Marquis vs Bastien - No Asana no work

[Bastien_Siebman]

Marquis and I have a combined experience of 20 years with using Asana and hundreds of clients helped. But we might not agree on everything and we thought it would be interesting for others to see how we align or not on important topics.

Today’s topic is one you can summarize with “No Asana no work”: how far should you go when asking people to create tasks?

Marquis “Everything should happen in the same place the task is happening”

I’m a firm believer that if it isn’t in Asana, it didn’t happen. This is something that I’ve tried to make a standard practice for my team. Places like Slack make it easy to make requests of people, but the problem is that these requests can often become lost in the flood of other unrelated content and conversations.

Anything that is required of me needs to be in Asana, or else it’s just not getting done. In some cases, I will use the Slack<>Asana integration and create Asana tasks from Slack if someone has asked something of me. To increase adoption, I will often ask the person making the request to create an Asana task for me so that they get in the habit of going to Asana first.

I’ll sometimes see conversations in Slack that I know is related to a task in Asana and rather than sharing my thoughts in the thread, I’ll take a screenshot of the Slack conversation so far, paste that in Asana, add my feedback to Asana, and then post the Asana link in Slack so that everyone knows to redirect the conversation back to Asana.

I’ve always been a firm believer that all the people, tasks, and work about the tasks should be happening in the same place that the task is happening.

All in all, there is rarely a use case where Asana is not the go-to method of communication.

Bastien “Be careful of the mental overload”

This is a mantra I got from working as a developer: we used to say “No Jira no work”. It meant one thing: you can’t do anything for someone unless it is documented in Jira. It might seem extreme but the reasoning was clear: if you start doing things that are not tracked, then the velocity of your team is inaccurate.

I believe the same thing is true for Asana: if you start doing things without a task, we can’t really track how much you do or have on your plate. And in fact, this is going to have a big impact on your mental overload: you’ll have a todo list in your head, as well as in Asana.

So I believe this rule is a good one: I personally create a task for every tiny little thing I have to do!

Conclusion: what do YOU think?

[Andrea_Mayer]

@Bastien_Siebman

I’ll take a screenshot of the Slack conversation so far, paste that in Asana, add my feedback to Asana

Yes! Doing the same all the time. I think this is really important to ensure everything in regards to a task is captured where it should be.
Sometimes I even respond later on purpose to people who still try to send tasks via a communication channel vs whoever messages me in Asana directly.

@Bastien_Siebman

create a task for every tiny little thing I have to do

[Liohn_Sherer]

I’m going to share this with my team so they have someone else to blame for my incessant refrain of “Asana!”

[Liohn_Sherer]

But do I share it via email, Teams, or… Asana!

[Bastien_Siebman]

A WhatsApp message of course, because that’s super important.

[Kateland_Vernon1]

Love this! Thankfully, my team is used to working in Asana (we’ve been using it for the past five years), so at this point, it’s mostly just the occasional reminder to add a task in Asana when an agreement or next steps are decided verbally during a meeting. As the project manager, though, I’m usually the one in charge of that…so…