This One APP Keeps My Business (& Team) Organized!

Being an online business owner, there's probably a lot on your to do list that you're juggling because you're doing everything between client work to social media content to prepping for launches, maybe you're even managing a team. And all those to do's can really start to pile up. And I know when I got started in my business, my planner of choice was Post its. And I had Post its everywhere in my house. And I quickly realized that Post its just weren't going to cut it because not only was I wasting my time constantly writing the same thing over and over again on new post its, but I was shuffling, fooling around trying to find these post its. I was forgetting about things. It just wasn't a way to run my business or really be organized. And so when I switched over this tool that I'm going to show you that I use now every day in my business, it really saved me time. It allowed me to say really focused and know exactly what I needed to work on. And I finally felt like I had some organization in my business. Now the app I'm talking about is totally free to use. In fact, most of the stuff that I'm going to share with you that I use it for, you can use the free version. And that is Asana, not Asana, which is what I'm trying to convince my husband. I need to buy this Black Friday, but Asana. And in this video I'm going to walk you through some of the main projects that I put in Asana, how I organize it, how I assign due dates, and then at the end I'm going to show you some quick tips to get started so you can start organizing your business on this free tool. I will say it's free to use with the caveat I've used the paid version before. Now the only reason I had the paid version is because I use this tool to basically organize and run my multi sick figure YouTube production agency. Doing that, I had to bring my clients into my Asana account as well as their assistants and their marketing director. So every time I brought a client on, we had like two or three people we had to bring into my Asana account, which is why I had to ultimately pay for a higher tier because of the amount of people that I had on my account. So nine times out of ten you're probably only going to need the free version. Now the biggest benefits and the reason why Asana pretty much runs my business and keeps me organized is because it allows me to do three things I'm able To combine multiple projects into one calendar. So I can look at my calendar and see all the tasks that I have assigned to a day, even if it's on multiple projects. So Maybe it's a YouTube project, maybe it's a launch project, and maybe it's a client project. Those are all on different boards. But because I link them to me, I assign certain tasks to me, I can go to my calendar view and see all the tasks, no matter what project that they are on. And this allows me to sit down and decide, did I overload my plate? Am I realistically going to be able to get this done? And if I'm not, I have to start to make some decisions and think, okay, what needs to be done, what can be pushed to a later date and what can be delegated. This has really helped me not overload my day with tasks. Because what can happen as an online business owner is we think we can do more than we actually can in a day, because certain tasks usually take longer than we anticipate. So what this has allowed me to do is really figure out what I can realistically get done in a day, which allows me to see what I can realistically get done in a week, which can help me see what I can realistically get done each month. The second thing it allows me to do is manage my team. And while you may not be at the level where you have a team, I know some of you have reached out to me and said, you know, I have a team of one or I'm thinking about hiring. I really encourage you to have some type of project management system with when you are ready to work with a virtual assistant or an executive assistant, even a video editor. So I actually have three full time employees. My client success coordinator, Aaron, my marketing director, Erica, and our marketing assistant, Mia. And again, asana just allows me to see quickly what everybody is working on. I'm able to build out a project like a launch and break down all the tasks that need to go into a launch and figure out what should I take on and what can Erica do and what can Mia do and just add them to that task, have them assigned to it and give them a due date. So I know that was a question I had in a previous video about how do I delegate my work. That's exactly how. Now, before I show you what my asana looks like, how I set it up, and what I actually do in it, the third thing asana really does for me is it allows me to sit down every single morning after a stressful, rushed morning to get children's lunches packed, breakfast made, clothes, toothbrush out the door on time, is to come to my office in the morning with my cup of coffee and see exactly what needs to be done that day. So I'm not feverishly jumping into a to do list, writing a massive to do list every single time I sit down after a stressful morning. But I already can look at my asana task, jump right into task number one and get started in my day as quickly as possible. What you are going to see inside my asana is there's not a lot going on right now in my business and that's because we are getting very close to the end of the year and there are two major holidays that myself and my team take off of. So we we've really slowed down on projects and things that we are working on. I've also not sat down yet to plan 2024. I have ideas and I have an outline in my head of what I'm planning to do in 2024. I've just not sat down, mapped out what projects we're going to take on and when the due dates are going to be for a certain task. So once I do that, then my asana really starts to get loaded up and that is where I can easily start to figure out am I adding too many tasks to my list? Do I need to add some tasks to Mia's? Do I need to ask Erin if she can take something on? But it's once I know exactly what I want to focus on in the next 90 days and I can get that into asana, I can ensure that everything's going to get done that I want to get done. I'm actually going to be hosting a CEO planning day on Tuesday, December 5, walking people through how to plan their year ahead. Once we figure out how to plan our year ahead, what we're going to focus on, what offers we want to work on, what promotions we want to do and 2024. I'm then during that CEO planning day, help you map out what are the first steps you're going to do in 2024 with your 90 day plan. If this is something that you really want to get going, you want to have a solid plan going into 2024, you want to hear how somebody else has been able to plan their business year after year. You can go to Trina Little.com CEO to get your ticket. Now this is almost a half a day event. It's going to run from 10:00am Eastern Standard Time to 2:00pm Eastern Standard Time. But I'm going to tell you, by the time we are done on this day, you are going to know exactly what you're going to be focusing on the first 90 days of the year. And I'm going to tell you that is such a relief when you know what your game plan is going to be. Now, let's look at my Asana. This is my homepage in Asana. You can see here my current tasks. There are some overdue tasks, but it was a project that we scrapped. And then you can see the projects that I'm using most frequently right here. The first thing I want to walk through are the different teams that I have. And you may think teams are people, but it's actually how I categorize all my projects in Asana. So you'll see here is teams. And we have an executive team, which I'm going to show you in a minute. It doesn't mean people. Our sales and marketing team, our client projects, our operations, our products and services in our templates. Those are the main ones that I use in my business. Now I do have a personal one and that is where I keep things like books I want to read, Netflix series I want to watch, and our vacation packing list, which I talked about in a previous video. So when we open up the executive team, you will see all of the different projects or boards that we have within this executive team. We also have some of these that we don't use anymore. I don't do the best of job cleaning things out, but let me show you the ones that I am using in here. This is one of our most important boards and it is where we put our goals. So at the end of every year, like in CEO Day, we plan out what are our goals going to be for the next next year. Once we know our goals, what are we going to do to hit those goals? And so we will track them here. You can see we post our annual goals here and then we break them down by quarterly goals. We also look at the projects that we're focusing on each month so that we don't overdo this. And I actually have another board that lets me see my Q1 a little bit better. We've not used this process in a little bit, but because it is a template board that we just template every single year, these are still here, but we do this a little bit differently. What I really enjoy here in our big goals and idea board is if you're an entrepreneur with a lot of ideas, that's it. You get a Lot of ideas, and it's hard to remember or hard to decide which ones to actually focus on. So for me, I will get massive ideas. I will send them all to my marketing director, Erica, and she puts them here in this 2023 parking lot of big ideas. This is so I don't feel like my idea has gone wasted. And then every quarter, we have a process of going through these big ideas that do we implement them, do we put them to the side again? So this has been really, really important for us. You can also see that we have already started tracking 2024 ideas as well. Mostly. Our 2023 Big Goals board is to again host our parking lot of ideas and to list what our goals are for the upcoming year or the actual year we're in. Now, I mentioned I break my goals into 90 days. And this is a board we use called our At a Glance board. Now, the idea of this board is for not only me to have a clear idea of what we're focusing on for 90 days at a time, but the team knows as well. And what I really like to do is have themes and pictures for each quarter and each month. So this is 1 from Q3 earlier this year. July is obviously high summertime vacation. And we put here what our monthly focus is for July, what we're promoting and what we're producing. So what we were promoting is our workshop series. And what we were producing is our YouTube accelerator that we were then going to promote in August of 2023. And you can see it's a sunset. We see kind of that hard time of summer. If you are a business owner, you know how sales can dip in the summer. Summer sun is setting. And so that was the theme we had there. So again, you saw we were promoting and producing the YouTube accelerator because I wasn't going to be done with all the tasks in July. So it did overlap into August. And in September, we actually didn't promote anything. We focus on production, which was our quarterly planning for the final quarter of 2023. And also the fall launch we were doing in Q3 as well. Like I said, I like to have a theme. 2023 was a wild ride if you've watched any of my videos here recently. So my goal in Q3 of this year was to just focus. And then we did have about five goals that we set for Q3, and then we also had four finance goals that we set as well. We also have a big picture wish list. So if we happen to get all of our goals done, okay, we can move on, but doesn't normally happen. The other thing that I really like doing as well is seeing what my team is working on this quarter as well. So again, questions on how I delegate to my team, we will put in here at each quarter what are the projects that we are working on and just keep track of those things within this Asana board, if this is a board that you would love to have, I'm actually going to be giving this to Everybody inside a CEO day on Tuesday, December 5th and helping you set this up. And so if you want to grab this, you want to start planning your 90 days like this, make sure you grab your ticket@trina little.com forward/CEO. That's pretty much what I do in the executive team. When we look at the sales team here, there's a lot of things going on in here. We've tested a lot of different ways to market and how to organize our marketing calendar. Also, what social platforms are going to work for us as well. So there's a lot going on in here, but really There are only 2, 3 ish boards that we now actively use in here after testing a lot of different workflows and processes and setups. So the first one you've probably seen before. I will link a few videos up here where you can watch how I set up my YouTube workflow. But that's exactly what this is. You can see that I have all my resources listed here. I have all of my ideas, videos that I have planned to title and script this video I'm filming right now, and things that are in edits. This one is actually an edit. And then things that we've promoted within each of these cards. Why this is easy as I have a templated card that then lists everything that I need to do for this particular video and who is assigned to that task. You can see our video editors here and then Mia, our marketing assistant, will go in here. Once I finish filming this video, I will let her know it's uploaded in. Every single one of these checklist items will get an assigned person, an assigned due date to make sure we get this out on time. And that's why Asana is so powerful to helpful. Because our video editor can get in here and see what she has do. Mia can get in here and see what she has do. I can get in here and see what I have do just by going right here to my tasks. And just so you can see, it's not very clean. We were trying a new promotion strategy in October. I just wasn't loving It. And so while Mia and Erica did a great job of assigning me these tasks, I never actually did them because I just decided to scrap this particular project. But if we look at what's due this week and do next week, it's a lot cleaner because I have not inserted our projects for Q1 in 2024. The other huge board in here is our new marketing calendar because this was new probably mid year this year. And this gives us our color coded content calendar. We love this. This is something we're giving as a bonus in our CEO day. So if you want something color coded like this in Asana, just saying it's a bonus. But what this is showing me is we have a YouTube video that goes live every Wednesday. We have started doing Mondays as well. So if you haven't noticed, check these videos as well. So all of our content starts with the YouTube video. And then we have reels that are in pink. So you can see this is a reel. This is an Instagram story. That's another pink color. This is also Instagram, but this is a carousel post. Then you can see we actually I think one of these need to be moved over here. But my team also sees exactly what I'm doing this day. So this was yesterday in real time. I was scripting these videos. And then you can also see what emails that we have going out. So we had a promo going on last week for YouTube coaching experience for a particular segment of our list and we also had a flash sale going on as well. So our emails, our promotional emails are then listed in this blue color. Our typical newsletters are right here listed in this orange color. In the way you can do that is just how you add these tags up here. So you'll see there are tags right here and that's how we color code them and how we can easily see what is going out that particular day. Erica, you see, is assigned to get this email out. You'll see we have Mia actually assigned here to put out community posts on our Instagram and she was also working on our TikTok as well. But we're kind of scrapped TikTok for a moment. But you can see here how your team can understand what they are working on and when it is due. And you can see an overview here in Asana what's actually going out to help you market your business. So I'm curious before we move on, are you working within a project management tool like Trello ClickUp, Monday.com, asana. I know there are so many options out there. But the same idea that I'm sharing here can literally be inserted to any project management tool. So I'm just curious, are you using one and which one are you using or absolutely love right now? I will also give you a little piece of advice right here before I keep going on. I don't recommend jumping from project management tool to project management tool. Generally there is a long learning curve when you do that and that's just going to waste a lot of your time. So I would just stick with one and make it work as best as possible. The next team that I have are my client projects. And so when we were working with our agency, like I said, all of our agency clients were ran within this particular board. I'm not going to show you that one because it is is proprietary information to us. But you can see we have an entire team where we track our clients. The next one is operations and this one's really important for two reasons. Have you ever tried to remember your hex codes or tell your team to grab a bio or Wonder what a LinkedIn affiliate is? That is exactly why this business hub board within your operations team is going to be a game changer. So you'll see that not only do I have our team listed here, we have other important information about my business so that my team can quickly get to it. So my core values, my mission statement, my bio, all right here we also have all of our information on our human resources quickly linked for our team. So our employee handbook, the orientation deck, how to request time off, all of my brand guidelines, all of the training videos that we've created for our team as they online on board, all of our processes listed here, all of our funnel links, all of our affiliate links, all of our marketing resources. So again, this is kind of your one stop shop for everything in your business, which allows you to find exactly what you need quicker, but also allows your team to find exactly what they need without needing to constantly ask you. This is kind of their one stop shop. The next team we're going to talk about are products and services. This is where we keep track of every single one of our coaching clients. We have an entire Asana board listed with each client's name. And not only do I keep track of their progress, the last call that I had with them, but my client success coordinator, Aaron also has mindset sessions with them and answers questions as well. So we are able to track every single client that we have come into our coaching program and also be able to know where they're at. Where we need to check in on them, how to best hold them accountable. It's such an amazing process. Again, allows us to give this really high touch point to every single client that we have. And this is how we are able to organize all of those clients and know who they are, where they're at and what they're working on. It is also where I am able to work on and improve curriculum and leave feedback. And when I get feedback or ideas from our clients, I'm able to add them here in the curriculum breakout so that I can continue to make our coaching programs the best it can possibly be and not just create it one time and leave it sit there and hope people do it and hope people complete it. I'm actively updating it and taking all the feedback that we get, plugging it into this board, putting a due date on it so that I can then implement it. We also have a process right here listed on how we onboard our clients. So if we decide to hire somebody else or Aaron is out and another team member needs, needs to sub in, they can go to this board and see exactly how we onboard a coaching client so that again, nothing ever gets stopped. So again, we can keep going without worrying if somebody gets sick. These are some of the other programs that I work on to update. I also try different boards and different workflows and we keep cycling through what works best for us until we get the best possible outcome or product with our boards. And that's why we have so many. We do a lot of testing and then typically the ones at the top are the ones that we love. I do want to share with you this templates board because this is how we are able to prepare for launches or challenges or webinars so much faster. Because we've created templates for our course launches. So when we come into here, everything that we need to do for the entire course is in this template. So what I do when I'm like, okay, time to launch our course, I'm going to come in here, I'm just going to duplicate this board and put the name of the new course, Boom. I know exactly what we need to do and I can start assigning tasks to people on my team. We've also created these templates, like I said, for my clients to have. So all of my clients inside my coaching programs get my quarterly at a glance board, our promotional schedule, our YouTube workflow, our market. This is an old marketing calendar, but they also get our challenge launch as well. So this just allows me to replicate the workflow over and over again without having to try to remember every task that we need to do. I've got it listed on a template. I duplicate the template. Boom. I'm ready to start assigning tasks. I want to help continue to simplify your business life because as I talk to online business owners, they are just overwhelmed and stressed and I get it. So I want to start talking about some automations that has taken a lot of work off of my plate and also my team teams plate so we can focus on bigger picture things. So in my next video, it'll be on your screen. Right now I'm going to share with you the biggest marketing automations I set up in my business and how to actually set those up. Ready to save some time? Click that next video.