Automate Your Agency

How do I use Asana like a pro?

• Alane Boyd & Micah Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 17

Share episode

In our last episode, we kicked off our exploration of the Top 3 project management systems by shining the spotlight on Monday.com. 

Now we'll be turning our attention to the always consistent, market-leader, Asana. 

As certified Asana Experts and having used Asana to help scale their previous business, Alane and Micah have the knowledge you need to get the most out of Asana's features and functionality. 

Join us in the episode of Automate Your Agency as Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson dig into the ups and downs of Asana and share their favorite features that helped elevate their agency to over 600 clients and 100+ team members. Listen in for actionable tips that will help you structure and optimize your Asana usage to ensure a successful, fruitful implementation!

If you're interested in learning more about Asana and whether or not Asana is the right fit for your business, this is the episode for you!

If you're already using Asana, take advantage of our Asana Team Training in our Workday Ninja community. It's 100% free to use and takes less than an hour to complete. You and your team with gain all the knowledge you need to leverage the most helpful features and effortlessly navigate the Asana. It's 100% free to use. 

 If you have yet to choose a project management system, use our free Project Management System Selector Tool to get a personalized recommendation in minutes. 

If you found this episode valuable and want to help other businesses reap the rewards, would you mind leaving us a 5-star review? It will help with show rankings and give more listeners the opportunity to find our show. 

Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Thank you and see you next time!

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links. This means that at no additional cost to you, we may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Thank you for supporting the podcast!

For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

Want more valuable content and helpful tips?

Explore our Courses/Programs:

Enjoy our Free Tools:

Connect with Us:

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate Your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations. If you've been using Asana and you feel like you're missing out on features and instead it's more like a glorified checklist, then this episode is free.

0:00:27 - (Alane): And Asana is my. Just one of my favorites. It's near and dear to my heart. It's what you and I built our previous company in, and we're certified experts in it. But we hear similar complaints that it's like a glorified checklist from most of the clients we start working with.

0:00:48 - (Micah): Yeah. So I think so many people jump into Asana going, all right, let's manage these projects. And Asana is been around. They're the 800 pound gorilla. They're still the largest between a sauna ClickUp and Monday. While it's easy to use and it looks good, there's a lot of ways that you could run into some issues while trying to implement it into your team.

0:01:12 - (Alane): Yeah. And I mean, even just managing your own tasks can be done differently between everyone and you have to do some setup in the beginning.

0:01:20 - (Micah): Yeah, I would say, geez, I don't know for sure. Alane, how long, do you remember how long it took us to figure out how to get a great task management workflow inside of Asana working when we first introduced it to our team at our last business? I want to say, like six, seven months.

0:01:39 - (Alane): Yeah. And since then, I mean, this was ten years ago when we first started using Asana, but I remember vividly because I was pregnant with my son at the time, so a lot to take in at one time, but Asana did it differently. And actually, it was a little bit easier than it is now. They made it so that it was even more functionality, but for a first time user, it was more to figure out. So I think it's actually harder now to get in and start using Mytask than it was ten years ago when we started.

0:02:10 - (Micah): I completely agree with that. There's rules. There's a whole bunch of different sections that you can put in. There's different views. And I would say the number one thing that when I'm working with individual users and I go, hey, can we take a look at your. My task section? You see this kind of like deer in the headlights, like panic. Yeah. Okay. Not because there's things they don't want us to see.

0:02:36 - (Micah): Because they have completely ignored that section. I would love the stats in Asana. I would guess a huge percentage of people really struggle managing their tasks inside of Sana. And so I put this right at the top of the list of what to watch out for when you're using Asana is figure out the best way for your team to manage their tasks in a standardized way. So just throwing an idea out there for anybody who's listening, but to do a today section, to do a upcoming and to do a later section, and above those three sections, throw a recently assigned, then throw in some rules that moves between those sections based on a date field.

0:03:24 - (Micah): If you have that going for you and you train your team on how to do that, you're really, really ahead of the game. The biggest thing to watch out for with this is getting a huge list inside of your my tasks. And then your team members are going to go, I can't look at this. I'm just going to ignore that and do my own thing.

0:03:43 - (Alane): I mean, that's what I was going to say is that a lot of times that's what we see, right? That it's just this giant list. And even if not everything's due that day, the person still has to spend their time sorting that in their head, okay, what's due today, what's not, what's priority? And that's why that upcoming piece is also so important, because you're like, well, if it's not today, everything's later. Okay, true, true.

0:04:08 - (Alane): But let's set some standards so that it moves from, if it's not in today, you have that upcoming. Because sometimes people do get ahead on work. They finish their tasks and then, okay, well, what's coming up? What could I work on next? Then they have that little short, sweet list that they can choose from based on priority, hopefully. And move that up into today.

0:04:29 - (Micah): Yep, yep. Excellent point. So once you have that set up, then it begs the question, well, how do I figure out what I'm supposed to do when I look at my tasks and where do I go and how do I find stuff? So structuring, structuring asana. Structuring asana is far more difficult than it sounds like it should be. If you're not on the plan with portfolios, then you're limited to teams and projects. And nine times out of ten, what I see happen is people go in, they create a project inside of Asana, they go, hey, this isn't really a project, so I'm going to make it a task.

0:05:10 - (Micah): But then that task blossoms into a project and you start seeing these nested and subtasks with nested subtasks and assigned to all different team members, and it's all crammed into this one little task that everybody's supposed to work out of in a project. And so the structure of Asana is so, so important, so it's going to feel like it shouldn't be this way. But anytime. This is our rule of thumb. Anytime you have an item that involves multiple people, make it a project.

0:05:49 - (Micah): That's a project in Asana's worldview. It'll just help immensely.

0:05:54 - (Alane): Well, and this is the hard part. Right. This is why we see this as an issue when clients are using it, because you don't inherently know how to create this stuff and it has to depend on how do you do things at your company, how do your workflows look? How do your departments look? Asana's help files are based on functionality. How do you do this? But you need to know what you need to build, and that is the hard part.

0:06:20 - (Alane): Either you have somebody internally that just rocks at not just workflows, but also being an expert in Asana, or you need to work with an outside person like us to help build that piece out, because it's not going to just come to you, it's going to be.

0:06:36 - (Micah): Absolutely.

0:06:37 - (Alane): And that's why, you know, if you're listening to this episode and you don't, you're going, yeah, I'm running into that. You know, that's why it's not something that comes. You need to be an expert in two different things, workflow, operations and Asana.

0:06:49 - (Micah): Definitely, definitely. I mean, there's. Asana is not going to tell you you're doing it wrong. So you can set up a specific structure. You could put everything under one team, you could put all your projects as tasks. You could create separate boards for every department, for every aspect of every project. All these kind of things that seem logical. Day one with Asana, at day 365, you're having a lot of oh, crap moments because people are wasting time, things are being lost. There's a lot of frustration because the structure isn't correct to match your workflow based on how Asana's functionality works.

0:07:31 - (Alane): Yeah, and this goes into status updates. And when you don't have status updates, you don't know what you're missing out on.

0:07:39 - (Micah): This is my favorite feature of Asana. It sounds so weird that a status update should be somebody's favorite feature, but I think a good 80% to 90% of clients that we work with, don't even know these exist, or have seen the status update button and have never really explored it enough to know the power between Asana ClickUp and Monday. Asana has this 100% right. It's so powerful. When we implemented this at our last business, Alane, it was like the world of project management finally opened up to us.

0:08:18 - (Alane): And I just don't think. You don't think that a status update makes that big of a deal?

0:08:22 - (Micah): Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about what a status update is. So I was just saying previously, you want to get your projects out of tasks. This is one of the main reasons why, because you can't easily do a status update on a task. It's just a comment. If you elevate that thing that's an actual project into a project, you now have the entire status update functionality. And what that gives you is the ability to say, well, is this project on track, at risk, off track, on hold, completed?

0:08:53 - (Micah): You can also leave all types of updates. You can get visual charts that are going into that, but most importantly, it's keeping a log and a timeline of this project automatically for you. So if you do a status update as a project owner every week, then the project manager overseeing all of this, or leadership overseeing all of this, is suddenly able to see the timeline and go on track. On track, at risk.

0:09:19 - (Micah): Uh oh. Off track. But there's comments that are going along with each of these, and you can have discussion within those status updates so you don't have to continue to ask, where are we at with this and where are we at with this and what happened here and all of this? Because all of that is built into Asana and streamlines, the collaboration of everything.

0:09:40 - (Alane): Yeah, it's really awesome. I remember this next one was such a pain point that we had to screw up and learn from, and that is their hierarchy. You can nest subtasks within subtasks within subtasks within subtasks, and you are digging and digging and digging and digging, and you're literally in a hole.

0:10:03 - (Micah): Yes, I've seen it even worse than that, where it's a nested subtask and a nested subtask and a nested subtask. And then three or four layers down, that triple, quadruple nested subtask is actually then shared with the original project. Talk about spaghetti.

0:10:24 - (Alane): What a nightmare. So we've learned from that experience. You just need to go one level down, honestly.

0:10:31 - (Micah): Yeah. Yep. And a good rule of thumb with subtasks, this doesn't apply to everything. But a good rule of thumb is use subtasks for the steps that the task owner will do. So if I own a task, I'm going to create a set of subtasks that are going to be the things that I'm going to do to achieve that task. That's the easiest way to think about it. You're one level down. You're not treating it like a project, you're treating it like a task of it works really well in Asana and it's super clean.

0:10:59 - (Micah): All right, so to go along with status updates and kind of this topic of maybe you don't want to nest sub tasks, one power of status updates is that it does elevate up into portfolios. And portfolios allow you to get a high level view of all the projects within that portfolio. And unlike teams of, you can assign one project to multiple portfolios. So that's another reason you'd want to elevate things into a project. You get portfolio variety, you get status updates, and even in portfolios you can add custom fields at the project level, so you can add data points related to the projects instead of data points just related to tasks, which is super, super helpful.

0:11:45 - (Micah): One of the features that portfolios does allow is nested portfolios. So you can create hierarchy. It's pseudo hierarchy within Asana. It's kind of a fake hierarchy, but it allows you a drill down method and allows you to explore. So a common way to do this would be, hey, Alane, if you're an account manager, we're going to create a portfolio for you and then we're going to nest a portfolio for each client you have.

0:12:12 - (Micah): And then under each of those nested portfolios that represent the clients, we're going to put each client project. So that way you can easily go right into your portfolio, you can go right into your clients. Whatever client you're looking for, you can see all the projects, and at the portfolio level you're going to see on track. On track. Off track. Oh, what happened? Click in the status update. The project owner is going to tell you exactly why it is off track.

0:12:37 - (Micah): That is going to give you the opportunity to, and you're going to get notifications of this happening too. But now you can easily get right to it at any time. Now you can ask the project manager, the project owner questions. Hey guys, why are we off track now? What's going on? What happened? I don't really understand where we missed this. What do I tell the client where, what's the ETA? All those questions that stem from that.

0:13:02 - (Alane): And how does milestones, then, Micah, fit into all of this?

0:13:07 - (Micah): Okay. Yeah, that's a great question. I almost forgot about milestones. Let's continue on the example that we're using now. If when you're designing projects, you create milestones that represent completions of phases or, you know, actual big things being completed within this project. So a given project might have four or five or six milestones. You can then view the portfolio from a milestone completion perspective.

0:13:37 - (Micah): By default, it's by task completion. But if you do it by milestone, you get a little more accurate view of how far are we through this project. So, for example, if you're doing it by task percentage, milestone one might take ten tasks, milestone two might take three tasks, and milestone four might take three tasks. So if you look and you complete milestone one, you're over 50% of the way of your tasks.

0:14:06 - (Micah): But milestone two and three, even though they're fewer tasks, they might be a lot more work. They might take longer. And so if you're to do it milestone based, you're only one third of the way through the project. Milestone wise just gives a little bit of a more accurate view. And there's different areas where milestones pop up that I don't want to bore everybody listening to us on it right now, but they are super, super useful.

0:14:32 - (Alane): And a lot of this stuff that we're talking about just might feel like we're talking a foreign language right now because you haven't been using these things. And so trying to go in and implement this stuff is hard. That's why we're talking about these things that a lot of companies miss out on because you don't know about them. And so if you're listening to this and you're not even sure, that's where we're looking at your workflows and saying where these things fit in, how to train, how to use them, where it makes sense for your projects, how you do things.

0:15:03 - (Micah): It's funny, I use the word translation a lot for this, Alane, and whether we do it or, you know, the people who are listening do it themselves or somebody on their team does it, or they hire somebody else to do it, there's a translation from what's the workflow that's happening now? And what does that look like in a tool like Asana?

0:15:24 - (Alane): That's a great comparison. All right. One of my favorite things to use project management systems for is conditional forms to get data. And it sounds like when we say a conditional form, that sounds like such a weird way to explain it, but it's a form that people fill out. This can be external or internal. And I remember with our last business we had internal forms for other department requests because you might need something from marketing or from sales or from operations team. How do you ask? Appropriately get it to the manager to decide, okay, where does this fit into our current project that we're working on?

0:16:07 - (Alane): And so these forms can be a way to collect data to get it where it needs to go. And it's already in the format of that project management system. So in this case, Asana.

0:16:17 - (Micah): Yeah, I've got a great example of this one too. Take the marketing department and take any other department that needs something from the marketing department. Without a form, it's generally an email, a slack, an in person request, or maybe a quick comment in Asana. Or if it's coming from a director or a VP or CEO or a founder, it's just going to be a task that I really prefer.

0:16:45 - (Alane): Paper airplanes.

0:16:47 - (Micah): Oh, or I forgot. Or paper. That's how we did it last time. No, the 210 cans and the string for each department. Yeah, yeah. The chance of that being a complete request where the marketing department sees that task or sees that slack, or gets that email and doesn't have to ask any questions to complete the request is like 0%. And I'm sure we've all been through this, everybody who's listening, the request is made. The marketing team goes, okay, well, do you need it in this format or this format, or when do you need it by? And then you answer them, and then they have more questions, and then you answer them, and then they have more questions, and then you answer them and you're spending a week or days or hours just going back and forth and back and forth. This is where forms come in, unlike an internal request perspective, because with a form you have the conditional formatting that you can do.

0:17:42 - (Micah): You have required fields and you have structured data, and the person making the request doesn't have to remember all the stuff that marketing needs because marketing's not their department. They don't know that they need the dimensions and the formats and the due dates and all this other stuff. So you put all those requirements in a form, then anybody in the company can fill out that form, get that nearly complete request to marketing, marketing reviews, that maybe asks one question and then it's off to the races.

0:18:14 - (Alane): Yeah, I mean, when you were talking about that, like we're talking about an internal scenario, but forms can be sent to clients that can be new client onboarding what information do you need when you're onboarding them to get that information from them that'll go automatically into whatever project you have for new clients. One of my favorite really weird use cases is for software. If you're a software company and a customer using the platform wants to submit a bug and software developers always want to know stuff that a user never thinks of. Well, what browser were you in? Were you on mobile? Like all of this information as a user you would never in a million years think of, well, if you do your bug request as a form, then you're getting the data you need instead of this back and forth scenario.

0:19:05 - (Micah): Yeah, I love that example. And I mean, these forms could apply to so many things and you're never reentering the data, you're never having to create the task manually. You can trigger automation based off this. I mean, the value of implementing forms as part of your system is just, you know, you win no matter what. With this, you're going to get an ROI.

0:19:31 - (Alane): Yeah, exactly. The next one that we're going to talk about I would say is the biggest change management and culture change that needs to happen when you are using Asana, ClickUp Monday, whatever project management system, and that is stop slacking. Meaning slack like not just taking a rest, like the software slack or teams or whatever your chat is, stop communicating in those systems and instead moving it to Asana.

0:20:03 - (Micah): Yes. We see it so often where I described this the other day, Alane, and I like this analogy, is people will design a project inside of Asana and assign it out and you know, just assuming it's a well planned project. Cool. And then all the collaboration is done over here in slack. And so you have this big huge moat between the work, the collaboration of the work, and then people just log into us on it to check things off.

0:20:34 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:20:34 - (Micah): Yep. But then if something happens with that project, if there's a question, if it's overdue, if a milestone doesn't get completed, if something gets missed, you can't look at those tasks. You have to build a boat, swim across the moat, go over to slack, do a search for an hour, try to find it, realize, oh, I talked about that in person. Realize, oh, that was actually in this email thread. Realize, oh, it was a direct message with somebody and now they don't work here anymore.

0:21:04 - (Micah): It's a disaster. Don't make the moat do the work inside of Asana. Do the collaboration inside of Asana. The tools to communicate and collaborate and message is top notch in Asana.

0:21:17 - (Alane): Yeah. And just really work on trying to move it out of the conversation happening elsewhere. Put it in there.

0:21:26 - (Micah): One tip that I do have for this, Alane, is turn off email notifications in Asana because then you're forcing your team to work in Asana, and they have to check the inbox, and pretty soon everybody starts collaborating inside of Asana, and it's not, oh, I'm going to wait for the email notification, then I'll log into Asana. No, work in Asana. Collaborate in Asana.

0:21:47 - (Alane): Yes. And you stole my number one thing that I tell people to do and when I designed. It's okay, Micah. It's okay. We can have the same one. But when we designed the Asana basic training, that is one of the number one. Like, there's three main things that we cover in Asana basic training. We'll link to it in, in the show notes. We'll give you a discount code. You can share this with your team, new client, onboarding everything so that it's free for y'all to use.

0:22:15 - (Alane): But you have to turn off notifications. And as you want to work within your project management system, you want to be in Asana, checking that inbox, archiving so that the communication stays there. But you also don't want double notifications because that's double work. I don't need more work.

0:22:34 - (Micah): I can't tell you how many times. No, nobody needs more work right now. I can't tell you how many times I see people tell or hear people even just tell me, oh, I just delete all the notifications in my inbox. In my email inbox. Great. Turn off your Asana email notifications and just use Asana then, because even though it feels like it's quick, you do that like five or six or seven times a day. Now. That's like 1520 minutes.

0:23:05 - (Micah): That's a nice break that you could have had. Instead, you spent that time deleting useless crap out of your email inbox.

0:23:12 - (Alane): Mm hmm. And it all comes down to training your teams.

0:23:18 - (Micah): Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Everything that we talked about today, if you just get people in Asana, and even if you try to implement some of these things, if you don't train the team on these things, they don't know it's nobody. You would have to have every single person on your, in your company be certified Asana experts to know how to do all this stuff. Obviously not realistic and obviously not what you're hiring for.

0:23:46 - (Micah): So the better way to do it is create these standardizations, create these systems, build simple training, and then train your team on how you want to do it your way within Asana.

0:23:58 - (Alane): Yeah. If not, you'll have however many people work at your company. That is, how many different ways that they will be using Asana.

0:24:06 - (Micah): I would still multiply that by two or three because they'll use it a different way.

0:24:12 - (Alane): Yeah, that's so true. You'll have 250 different ways of using Asana, whether it's person team. So we're going to link in the show notes to our basic training. If you have more questions about how to structure your asana on how to set up workflows, any of the things that Micah and I covered into this, we have our company workday ninja. This is what we do all day, helping companies improve their usage of these project management systems so that your team can act as a well oiled machine.

0:24:42 - (Alane): So shoot us a note and contact us if you want to talk more.

0:24:46 - (Micah): Yes. Thanks everybody for listening.

0:24:48 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate your agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website, workdayninja.com.

0:24:59 - (Micah): Dot, and join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:25:04 - (Alane): Bye for now.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Alane Boyd

Co-host
Head Shot

Micah Johnson

Co-host