10 Ways On How To Streamline Your Business And Life Using Asana
If you’ve been tuning into my podcast, then you know that I am a massive fan of Asana and love what it is done for not only my business but also my personal life. It has completely revolutionized how I operate my life.
In today’s blog post, I’m going to share with you the 10 ways on how to streamline your business and life using Asana.
View Asana as Your HeadQuarters for all things.
Set up Teams
Set up projects within those teams
Using sections and tasks within projects
Create templates
Use colors and tags to categorize for easy visual reference
Leverage the ability to repeat tasks
Forecast workload
Use it for lists, not just deadlines (gift card tracking)
Link back to appropriate google docs
Let’s start with number 1: View Asana as Your HeadQuarters for all things:
I love Asana but I didn’t always love it. Especially in the beginning when I started using it for a client. I struggled to get on board with it or see the value. It wasn’t until I started to outsource for She Did It Her Way, years later that I then realized I needed to find a way to streamline and systematize my business to grow. Since then, I'm not only using it for business but also for personal needs as well. There are other great software tools out there but for me Asana as my favorite and most easy to use. I have found that by fully committing to using the software has forced me (in a good way) to reap the benefits of it, fully. I use Asana and my Full Focus Planner to help manage my life.
You want to organize your Asana so that when you log in, everything is intuitive for you, and content, tasks, projects are all assigned appropriately. This is where “Teams” come in. You can think of “Teams” as departments. I have 5 teams; Executive, Marketing, Products + Events, Operations, Personal. Only I can view the Executive team and Personal team. Marketing, Products + Events, and Operations, the entire team can see. It is more likely that you and I will have the same “Teams” but different projects. Which I’m going to get to in a second. Setting up teams will help you visually see the layout of your business and help organize the tasks/projects that need to be completed. I recommend first, grabbing a blank sheet of paper and brainstorming your teams before creating them in Asana. This is just to help minimize inefficiencies of creating and then deleting teams if need be. Brainstorm on paper then transfers over.
After you identify the teams, then consider which projects go under which teams. For example, under our Marketing Team, the projects we have are Podcast (this could be a blog, YouTube), Email Marketing, PR, Social Media Manager, Her Way Community Facebook Group. Products + Events: Her Way Society and She Did It Her Way Summit. Under Personal the Projects that I have are: Personal Goals (which tend to be anything that is specific to my family, before the end of the year I had tasks to reevaluate our renter’s insurance, car insurance, to create a folder with all important documents), Personal Project (think Christmas, birthdays, gifts, weddings, hair appointments, I have a moving prep list, list of gift cards that we have). I’ll share how I automate some of this stuff later in the episode. In your projects is really where you get into the templates, assigning, scheduling and further organizing your projects.
Once you create your teams and appropriate projects under the team, you’ll want to organize your interface for each project. Here you’ll leverage “Sections.” For example, under our Podcast project that sits on the “marketing” team, when I click “Podcast” there are different sections: Template, Guest Outreach, Sponsorship Outreach and then I create sections for each month to reflect a content calendar like the style. Your tasks go under the sections. I have a section for January, February, March, etc. Under each section, I’ll then create a task to reach a podcast that launches in that corresponding month. When creating the task, I leverage templates that I have previously created that are under the “TEMPLATE” section. Using sections helps you further to organize your projects and to help visually see how the pieces of your business work together.
Create templates where needed. Creating templates is an integral part of scaling your business. Continuing with the Podcast example, the podcast is a project under Marketing. Within the Podcast Project, there are sections. One of the sections is named “Templates” Under the template section, I have a template task for solecists, podcast episode with guest and guest outreach. so that for every episode all I need to do is copy the task, rename the task and I’m done. Then afterward I just have to assign due dates. In episode 292 I share 3 easy steps to help you outsource your first task. In that episode, I walk you through a method on how to create a process to help systemize a task. You might create a template for your blog post, email marketing, you name it.
Use colors and tags. You can assign projects to certain colors. This helps when you look at the calendar view of all your tags and visually you can see which team or projects will require the most effort. It is also visually appealing to have them all one color. All executive projects have the color blue, marketing is pink, products and events yellow, operations is green and personal is grey. You can also use tags. One way I used tags is for templates. Anything that is a template regardless of what project it is for, I used a template tag - colored orange. I’ve seen other content creators use tags as a form to cycle out content buckets. So each podcast or blog post might have a certain theme and you tag each post appropriately.
Leverage repeat tasks. One thing that I love about Asana is that you can automate tasks to repeat. A simple example of this is in my team ->I have Personal Project -> Birthday Section -> I keep track of birthdays and I set up the due date as their birthday and set it up to repeat yearly. Doing this and having it in one location helps me a) not forget a birthday b) see how many cards I’ll need to order. Other tasks that you can set to repeat might be checking email M-F whether it is for you or your VA. Setting a task to repeat every Friday to revisit your goals. The list is endless. I also set reminders every 8 weeks to schedule a hair appointment that way I don’t have to spend time guessing and it is just automatic.
Forecast workload. There is a “Calendar” view in Asana that lets you see all the tasks that are due and are coming up. This is helpful because then you can see your upcoming workload but also make adjustments if need be. Maybe you realize that you need to move some tasks to even out the days or you want to go heavy on one day. It is just another way to view all of your tasks.
Another way you can use Asana is for lists, not just deadlines. One way that I use it for lists is when I’m brainstorming whether it is for business or personal. An example is when it was Christmas. I made a task for everyone that we needed to get gifts for (didn’t assign a due date) and then within each task, I would comment about gift ideas for that person so when it came to purchasing them, I had all my ideas in one place. I also use it for podcasting and guest ideas.
Link back to google docs. One way to leverage Asana and integrate it with other software that we use is I often link back to google docs within Asana. Whether it be our content calendar for Podcast, SM, HWC, HWS. That way I can be in Asana and know that I have all the necessary links that I’ll need and I don’t have to go searching for it.
Time to get to work my friend and consider using Asana as your software!
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