How do you run meetings in Asana?

I utilize projects for meetings that are repeating. My department has a bi-weekly meeting for project management that is a touch-base for everything we are working on, alerts about upcoming matters and brainstorming. I also keep a meeting projects for 1-1s I have with colleagues. I use the same project over and over for these. If it’s not a repeating meeting, I will just create a section within the project the meeting relates to.

I pretty much use Asana’s format for meetings however I have found I really don’t like subtasks in meeting agendas. For meetings I have found subtasks involve too much clicking and if someone is following along on a shared screen, I lose their focus.

So to avoid using subtasks, I format my text. I use all-caps for highest level section and indent subsections and tasks. I also like to use Alt Codes to create icons in the section headers so the text stands apart a bit.

Not a revolutionary way to do it, but it took me awhile to find the formats that worked for me.

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It doesn’t seem that Asana has a Folder option. So do you just have 10-100’s of projects by meeting date? I like the setup of the agenda but I am confused at the implementation.

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Hi @Nick_Nicolaysen, I do re-use the same project for each meeting to avoid have a lot of projects that are for the same repeating meeting. I simply change headings as needed and uncheck tasks if I want them on the agenda again.

If it’s not a meeting that repeats, then I just create a section in the project for a meeting. Does that make sense?

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Really interesting tread here. I have a question regarding the meeting minutes to report the decision taken following the meeting ends.
We do use Asana, but need to keep track of discussion and decisions. We used to create a new project for each recurring meeting, but we then multiplicated the tasks, either in the projects or for the assignee. Do you have any way of keeping a “snapshot” of the meeting?

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Could you elaborate on what you mean by keeping a snapshot of the meeting?

We tend to take meeting notes within a task description (including assignees, meeting goal, agenda, notes, action items) and assign out next steps via subtask. Does that answer your question?

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Hi @Alexis.
We do have currently about 15 projects from which we select specific tasks or sub-tasks to add them to our internal meeting (project dedicated to internal discussion).

Most of the assignees are present during this meeting, but we also need to report information and decision to people that are not assignee, or even not part of Asana (for now :wink: at least). Just like we did previoulsy using Word meeting minutes document that we shared with our organization.

So, we do tried to export the internal meeting in PDF (export to print) but can’t have all of the information, as only the task name and description are exported, and completed task are crossed out. Description is not as good as comment section to document meeting notes, as we do not see easily who wrote it and
sometimes a lot of different comments cannot always be summarized in the description section. We would like to have the possibility of export either the task name, description, completion, and comments, as well as assignee and due date, for parent and sub-tasks. This export would be to show the status of each task at the meeting date. A way of freezing the information at that time. Then, following the meeting, the tasks will be updated and then completed, so we can have different view for the next meeting.

Am I more clear?
Do you know how we can have the possibility of getting this information every week?

Thanks for the additional detail! It sounds like you’re already very familiar with the current export functionality.

If you’d like everyone on your team to have a consistent record of these meetings, the most obvious solution is to add everyone as a guest in Asana and give them access to the tasks and/or projects that are relevant to them.

For a more specific export of this data than Asana currently provides, you might consider an integration like Zapier to transfer information from Asana to another tool.

Thank you for your reply.
I’m also looking at Bridge24 integration but it will require some macro management to the excel file to make sure we do have the view witha ll of the information needed.
Tx

I usually do these steps.

  1. Create a task assigned to myself, add due time as to when the meeting begins.
  2. Add all the people I want to invite to follow the task so they can see this task.
  3. Add sub tasks and assign each subtask to each individual person so that it appears to their “my task” calendar.

As you can see, there are so many steps and lots of works to do.
Do you guys have a better way to do it and give similar result?

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Hi Team - there is some good ideas here but I dont see any suggestions on how to bundle meeting items/action items into a nice little bow and send them to external users that do not yet use Asana…

We have many suppliers and clients that are not in the Asana loop and I currently have to export into an excel sheet, make them look nice and pretty and then email out separately to these users…

Ideas?

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Hi @Nigel_Aitken - If you’d like to send specific action items to guests and would prefer not to export to an excel sheet, you could do something as simple as copying the tasks as you would in an ordinary text editor. Just “highlight” the tasks and paste into an email/word doc/google doc, etc. You’ll need to manually write the assignee, but other than that you’ll be set. The one thing you’ll want to keep in mind is highlighting and copy/pasting tasks in this way means when they’re pasted they appear as hyperlinks to the tasks themselves. I recommend confirming the privacy settings on these tasks to be safe, if you’d like to keep the tasks themselves private.

Thanks Alexis - I’ve got a couple of work-arounds that seem to get me through it but its not as fluid as it could be… I took another suggestion out of this thread to use Bridge24 to link the data into a sheet and then use a macro to pretty it up and allocate action numbers that are identifiable to all users on the call…

I think my suggestion for you would be to entertain the idea of allowing people to view a task list (I use a tag to put mine together) so as to allow someone to run a meeting with people who refuse to access Asana (or a combination of both). I work in the banking sector and its generally a big no-no to store sensitive data outside of approved networks so its not as simple as just asking them to join so they can see the list. Cheers!

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Thanks for the feedback @Nigel_Aitken! I’m glad you found a solution that works for you right now. As for your ideas, feel free to add them to the #productfeedback category and our product team will take note.

Hello, Everyone! I am not sure I understood the whole topic, but my point is:
I have aproximadatelly 30 projects on may Asana board. Each project has its meetings. Also, I go to 5-8 meetings per week. I can’t create a new project each meeting I go.

My question is: how to use Asana for meeting minutes “inside” the project?

Best Regards

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Hi we are experiencing the same issue here, also lot to projects and and multiple meetings in one project. @Mauro_Kusznir did you figure anything out for this?

I currently thinking to make 1 agenda project for each project, from the “task”-project you then add tasks also to the “meetings”-projects. If new tasks rises you can add them to the meeting project and later move them to the tasks project.

Hello! Glad being not the only one to face this issue. Well, how I am managing this today (clearly not the best option, but…):

1 - I’ve created a project named “meeting minutes”. Each meeting I attend I take notes in this “project”
2 - Then I add this task (where I took the notes) to the project which it refers to
3 - In each project, I created a section named “Meeting Minutes”, “to do”, “pending”

The good thing is that I can assignee this task to whoever is in charge. It is working so far, but I’m sure there are better ways to do itMM

Hi, thanks for your replay. I am going te experiment with a same kind of structure. Planning to have one section in the project “Meeting” (where we place agenda items) and a seperate “Meeting Minutes” and the “agenda” tasks will be in both projects. The action points from the meeting I wil work out in the project it self, as you do the same.

I will send an update to share my experiences.

I hope other people will share there workflow how they handle meetings with a lot of seperate projects in Asana.

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@Valentijn_Kok @Mauro_Kusznir
Not sure if this helps, but I often create a ‘meetings’ section within a project. Under the meetings section, I make a template agenda task. Every meeting, we copy that task, and rename it with the meeting date.
I like to keep the notes easily available, so we don’t complete the tasks, but you could complete them if you want it to look cleaner.
image

The actual agenda template task looks a bit like this

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I think this is great, Very useful. Tks for sharing

great advice, THANK YOU!
I have the added goals of making the meeting recurring, keeping a running list of notes and tasks from each meeting in ONE place, and make sure the meeting shows up in everyone’s My Tasks Calendar. My team is very small and very remote. Plus, the meeting is a general a check in (like a scrum) with the same generic agenda. For my specific needs here is what I’m thinking:

  1. Create a “Master” Meeting Task assigned to myself, set due time to the start time, set recurrence for weekly, paste the generic agenda in the description, in the subtasks area create a section (Tab+N) for each date of the meeting (ex: all the Mondays in Q1)
  2. Add folks invited to the meetings as collaborators so they can see and edit my Master Meeting Task, and they get updates in case they miss a meeting. (Additionally, one stakeholder doesn’t attend the meetings but wants to be able to see the notes, so I add them as a collaborator, too.)
  3. **To make sure each person invited to the meetings has this meeting in their own “MY TASKS”… I duplicate my Master Meeting Task MINUS the subtasks (deselect), and in the description paste a link to my Master Meeting Task. Assign the person invited to this newly duplicated meeting. Repeat for all invited persons. (tip: I then duplicate the duplicated one)
  4. TO USE: During meetings, in my Master Meeting Task, under the appropriate subtask section I can add action items (as sub tasks) as needed and assign said subtask to the appropriate person so that the action item appears in his/her “my tasks”.

I sounds a lot, but I only only going to do this once a quarter and as I said, my team is super small.