088: Why I Moved from Asana to Notion for Task and Project Management

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This is not about throwing other software services under the bus, but it is about moving with the tides of change. And I think that's one of the realities of software. And what's so interesting about running a tech enabled business these days is that as software develops, this is basically no code coding. Because yes, you have to think strategically about what information you're trying to capture and the best way to view it, but you don't have to know the backend code in order to create a fully customizable, interlinkable, searchable, externalized mind for your business. You get to just point and click. Which is why I love Notion so much.

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If you've been in business for more than a few years, you know the dangers of falling prey to switching costs and shiny object syndrome, especially when it comes to software, and even buying digital courses and PDFs and tutorials that just go to die somewhere in your computer hard drive or in the cloud. But I cannot resist today's conversation because it keeps coming up offline. Outside of the podcast, even outside of the BFF community, are people who are asking me if I'm all in on Asana, is it worth switching to Notion? Or maybe they're just getting something going in their business, or they're just switching to task management software looking for the right fit and they're considering Asana or Trello. Now, I don't mean to throw either of those two software companies under the bus. I went so far as to become an Asana ambassador. That's how much I geeked out on Asana when I was setting my company up on that platform. However, with what I know about Notion, I just cannot in good faith not record this Episode I want to share why I moved from Asana. I had stopped using Trello a while back, but Asana is incredibly powerful and I adore them as a company. I just have found so much more functionality with what I've got going on in Notion that I want to share that logic with you here today. Let me start by saying I am not a Notion affiliate. Yes, I want to apply for their certified Notion Pro program just because I love geeking out and you know, it'd be cool to get certified. I like the extra studying and going through that application process and then being part of a community of certified experts. I also have the Notion Dashboard. Yes, that is a product that I sell and I'm in the process of figuring out the best way to package it so that if you purchase the dashboard you're well set up for success because it can be overwhelming. But this episode is so much deeper than that and more important than that. So I wanted to be upfront about my passion for Notion. But this episode on why I Switched is not so much trying to convince you, it's actually just trying to share with you the logic and what I have found so powerful. If you're somebody who's on the fence, it would just hurt my heart to see you invest a lot of time and effort and energy. And really there is a sunk cost to investing in software. When you get all of your team and all of your documentation into something, it's much, much harder to switch later down the road. And that's how these subscription services make so much money. Because once you've set it up like let's say you're bookkeeping software, once you've set up all the rules, in my case over 10 years, there's no way I'm switching. I have 10 years of data and rules and intelligence built into my bookkeeping software, even though it is not the one I would necessarily choose if I were signing up fresh today. And in fact I'm being so silly about this that I now pay for bench bookkeeping and still my old software that's not very expensive, but it was a company acquired by GoDaddy and at the time I was so pissed because I hated GoDaddy's ad campaigns and I was so disappointed and they've kind of let the software like it's off in the garage somewhere of GoDaddy, not really getting much investment or attention and yet still there are elements about it that are just superior to anything else. That's a digression. But just to say that I'm with you if you are hesitant. It's also scary to go into new software that when you first start with Notion it is a blinking blank cursor. It is intimidating and I know that not everybody feels they have well developed tech tuition as I talk about in free time and it's just nerve wracking. Do you go all in on something unknown or do you go with more of a known entity? That's what I'm going to share today, specifically three reasons that I made the switch and that I'm happy I made the switch from Asana to Notion for project management, task management and so much more. First, I want to give a shout out to Alison Jeffrey in Calgary, Canada. Alison, you just made my morning. I'm here. This is the first episode I'm recording of a batch today at the podcast studio and as I sit down to record I happen to see this review come through. Alison said Girl crush on Jenny. I found Jenny through Jeffrey Shaw's podcast and have been hooked since. She's smart, strategic, spunky, and able to laugh at life's foibles. Now you're really making me laugh. That's kind of hard to say. Laugh at life's foibles. There's an originality to how she designs these podcasts. I'm keeping current and going into the archives. Carry on Jenny. I need more. Thank you so much Alison. This review means the world to me. You have indeed made me smile and I've gotten feedback about my podcast that I probably laugh and smile too much even when the topic is serious. And I've been reflecting on that feedback because it's good feedback. I've gotten it before in my training and speaking career. But then there's part of me that I'm just so happy to be here and I'm so happy to have feedback like yours and all the rest of you who are here listening that it's like I just can't help but be joyful when I'm actually in the room recording, even if I've just had some major dip that morning or I didn't have the energy coming in. So it's really a transformative space and I have to say thank you right back at you Alison, Everyone else who's left, reviews, and all of you who are here listening. Truly, truly, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Let's geek out on software now, shall we? So the three categories and I'll get into what these mean of why I moved and why I'm happy I moved are functionality, customization, and simplification. Let's start with functionality. So the core problem, the reason that you would sign up for task management or project management software is that A, nothing should live in your head and B, maybe you're feeling confused or overwhelmed. There's so much flying around in your business and you want to better keep track of what's happening by when and who's taking care of it. As soon as you start working with other people, I mean, even when it's just you, it's imperative to have some kind of task tracking software. But especially when you have a team, you need to get it out of everybody's head and have that visibility into who's doing what. I like to have a one week default turnaround on things that I assign. There's usually no reason that small tasks need to take more than that. And then of course, some companies work for bigger projects on a quarterly Sprint model or a six week Sprint model like Basecamp. So depending on what your big projects are, you also want to be able to set a timeline, a work back plan of the major milestones and be able to track what's happening and if everything's on track, no matter what, it's so important to just get things out of your head, out of your inbox, out of your Slack channels. Tasks need a home and you can correspond about those tasks within software like Asana or Trello or Notion. And that's ideal because it's really hard to search the archives of email and even Slack to understand how was this task tackled the last time? What are all the subtasks that need to happen, especially if it's something that's going to repeat into the future. So I don't think I need to convince you about the reason to have task and project management software. The question is, what should you use? There's Asana, there's Trello, there's now even things like ClickUp and Monday that look pretty awesome. The reason that I love Notion is because when you sign up for task or project management software, the unit of creation is a task. Whereas with Notion, the unit within the building blocks of every page are literally called blocks. So within Notion you could have a task tracking database, but you could also have what would simulate Google Docs and you could have text based pages, you could have spreadsheets that track data, you could have all kinds of things that combine together in a page format that allows you to have many different types of blocks all in one place. Now, if I've already lost you, stay with me. The key thing Here is that when you're in task or project management software, that's really all that it's built to do, no matter how complex. So the number one thing that I found with Asana was that we were always having to click out of tasks to open the corresponding page in our manager manual, which at that time was a very long Google Doc. If we were tracking member data and we had, let's say, a new member join the BFF community, well, we might create a task in Asana, but then we had to click over to a spreadsheet that was tracking who all of our members were. So by having the unit, the default building block, be a task, it just meant that we had to link out to all these other places and that's where you get the Franken systems string of software. And I didn't know what I was missing until I moved to notion because that unit functionality shifted to the point where if you build around tasks as the unit, it becomes really cumbersome and dense to look into all the documentation within the task. And oh, what if certain documentation about how to do something actually belongs with two or three different tasks or projects? Where should it live? I was also finding that within my Asana boards, I was creating a lot of FYI style tasks and those kind of gunk up the works a little bit because FYI stuff shouldn't really live there. It's stuff that's now hovering and it's information and it's for the future, but it's not necessarily the best home for it.

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So that brings us to the second reason that I think it's helpful to switch is simplification by Moving to Notion, not only was I able to create a task tracking database in Board View, so we could see by company area tasks or by person who it's assigned to, we could see tasks by status. You get to completely design from scratch, which again is a little overwhelming at first, from scratch, what types of metadata you want for every task, what types of views that you want to see. Each team member could create a view. Where you create a view once this is new in Notion, and when everyone lands at the home base of your company, it could just say tasks assigned to me. And everybody sees what's assigned. So that's very similar to something like Asana. Notion wasn't built to be a task management system, by the way. It's meant to be so much more than that. But the result is that you get to simplify your business. Because instead of having information about how to run your business and what's happening in Google Docs, sheets, airtables, Asana boards and so on, with Notion, it's all in one place. So when you create a new task in Notion, you can easily basically reply the corresponding pages of your manager manual. So if there's a task on adding a new member to the community, you can link and just eply the manager manual page on how the community works. So everything is within Notion. It's your own company intranet. It's a searchable, customizable home for all the data about how to run your business. And that has very real benefits for team members. Because now instead of having to search and look for things in sheets and docs and Asana and Slack and email and wondering where is the information about how to do this or where I should even document this in the first place. There's only one home that you're searching and that's your Notion Operations hub. As I mentioned, what makes Notion so powerful is also what makes it intimidating. This blank screen and the amount of customization. But what that means is that instead of stringing together, there's even software on documenting all the process of your business. ClickUp is good for that. There's something called Process street, but in my mind, why pay for six services, even if some of them are free, that come through Google Docs and Sheets, if you can have one service that at the time of this recording is $8 per team member, so it's not prohibitively expensive, and yet at any time it can expand to fit exactly what you want to create. That takes me to the third reason that I switched and the third benefit of switching. And that's customization, you are able to create a dashboard that not only fits the way your mind works for your personal capture, but something that your team can customize to really fit how you run your business. Because it is so powerful, it does take some strategic thinking. And that's why I created the Free Time Operations Dashboard. Because that's two years of me crafting every single database metadata flow of the entire system. I wanted to share that with all of you to give you a shortcut if you resonate with the Free Time principles and you want to implement it in relatively few clicks. Aside from a little bit of a learning curve, that's why I created the dashboard to save you some of this time and trouble. The whole point of customization is that this can expand and shift and mold itself to fit your needs, whereas if you sign up for more functional software, you might have an easier time ramping up and even understanding it. But it's not necessarily going to be this all in one tool. As I've mentioned, what happens for me when I have too much information spread out, it's more confusing for team members. I hate when I'm in a task. Let's say when I would be in Asana and then I would have to click to open a spreadsheet and then a new browser window opens and maybe it's not in the browser browser I was even using and then I have to go to the spreadsheet and record the data and somehow map it back and I had to create an inline comment in that spreadsheet. But then I also needed to reply in the task and it just started to annoy me. The friction of confusion of not knowing where I was going to comment, where the actual data lived, where the FYI level or process manager manual style documentation would live. And by the way, keeping a manager manual in a long Google Doc, ours got to be over 50 pages at one point is cumbersome. You have to know exactly what you're looking for in the table of contents and although you can search it, it's not intuitive to navigate and it's slow and it's clunky and it just gets annoying. The biggest benefit of moving to something like notion is consolidating how much you're paying for different software, eliminating the confusion and friction of having to jump around across multiple softwares. Three is building something that's actually intuitive to how your business runs. It really is, as I call in free time, an externalized mind. You really can start to replicate the horizontal interlink ability that your mind would have like anything you could think to click any topic you want to link, you can reply any block, any person, any due date, any database line item. Let's say you actually want to reference a member's name. It's incredible. And then with things like Zapier, the customization and data collection is very powerful as well. I've talked about in previous episodes some of the zaps I'm most proud of where to continue with this community. Example, if you join the community, let's say you register through Kajabi powers the backend and then that data a zap sends that data from Kajabi, you get automatically added to a recurring calendar invite, you get automatically sent an invitation to our private circle community and you get automatically added to a row in our Notion people tracker for the BFF community. So all of that is happening automatically, which is really exciting. It means that no one on my team has to do that busy work. And it also means that Notion becomes the centralized, interlinkable, searchable mind for everything in the business. Now, instead of me going to Kajabi and exporting current BFFs, let's say I can just go to Notion. It already lives there. I don't ever have to leave. And that level of simplification is so worth the learning curves. I happen to love new software, so I really had fun. In fact, I procrast learned I was as Marie Poulain, who I learned from, she calls it procrastination. I certainly did that for the first few weeks. But I think you'll find, as many people that I have worked with have found around all this, that yes, it's a little confusing and overwhelming in the beginning, but as soon as you start to get some wins under your belt, it's so powerful. And that feeling is exhilarating because you can just feel the pressure and stresses of your mind and of confusion and friction melting away. So I have people now who switch to the dashboard and even just using Notion to start as a content production calendar, whether it's for a podcast or article writing. And they just say, my whole team is thanking me. I can't believe it. This is incredible. Everyone's just thanking me that it's so much easier to participate in the business and have visibility to everything that's going on. As I mentioned at the start, this is not about throwing other software services under the bus, but it is about moving with the tides of change. And I think that's one of the realities of software. And what's so interesting about running a tech enabled business these days is that as software develops, this is basically no code coding. Because yes, you have to think strategically about what information you're trying to capture and the best way to view it. But you don't have to know the backend code in order to create a fully customizable, interlinkable, searchable, externalized mind for your business. You get to just point and click. Which is why I love Notion so much. And again, I'm not trying to sell you on Notion, but I just have to share this information because of how much easier it's made my life and my business. And if it can help any of you who are on the fence to kind of get over the intimidation factor in the learning curve, then I'm very happy to do that. So I appreciate you listening. I would love to know what Notion wins you've had or ways that you've set it up to work for you. If you're already using Notion, and if you want to see a free example of what a simple Notion buildout can look like, go to itsfreetime.com toolkit. You will see all the free tools and templates that go with the book. I built it in Notion on purpose because I wanted to show you what's possible. This is using Notion as more of a handout. It's not necessarily a business operations hub. If you're interested in learning more about the dashboard and getting into the next cohort of when we open that back up, you can go to itsfreetime.com dashboard. Thank you so much for listening everybody. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day.

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