y@mail.asana.com
- 4 - z@mail.asana.com
See the answer
The correct answer is 2 - x@mail.asana.com.
When we send an email to x@mail.asana.com, a task is created in your My Tasks.
By sending to x+SpecificLocation@mail.asana.com, we can also create tasks in specific places like in a project.
Please see the details at https://asana.com/guide/help/email/email-to-asana.
Speaking of ways to add tasks from outside of Asana UI, I also recommend Asana’s Chrome extension.
Question 11
With “Advanced Search”, we can search for tasks that are not assigned to anyone. True or False?
- 1 - True
- 2 - False
See the answer
The correct answer is 1 - True.
We can use queries like Nobody, Not me, and No project.
Probably due to technical difficulty, we need to type English words even in the localized UI of Asana at the moment.
Question 12
Which is the keyboard shortcut to access your My Tasks?
- 1 - Tab + A
- 2 - Tab + M
- 3 - Tab + T
- 4 - Tab + Z
See the answer
The correct answer is 4 - Tab + Z.
- Tab + A is “Assign task(s)”
- Tab + M is “Assign task(s) to me”
- Tab + T is “Add tag to task(s)”
You can see the list of keyboard shortcuts by clicking “Help & getting started” at lower left of the screen.
You can also directly display the list with keyboard shortcuts Cmd + / (Mac), Ctrl + / (Windows).
Your Asana experience will be even faster by remembering some of the main shortcuts.
By the way, my favorite one is Cmd + Shift + Up/Down arrows to move tasks to previous/next sections.
【Pro-level questions】
Question 13
The keyboard shortcut list tells us that Tab + / is the combination to open the search bar. There’s another secret shortcut to do the same thing. Which is the one?
- 1 - Tab + ?
- 2 - Tab + ’
- 3 - Tab + -
- 4 - Tab + ;
See the answer
The correct answer is 4 - Tab + ;.
I found the combination by chance when I was developing a tool using Asana API.
Speaking of undocumented keyboard shortcuts, another example used to be Tab + ←, which works exactly the same as Tab + ↑ (Go to the parent task). However, unfortunately, it seems both Tab + → (Go to the subtask) and Tab + ↑ (Go to the parent task) have been deleted from the list.
*I checked the behavior with Japanese and US keyboards but they might not work in different keyboard layouts.
Question 14
We can “pin to top” multiple comments in a task. True or False?
- 1 - True
- 2 - False
See the answer
The correct answer is 1 - True.
I found it by chance as well. Before that, I was somehow assuming we could only pin one comment.
Question 15
With “My Settings” > “Hacks” > “Extra Delight” turned on, and by pressing Tab + B, celebration characters such as Phoenix and Unicorn are displayed on the screen. True or False?
- 1 - True
- 2 - False
See the answer
The correct answer is 2 - False.
Tab + B displays cats on the screen. The shortcut is coming from “tabby” which means cats, with the sound of “Tab” and “B” combined.
We can now display dogs with Tab+V. (As a Japanese, I assume it’s because B and V are similar sounds, but I’m not sure.)
The celebration characters such as otter, narwhal, and yeti, are displayed when tasks are completed. It’s different from when we press the shortcut keys.
*Note: The correct setting is [Display] > [Show occasional celebrations upon task completion
].
Question 16
This is a URL of a task, opened in Inbox. Which part is the task ID?
- 1 - 1111111111111111
- 2 - 2222222222222222
- 3 - 3333333333333333
- 4 - None of the above
See the answer
The correct answer is 2 - 2222222222222222.
URLs in Asana are basically in the following format:
https://app.asana.com/0/Location/TaskID
The format is a little different in Inbox and search results. The inbox URLs are formatted as:
https://app.asana.com/0/inbox/InboxIDUniqueToTheUser/TaskID/StoryID
“Story” are each piece of change history and comments like these:
【Wrap-up】
Thank you for your time and patience today!
How many quizzes did you answer correctly?
It’d be great if you can share your impressions and thoughts in replies or on the social media (#AsanaTogether). Please be careful not to disclose answers before others challenge the quizzes!
Had fun, interested, want to learn more about Asana? We welcome you to Asana Together community!
See you next year then 
Thanks for sharing
Thank you so much for sharing git in the Forum 
