The presenter walks through Asana as a project management tool, showing how to create projects, assign tasks with recurring options, use subtasks and tags, and view everything on a calendar color-coded by client. He chose it over Basecamp because it handles recurring tasks better and the free tier covers their team's needs.
Chapters
Hi Nina and everyone. Nina asked if I can recommend— I don't know what an AP is— project management software essentially that keeps track of projects, clients, and campaigns. Is there a program you use that can help keep track of the various critical paths? We have tried all of them. My team sometimes makes fun of me because I try one out, I go through them faster than I go through underwear. I try them, I assign everyone rights to it, and then a day later I get sick of it and I turn it off. I have a particular hate-on for Basecamp, which is the one that a lot of a lot of people use, BasecampHQ. It's reasonable. The two things I don't like about it is they do not have recurring tasks is the main one, and they refuse ethically, spiritually, somehow, they refuse to put recurring tasks in, which is a no-brainer and it pisses me off. The other reason is that when your clients get emails with it, it has that crazy reply above this line. Some clients do and don't and they go to click an attachment and it makes them log in and so on. We do things mostly by email, but we do use Asana as our project manager. I'll show you what that looks like here. Let me find an example. Let me just create an example here. One of the things that I like about Asana is that it's free and it's really very solid actually. I'm going to call this ABC Client., and you can say whether you want it to be open to everyone in your organization or just particular people can see it. And in that case, it's just going to be me, but in this case, we'll make it open to everybody. And then if you want, you can click here and you can add people to it if you want to. So I'm going to add, say, Geneva, and I'm going to add Erica, and so on. So, so you can do that if you want. I'm not going to do that because it'll bother them. And then it's kind of your standard system, you know, Task 1, Task 2. I do find it sometimes a little slow to respond in the UI. Task 4, Task 5. If you've got a whole bunch of tasks, you can just paste them in. And then you can do this, which is kind of nice. You can assign it to a particular team member. You can set a due date. So I'm going to say this is due on the 17th. If you want to add a time, you can say— I'm not entirely sure why people add times, but some people do. And lo and behold, you can make it a recurring task, weekly, daily, monthly. Weekly has some options, you know, you can say this only goes on certain days and so on. One thing that people overlook that I really like is this periodically, and it will show up X number of days after you finish it. So if it doesn't have to be on a Wednesday, but you have to do it every 7 days, if you miss, let's say, 2 days, if you're 2 days late, it'll wait another 7 days. It won't do it after 5 days, which is based on the date, if that makes any sense at all. I'm just going to change this back to never. Another nice thing is it does subtasks. You can say do this, do that, and this, and that, and you can have notes for each individual subtask, or you can assign subtasks to individual people or to yourself. You can schedule specific subtasks. We use this for recurring things. I happen to use it for our finances. Every month I have a single task that comes into my, into my Tasks window that says monthly financial tasks and there's a series of check marks in here. You know, pay this, put corporate tax away, put GST tax away, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it will only complete from my main list when I've checked off all of these, which is really nice. And you can put a description in for your team as well. A couple of other things is you can add tags to it if you want to sort it. So finance or corporate or contest or whatever. We don't use tags. You can, if you want, add an attachment. So if there's a particular file that goes with it, team members can like them as well. This is good for voting. We don't use this very much as well. And there's some other options in here, which is kind of nice. You know, you can— once you've completed it, you can create a follow-up task and so on. So another nice little thing about it, a couple of things, is you can bulk edit things. So I'm going to say these all should be assigned— should be on that date. And you notice it puts them all in under Thursday. You can view them as a calendar or all the attachments in it. So if I go to our team calendar, it's gonna show— it takes a while to kind of plug in— but it's gonna show every single task across every single project that we've got. And we have ours color-coded so we can see at a glance which client— there we go— we can see at a glance kind of which clients are which. Kildonan Place, which is a shopping center, that we work with is always pink, and I can see by that icon that that's a task for Geneva. The dark color here is Oak Ridge Center, so we can see that, you know, on the 10th we're launching a $75 promoted post campaign. And you can move these around as well. So if I decide that, you know, gosh, that Thursday is looking really busy— and if you want to see weekends, you just kind of hover up here and turn weekends on. So you say, you know, I'm gonna do this later, I'm gonna do this, develop a plan to build up the audience over on this date, and it'll actually replicate that in the task list as well and update people. So that's pretty nice. Another thing that's kind of cool— let's get to this one that I just created earlier, ABC Client. The other thing that's nice is you can group these. So you can, you can say that this particular one is— whoops, come on, see what I mean by it being a little slow? Come on. There we go. So if I want to group all of these and call it Project A, as soon as you hit a colon, it turns it into a little thing like that. So you can say Project B colon and then start adding tasks below as well. So that's the one that we use at Asana. It's not perfect, you know, but it's free and it's pretty comprehensive and does a pretty good job for us.
