I feel overwhelmed what can I do? Yes, Asana allows you to get rid of most emails to bring clarity. But many bad practices or lack of clean-up can generate an overwhelming feeling. Here’s how to address the situation.
Remove notifications from tasks due today, in the profile settings > hacks
Clean up your My Tasks view
Unfollow projects and tasks massively, using the profile settings > notifications > Manage project notifications + skimming through the Inbox
Setup task auto-promotion using Rules in My Tasks and push to Later anything due in the future
Use my Tip of iceberg trick if applicable: only assign yourself on the next task for a big project, not on all tasks
Use Parking projects to store unimportant or unurgent tasks, and if possible unassign from yourself
Use a fire emoji on urgent tasks to make them stand out
Challenge custom colors impacting your clarity within projects
Delete stuff you’ll never do. If it’s important, it will come back.
Delegate as much as you can to the appropriate person
I’d add: Achieve “Inbox Zero” by archiving notifications
For read/replied notifications, we can immediately archive them. For notifications that require some actions, we can create a follow-up task to track them in My Tasks.
Before:
Need to check two places (Inbox and My Tasks) to understand what needs to be done
Scroll endlessly to find the information received last week
After:
Only need to check in My Tasks
Find the information in My Tasks, in Projects, or with Search
I found that many new Asana users don’t know that they can archive notifications in Inbox.
I learned the importance to emphasize archiving at @paulminors’s webinar “Training: How to ease your team into Asana” in 2016, and ever since, I do so whenever I onboard new members, so that they are less likely to be overwhelmed.
P.S. This is a great topic! May I get your approval for translating it for the Japanese community?