Automate Your Agency

Stop managing tasks! Start managing workflows in ClickUp, Asana, and Monday!

• Alane Boyd & Micah Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 38

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Using project management tools like Asana, ClickUp, or Monday without a solid workflow is like trying to run a marathon in flip-flops. It's messy, chaotic, and you’re probably wasting a ton of time. Newsflash: it doesn’t have to be that way. 

In this episode, Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson drop the truth on why your workflow is probably a mess, and how to fix it. They’re not sugarcoating it: we’re talking about the real reasons your team isn’t hitting their stride and the steps to finally make your project management tools actually work for you.

Here’s what you’ll get:

💡 Why using Asana, ClickUp, or Monday like a basic to-do list is a huge mistake.

💡 Simple, no-tech-needed ways to set up workflows that actually *move the needle*.

💡 How to fix the accountability gaps that are holding your team back.

Stop wasting time and start building the systems that’ll make your team work smarter, not harder. This episode is your wake-up call, no more excuses, let’s get your team on track.

Also, if you're looking to dive deeper into any of these tools, check out our WMS Basic Training courses:

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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.

0:00:18 - (Alane): All right, Micah, this is such a common thing when we work with a new client.

0:00:23 - (Micah): Serious.

0:00:24 - (Alane): It's serious because at this point I start getting nervous when I see this. But it's every single, almost every single client we work with. It's like this that you're using your project management system Asana Click over Monday as an individual task assignment tool instead of a workflow with tasks in it. And I want to talk about what we mean by those two things and why you don't want to just create it as an individual task list and you want to build a workflow with tasks in it.

0:01:00 - (Micah): Yeah, I'm all about this topic because like you said, almost every single client has some variation of this. And I think a quick sidebar. I think I've thought a lot about this, Alane, and I think it's because people look at tools like Asana ClickUp and Monday and go, that's going to solve all of our problems. We're going to start using it. Hey team, we are using this. And then that's where the training typically ends. There's no standardization. There's no training, there's no.

0:01:34 - (Micah): This is how we're going to use it here. It's just start using it and let's see what happens and let's reap all these benefits. But then the wild west happens and Alane creates her personal board. Micah creates his personal board. Marketing creates their personal board.

0:01:55 - (Alane): I was going to say marketing has a, has their own board with 400 tasks in it. That one is, makes me laugh because it's almost every time. Or software development. If you're using your project management tool for software development, which Fantastic. High five. But it's not just a long running list of things. And. Okay, so let's talk about why if you're using it for individual tasks, why you don't want to do that. Well, number one, you don't know where that falls in and you don't know if you have duplication of efforts. You have nothing to show where it is in a part of your plan.

0:02:34 - (Micah): Yeah. And what you mean by falls in is like where it falls into actually completing company objectives or goals or projects. Right?

0:02:43 - (Alane): Yeah. So let's, let's use an example like maybe creating a new, maybe you need to do a new landing page or a page on your website. Okay, that is your project. You might need to buy a new domain. Is that marketing? Maybe not. That could be. It could be somebody else on another team that buys the domain, gets it set up to push over to your website. If you're, if you're doing a whole new URL, you're going to have graphics that you need, you have text that you need, SEO things that you need.

0:03:16 - (Alane): And a lot of times what I see, instead of having a project for your website with all the pieces that need to be a part of it and then moving it into the status, you can't work on everything at once. And so you can move things into priority. Well, before you start building, you probably need to know what you're going to put in it. So having a structure of text and graphics could be in a word doc, you know, I'm not talking about anything fancy, but that's going to be your first draft of your website.

0:03:45 - (Alane): So you want to prioritize that before you start building your website because you don't know what's going into your website yet. And so that's the difference between, you know, individual tasks where yes, you're going to have to create graphics, you're going to have to create text that goes in there, but if you can put it in your, in the workflow and then you have, let's just make up a status board would be your backlog of everything that you have that you need to do to get your website done.

0:04:12 - (Alane): Then you have to, it moves to, to do then in progress. Maybe you have a validation step, then you have ready to go into website, you know, whatever it might be and then done. And that's what a workflow is. And you can move those tasks and you can assign them to different people, but you always have a visual of where everything is for that website.

0:04:34 - (Micah): Right? Right. Somebody who's responsible for that objective can go to a single board and see, well, where are we at with this landing page? Are there, have we missed anything? Are we behind schedule? Are we ahead of schedule? If what we typically see without this structure is, hey, let's have a meeting on creating this landing page. And then let's hope we remember to track all the action items. But maybe.

0:05:03 - (Micah): And then everybody goes and creates their own individual task list. Well, guess what? Nobody owns anything. Nobody knows where anything is at. There's no accountability, there's no recording of where anything can be tracked. And then two weeks go by and you're like, where's the landing page at? There's no interactivity the collaboration happens in email, it happens in Slack or teams. Like it's all over the place.

0:05:31 - (Alane): I mean, I, I literally had this conversation just last week that is like replicated. And then you have that they were complaining about the number of meetings that they're having to have because they always have to talk about status, where things are at, what are the roadblocks of this project that's eating away people's time. And then you have these action items. Maybe they create action, a task for themselves after that meeting, but maybe not.

0:05:57 - (Alane): But you have no visual of where if they did, if they didn't, how that bubbles up into everything else. You cannot reprioritize because you don't have a coherent space for all of this stuff. Now I want to take a step back, Micah, because. And you might disagree and that's okay. But when a team first starts, I highly recommend if you're starting with a project management system like click up a Asana or Monday, that you use our basics course it's free and it takes less than an hour. Get every person that comes in, have them go through that. That way you're from the very basics doing this.

0:06:35 - (Alane): But my belief is after that to start using it in, in whatever capacity feels good at that time. Because what I find is if you're scared to use your project management system because you don't want to do it wrong, if it doesn't have a workflow to be a part of in the beginning, then you're going to still use post its or whatever note system that you have. So instead of like waiting for a workflow to be there, I do say just get in there and start using it. Assign yourself tasks, get all chaotic and wild, you know, but then after the first couple of weeks is okay, what, what is our priority workflow that we want to build out in here? You can't do everything at once. That's impossible.

0:07:21 - (Alane): And so you can start cleaning up that mess. But in the beginning, I do think it's okay. I don't know if you disagree or not.

0:07:29 - (Micah): I 100% agree, but for a different reason, actually.

0:07:33 - (Alane): Okay.

0:07:33 - (Micah): I think it's really, really interesting that you bring this up. I really agree that people should get in there and start using it. The reason that I believe that should happen, and I think both of us are right here, is that the team needs to feel the pain points. Right? So we've gone into companies and tried to help them out, starting fresh. Like, hey, we just, we just signed up for Asana two days ago.

0:08:02 - (Micah): We want to set it up right the first time. Well, when we start talking about Asana things with their team, it's right over their head because they have no exposure to it. They don't know the pain points they're going to run into. They, they don't understand the paradigm shift from doing post it notes or email threads into a true collaborative tool like Asana. And they, and they also don't know the pain points of everybody doing it their own way.

0:08:32 - (Alane): Right.

0:08:33 - (Micah): And so once a team is in there and using it, then everybody has the context to say, okay, imagine this problem being solved and imagine this problem being solved and imagine this being a workflow and imagine not having to spend all the time moving all these tasks around every day. Now everybody's like, okay, cool, let's do that. Because that's going to get us the benefit that we wanted to begin with.

0:09:01 - (Alane): Yes. And Micah, I want to speak for how I felt because I can identify with that feeling. I hate change management and changing software platforms. It's got to be. And we have an episode on this where it's got to be valuable in a couple of different areas for me to see the value in switching. And we were on this was, oh gosh, over 10 years ago. We were in Trello and it wasn't. Our team was just getting too large. We had way too much stuff happening and it just was not working for us.

0:09:40 - (Alane): And you decided we are moving to Asana and we didn't have training, like we didn't have training on it. Like, you know, we were a little more scrappy at that time. We didn't have any training. We move into this platform that is very different. I was livid. I was, I was so pissed. I just, I remember yelling at you about it. I can feel the anger bubbling up just thinking about that 10 years ago. And I can remember because I was pregnant too. So that also added to every emotion that I was feeling at the time.

0:10:11 - (Alane): And then it happened again when we moved from Asana to ClickUp. So I know from experience and the pain of going into a project management system that you don't know and having to operate out of it that this time to get to know it and just use it and fluster through it is so important for that, for an individual team member to understand the functionality before and that's why I think you need to do the basics course it's free, you can get some basic functionality but then you give it some time before you do huge things because it's way too overwhelming.

0:10:50 - (Micah): Yep. And I mean that's, that's really not, not to self promote our free Basics course, but there is kind of this base level training that you want every user to know. Like, how do you navigate? How does collaboration actually work? How do you manage your own tasks? Like, what are the best practices? There's, there's not that much that you need to know as an everyday user, but it is nice to have something in place there.

0:11:19 - (Micah): Yeah, but, yeah, the funny part, Alane, is you weren't any less angry, but you were less pregnant when we switched to ClickUp, so that's good.

0:11:27 - (Alane): Yeah. So maybe it had nothing to do with pregnancy emotions, just change management.

0:11:31 - (Micah): I don't think so. I think you just don't like changing software and I don't. Yeah, I don't like it, you know, but once, I will say you came around because once we implemented the right structure inside of ClickUp and it solved the, the problems that we were personally experiencing with Asana, it was like, okay, cool. Like now we have that, we're stronger for it.

0:11:58 - (Alane): But training is a huge piece. And the reason that we created our Basics course is because we hire new people and they may or may not have experience with ClickUp and that's what we use internally. And we were throwing so much stuff at them in training in the beginning that they couldn't retain everything. And I'm going, we just, they just spent eight hours going through training and they don't remember any of it. Like, I'm getting so frustrated and I took a step back one day and I'm like, first day, what does somebody need to know their first day with us?

0:12:35 - (Alane): And that was the core of how we started creating these basics courses is day one through day five. What does your team need to know to manage their ClickUp Monday or Asana? And so that's, it's so helpful to have those. I wouldn't have been so mad had we had something like that in the beginning. But you know, we're, we're just trying new things and learning from our mistakes and that was one of them.

0:12:57 - (Alane): And let's talk for just a second, Micah. I think there's some basic structure that you can put in when you're first starting with a project management tool to getting to the point where we're saying you really need workflows and to manage out of those. And I think the basic structure and you can add to this is departments. You know, what departments do you have? You can create a backlog and then from there build in a workflow for Specific things. What's your email marketing workflow, what's your podcast marketing workflow, what's your software development workflow? You know, things like that. So, you know, I think having it by department initially, creating a backlog is a starting place.

0:13:37 - (Micah): It's a great starting place. Yeah. If you're in Asana, make your teams your different departments. If it's ClickUp, make your spaces different departments. If it's Monday, make your workspaces different departments. A big mistake that we see, you know, we mentioned at the beginning of the episode. But on an individual or team level, people just make their own boards and there's already functionality in all of these tools to manage your tasks in a much better way than individual boards.

0:14:06 - (Micah): But like you're saying, Alane, use spaces for departments, use workspaces. If you're in Monday for departments, and Asana, use teams for departments. That just gives you this structure, this organize this base organization to fit stuff in. Because if you don't do that, we see a lot of times with Asana, the entire company is running everything out of one team. Well, that's gonna change how permissions are.

0:14:33 - (Micah): That's going to change how navigation is. It's going to be very over, like less overwhelming. More overwhelming. It's going to be a lot more overwhelming when you just have everything crammed in one team or in Monday, one workspace or in ClickUp one space and you try to do everything within this, like, tiny element. So I think that's fantastic. Of advice.

0:14:56 - (Alane): And I think the next step above that, if you're not ready to build a workflow flow inside of the project management tool, is, okay, you've got your projects, teams, workspaces, whatever, Depending on which one you're in, you've got it by department, you've got a backlog created. The next piece is creating templates that could be. You have to design a Facebook ad. What's everything that you need to do to create that ad? You know, the things that you do, often running payroll, things that you do often create a template and then start listing everything you have to do for that.

0:15:33 - (Alane): That's going to be the start of actually your workflow. Because not everything's really a task template. You know, you're going to have things that could be in different statuses, different places. It doesn't necessarily need to stay as that. That template. It could be turned into a workflow. So I think that's another great next step is start templatizing what you can and that'll help with your consistency.

0:15:55 - (Alane): Delegation Accountability, all the things that we talk about, the benefits of a project management system that can be your next step. In between I'm getting a project management tool and now I need to get workflows and in between level.

0:16:09 - (Micah): Yeah, Love it. Great advice.

0:16:12 - (Alane): Actually one, one thing that came to my mind, Micah, it has been a long time since I just assigned myself a task that was not related to a project. Now and I don't know how often you run into that, but I remember in my, in our Asana days I did that a lot where I assigned myself a task that was unrelated to a project and then that was my hard part because ClickUp used to not be able to do that. So you'd have to create a space that was just you and you had to assign tasks to yourself.

0:16:42 - (Alane): But now everything that I assign myself has a place in a certain space or project or list or whatever it is and I add it there. So everything always has a place.

0:16:55 - (Micah): Yep. And that, that at its core is just the baseline to get to. Right. Because if you're just adding a bunch of tasks that aren't associated with anything, well, you're not tying it to objectives, you're not tying it to goals, you're not tying it to projects, you're not tying it to any work that anybody else is doing. Sometimes you need that. There is just the quick reminder, the one offs. But I would say it's an 8020 rule here. 80% of the work that you're doing is probably related to something involving a goal and objective. A project that involves other people.

0:17:32 - (Micah): And so getting it in there, even if it is like we have a couple lists and ClickUp that's like our sales activity. Right. So it's like we have our CRM, but then we put tasks inside of that sales backlog that allows us to track the actions that we want to interact with. That way we can leverage the rest of our team to help us create those assets or get feedback or review a proposal. And we're doing it collaboratively versus just a post it note and then a slack message that interrupts everybody.

0:18:08 - (Micah): It's a completely different way to work and much better it is.

0:18:11 - (Alane): And Micah, I'm so glad that you brought up that example because that was exactly what was running through my head on a cross departmental workflow and things that trigger different projects. Something as simple as going to a conference that is going to be in your sales funnel. Right. Or in your. It's in my sales backlog in our sales space. And ClickUp now for going to that conference, I got to loop in marketing because we want to put out some marketing information that, hey, we're going to this conference.

0:18:39 - (Alane): We want to do outreach to people that we know are going. That's a different person on our team that's going to be doing that specific outreach to the registrants of that conference. But I also need to get it into my travel project where I manage my travel tasks so that I know where I need to be and when. And you know, do we need to have. That's a whole other topic on my travel checklist that we could do a different episode on, but I'm not going to dive in to, to to spare people's time.

0:19:10 - (Alane): But it's a whole different project where I manage this, but based on the status of me going to a conference, it will create the task and my travel checklist so that I can delegate any airport bookings or plane bookings, travel, any of that kind of stuff is a different person than the person that's going to be building my other campaigns in my sales backlog and moving things along for the different campaigns associated.

0:19:33 - (Micah): To sum everything up, start using it, but before it gets out of control, start using your project management tools, but before it gets out of control, reel it in. Create standards, create workflows, create and provide training. Don't let people create random boards all over the place. If you're going to commit to a project management system, commit and collaborate in there. We have lots of episodes that go much more in depth on all of those, but yeah, well, everybody, I hope.

0:20:06 - (Alane): You go from managing individual tasks to managing tasks within a workflow.

0:20:10 - (A): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate youe 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 workday.

0:20:21 - (Micah): Ninja.Com and join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:20:26 - (A): Bye for now.

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Alane Boyd

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Micah Johnson

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