Whether it is weekly team meetings or 1:1’s if your work is in Asana, I recommend your meetings should be too!
Asana itself has some great templates in the template library that can be used to set these up easily, but as usual I like to do things MY WAY so I thought I would share!
Firstly, I always would recommend setting the project up in board view for a start - super visual and easy to see each task. This is an evergreen project so I do not need to make a project every meeting.
Secondly, Sections - Depending on the style of meeting these may differ - I usually have a section each of; Meeting Agenda, Let’s Discuss, Action Points, Completed and Reminders.
The ‘Let’s Discuss’ - the team can add in suggestions of things they wish to discuss in the meeting in advance. They can do this by creating a task in that section or (my favorite) multi-homing an existing task they want to discuss into that section.
The meeting lead can then review in advance and slot it into the Meeting Agenda section as well as adding tasks of their choosing for the agenda.
I recommend having a number field in this project so that each topic/task can be assigned a time to save running over in meetings. Potentially a priority custom field also if you feel it is necessary ( you can then sort by priority and make sure you discuss the higher priority topics first).
During the meetings, comments can be added to multihomed tasks that are discussed to provide updates from the meeting and then they can be removed from the meetings project. Anything that is not multihomed can be moved to the completed section if there is no further action required.
Anything left after the meeting has finished in the ‘Let’s Discuss’ section can be moved to the meeting agenda for next time.
Any Action Points that are actual tasks for the team to do can be written in the Action Points Column, given deadlines and multi-homed into the correct project or assigned out to members of the team. This can have a rule so that once an Action Point task is completed it moves to the completed section. Then if something hasn’t been completed it can be moved into the agenda to discuss the next week if required.
The Reminders section- I have a task titled with the meeting name and assigned to each person who is supposed to attend and have it reoccurring. They can also communicate using the comment box if they cannot attend.
I also recommend using the status update to capture the minutes from the meeting. You can have sections inside the update such as Attendees and Notes and everyone who is a part of the meetings project will get a message of these in their inbox. This also means you can easily go back to previous meetings and read details and updates.
This is just how I do it, please add your suggestions below!
Danielle, this is great. We are just starting to use Asana for our meetings and love it. One questions that I have to help manage my tasks.
I use the “My Task” view from the left navigation bar. But I struggle managing the tasks because they reside in a project, but they might also need to be an agenda item. The project and the meeting agenda (both team and 1-on-1) have different fields and when I see the tasks in my master list, it’s difficult to manage them. Know what what belongs to what, the status, etc.
If you could share how you personally manage tasks between meetings and projects or point me to a resource, I would really appreciate it! Thanks!
The multi-homing is probably the best bet - it is where a task can be as a part of the project and the meeting agenda. It will inherit fields from both projects but you can add your preferred fields to your my tasks from the library so you can see them at a glance. (Providing the custom fields have already been added to the library).
Hope that makes sense!
Thanks for putting this together. It has me rethinking how we’re doing meetings. We’ve been setting up individual meetings as tasks inside a team meetings project. I’m finding this somewhat limiting as agenda items need to either be listed in the description or as sub-tasks. It’s not a bad way to do it but you have me rethinking this.
I’m curious do you always set up meetings as a project? If so, do you have a portfolio that holds all those meetings for reference. I guess I’m asking where are you placing the meeting agenda above?
Hey @Jason_Roberts1 Yes all my meetings are rolling projects that gets updated each time. I place the agenda as tasks in the agenda section that get ticked off when discussed.
We are just starting out having meetings in Asana. Do you have any meetings where everyone provides an update, and its not really around specific items to discuss? Currently I have it set up so each week is a bucket and everyone has a task in the bucket. Wondering how others may approach a weekly update type meeting where everyone speaks?
Hi @Kristen_Remick, this is what we’re doing in our team. We use a template task to generate an agenda task for every meeting. In this task, we have:
a description including sections for each member of our team
a subtask to each team member to add their agenda item (assigned for the day before the meeting, so we’re sure everyone has added their agenda before the meeting).
During the meeting, everyone goes through all their point, and we create follow-up tasks if needed.
Our team is spread worldwide, and because of that, not everyone can always attend the team meeting live. To solve that, we’re doing two things:
Folks not able to attend the meeting live record a video and attach it to the agenda. This video is played during the live meeting, so everyone gets to hear the update face to face
We also record our team meeting and share the link to the recording, so folks not able to attend live can catch up async the next day.
Any follow-up conversation after that happens via comment.
Recording videos has revolutionized our team meetings and made them so inclusive. Has anyone else experienced with videos too? And if so, have you found it helpful?
@Danielle-GenD Thank you for this great overview. Can you elaborate on the last bullet? Where is the status update? I’m not seeing it on your screen share. Is is a field you’ve added?
I’ve leaned towards keeping agendas and notes in a running doc for each meeting and 1:1 so I can easily scroll down and not have to search by date and click in and out of Asana tasks/boards. This is helping me reconsider.I love the emphasis on multi-homed tasks making up the agenda. I think what we’re struggling with is that many of our staff haven’t fully adopted Asana and are using it for agendas and meetings primarily.
HI @Sarah_Brown9 in the top screenshot by the title you shout see a set status button. This is also on the project home page on the right hand side. You can set a status as on track, at risk or off track and then you can see all previous updates (notes) from previous meetings.
