Hello, my name is Paul Minors.
Welcome back to another one of my Asana training videos.
Over the last few years, I've been very fortunate to have worked with
hundreds of different businesses and different Asana users.
And what I'm going to show you today are
the most common mistakes that we see coming up again and again.
This video is actually a remake from a video I made a couple of years ago,
and I wanted to update it with an even bigger list of some of the common mistakes that we see.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a comment below,
and if you would like one-on-one help with setting up your Asana account,
learning how to take advantage of all the different features,
training and onboarding your team, then click the link in the description below
to learn more about my Asana consulting options.
Now the first and maybe one of the biggest mistakes
that I see people making in Asana, is not using the My Tasks page.
The My Tasks page you will find here on the sidebar,
this is the page that shows you everything assigned to you
from all of the different tasks, subtasks and projects that you're working in.
Basically, if a task or a subtask is assigned to you,
if it has your name on it like this, then it's going to show up on this My Tasks page.
Now the mistake that we see a lot of people make is
instead of using and working from this screen throughout the day,
we see a lot of people clicking through all of their projects
to go and find their work.
They look for anything with their name on it.
Or, maybe they actually even create a project for their own tasks
and I'll actually come back to that in a sec.
So you spend a lot of time hunting around just trying to find your work.
But the best practice in Asana is to use and work from the My Tasks page.
I have separate videos all about how to use this screen to give you a brief overview.
You can see what I've done here is,
I have some sections to show what I'm working on today.
I can see what I have coming up later this week,
and then even some tasks that are starting to populate my next week section here.
I've even got some rules that help me to automatically move
tasks through these sections as the due dates fall due.
But go and check out my other videos
to learn more about how to use this My Tasks page.
Okay.
The next mistake we see people making a lot is assigning too many tasks to yourself
including non-tasks, or really things that shouldn't be in Asana,
for example, articles or books you might want to read.
I think a lot of that type of thing can clutter up Asana quite a lot.
So here's an example in my demo account.
You can see this is looking really messy.
I've got loads of stuff jammed into my Recently Assigned section.
My Today section is full.
There's a lot of things that are overdue here.
I'll come back to that.
But really the volume of work is too much.
And this happens a lot with new users because what I find tends to happen is
when you get started with Asana, you're really excited so you jump in,
you create loads of projects and loads of tasks for everything that you need to do,
which is great in theory except that now you have all these tasks on your My Tasks page,
and you quickly start to feel overwhelmed and just drown in the volume of work.
Now there are a couple of ways you could manage this slightly better.
One is as I showed you before on the My Tasks page, you could use sections
like I've done, Today, This week, Next week, and even I have Later down here.
And you move tasks into the various sections to hide them.
So I actually, when I'm working in Asana on a daily basis,
often don't even look at This week and Next week.
I put tasks into This week and Next week obviously based on the due date.
You can see I have here tasks due tomorrow and Friday.
Anything due more than a week away, you can see I have quite a lot in here,
I hide in this Later section.
And so that helps me to keep my My Tasks page
really nice and clean and minimal and organized.
And it really helps me to focus on only what I have to do today.
Another option is and this is where you might want to think about
and have a conversation with your team about how you're going to manage the work,
but another thing we see clients do sometimes is,
only assigning tasks to yourself when they fall due.
So what I could do here is
with some of these tasks that are occurring later on in the project
I might actually leave this unassigned for now,
and then only assign this when the task is now ready to be worked on.
So we move through the project in phases
and assign blocks of tasks when it's time to work on them.
That's going to make it
so that people are less overwhelmed with a huge volume of tasks on their task list.
I would also caution you
to not use Asana for things that aren't task based or task related.
I've seen clients do funny things where
they put things like articles or even emails that they want to respond to into Asana
as a way of trying to collect everything in one place.
And again the intention is there, it's good.
it's "I want to have everything in one place,"
but then Asana is full of not just tasks which you need to work on
but also articles that you may or may not read someday,
or an email that you need to respond to,
and I would argue that those types of things really don't belong in Asana.
The next very common and very big mistake
that we see people making, is not checking the Inbox
and really not dealing with the notifications correctly.
So the Inbox in Asana up here on the sidebar,
this is where you get notified about all tasks
that you are a collaborator on down here at the bottom.
So anything I'm a collaborator on I'm getting notified about,
whether it's a task like this where the due date has changed,
or maybe a task that's being completed like this one,
or if somebody is commenting on a task,
I'm getting notified about anything that I'm a collaborator on.
Now the mistake we see people make is, number one, not checking this Inbox enough.
If you don't check the Inbox, this is where
important updates and just work in general slips through the cracks.
You end up in a situation where somebody says
"Hey Paul, you know, you never gave me feedback on that task" and I say
"Oh, I didn't even see, it's probably because I wasn't checking the Inbox."
So the first best practice is to be checking the Inbox a couple of times a day.
You'll actually see there'll be a little orange dot up here
when there's a new notification in the Inbox.
Checking it regularly is going to mean that you're more up to date with
the task updates, comments, and questions that teammates are sharing with you.
And then the next best practice is to archive the notifications as you go.
So you can click this little archive button here.
Once you've dealt with a notification,
you've either looked at it or you've responded with it,
you click that archive button.
I'm going to go ahead and archive all,
but this is the screen we want to get to
on a daily basis, which is Inbox zero.
This means that I've dealt with all of my notifications
and I'm completely up to date.
I would also recommend if you are working from the Inbox as I suggest,
managing your notifications and turning off email updates
for activity updates and maybe even mentions and summaries.
You don't really need the email notifications if you are checking this Inbox regularly.
Another mistake we see from time to time
is leaving tasks open and not completing them.
So not using the Mark as complete button up here or checking the tick here.
When I ask clients about this
the excuse or reason people often give me is they'll say something like
"Well, I did the work but I didn't want to lose the task."
You know, "I still wanted to chat with the person who assigned it to me.
I wanted to get some feedback before I was confident in fully completing the work,
and so I left it open."
So again, I understand the intention it's there, it's good,
but the better way to manage a situation like this is mark the task as complete.
As the assignee, that's your responsibility.
Sometimes people feel like "Am I allowed to complete the task?"
if they're not the one that actually created it or assigned it in the first place.
There's often a bit of hesitation about being able to complete it,
but in my view as the assignee,
it's your responsibility to actually complete the task.
The assignor, the person who gave you the task,
they will get notified in their Inbox that you've completed it.
They can then review the work. They can go back with any questions.
They could even reopen the task if they're not satisfied
and there's something else that still needs to be done.
But you completing the task in the first place,
sends a clear signal that you're saying this is now done.
Another common mistake along the same lines is
changing the assignee back and forth as the work changes.
So what we see from time to time is,
maybe somebody assigns me a task, so they put my name on it up here,
and then when I'm finished with the task, when I think that I've done the work
I then change it back to the person that assigned it to me.
And yes, the intention there is,
you're saying "I've done the work so I'm going to assign it back"
because they now need to check the task.
The issue with doing this though
is that you lose visibility of who's responsible for this task.
If you assign the task back and forth,
it's very easy to get into a situation where maybe it isn't assigned to the right person
because you've assigned it to the person that assigned it to you
you've assigned it back and they actually want you to go and change something else.
But they forget to assign it back to you.
So the whole assigning back and forth thing I think just opens up a can of worms
and it creates a lot of opportunity for human error
to result in the task just falling through the cracks.
Again, the best practice is, leave the task assigned to the person
who is ultimately responsible for doing the work.
When that person is finished, they mark it as complete like I mentioned before,
and the original assignor can then jump in with any comments, questions,
or feedback, or again, they can simply reopen the task if they need to.
Another very common mistake I see all the time is leaving tasks overdue.
So this happens where you've got a bunch of tasks assigned to you,
let's collapse that in my Today section, I had the intention to do this work
but for whatever reason I didn't get it done that day.
That's fine, you know, stuff happens, emergencies come up,
so we can't always get all of our tasks done.
But leaving the tasks here on your My Tasks with the red overdue dates
I think is just just results in the tasks building up over time
this task list gets very messy,
and it very quickly leads you to feeling quite overwhelmed by all your work.
I think a better way to deal with overdue tasks is,
instead of leaving them overdue like this, at the end of the day,
and you should make this part of your shutdown routine at the end of the day,
is I look at anything that I have left on my task list
that I just didn't have time for, and I change the due date.
So I'll say "Okay, let me do this maybe tomorrow"
or maybe "I'll come back to it on Monday," and I change the date.
And then I'll sort it accordingly.
So if it's next week maybe I'll put it into my upcoming
and then I've got rules that will automatically move it into today when it's due.
So the long and short of it is
don't let it go overdue or don't leave it overdue.
Update the due date to reflect
when are you actually going to come back and work on it again.
That way, you can avoid having this massive list of overdue tasks,
and you've actually now got a clear plan of when you're going to come back to it later.
The next common mistake we see all the time
and this is the reason a lot of clients reach out to us in the first place,
is that maybe as the owner of the business, they have dumped Asana on their team
without any really formal introduction or training.
This is a mistake that's not unique particularly to Asana,
but with a lot of tools and apps that different businesses choose to use,
is the business owner says "Right, we're going to use this tool" like Asana
and they leave it up to their team to figure out how to use it
"let's just work it out as a team".
And what we tend to find happen is
you'll see some people are good at figuring it out because they're quite tech savvy,
but inevitably there are people on the team who aren't very tech savvy,
who can't figure it out on their own and need a little bit more help.
So you end up with this kind of half adoption half usage of Asana,
where some people use it other people don't
but the people that don't are dragging down the entire team.
So what we recommend and this is part of the service that we provide is
thinking about why are we using Asana in the first place,
and actually talking to your team and saying this is why we're using Asana,
here are the problems we think it's going to solve,
and how we expect everyone to use it.
If you need help with training and onboarding your team,
then check out the Master Asana program on my website
which lets you book private 1:1 consulting sessions with experts on my team.
You get access to weekly group coaching calls,
and you even get access to a full online course that I've developed
that guides you through how to build out your Asana account,
how to plan your Asana role out, and how to train your team correctly.
Something else we recommend when rolling out Asana to your team is
identifying an Asana Champion or what I call the Chief Asana Officer,
basically somebody on your team
who's ultimately going to be responsible for Asana's rollout and adoption.
Unless you have somebody that's ultimately responsible for,
it we find that everyone tends to use it in their own different way,
and so the purpose of having that Asana Champion is
they're someone that can help to train and onboard new employees
and there's someone that can work with different team members and departments
to make sure we're all using it consistently.
Another common mistake we see, and this is the result of not using the My Tasks page
that I talked about at the beginning,
is creating a private project for your work instead of using that My Tasks page.
So because people often don't understand how to use this My Tasks page,
what they do is they'll create a project a bit like this,
where they say, you know, "Paul's tasks".
And then what they do is they create their own task list in this project.
But you don't actually need to do this
because the My Tasks page is like your own private project.
If I create a task directly on here so "This is a task".
If I don't put this in a project,
this is just going to be private to me, nobody else can see this.
I can also choose to view My Tasks as a list like this,
or I can use the board layout, or even the calendar view.
So this is in a sense my own private project
and creating your own private project like this separately is sort of a waste of time.
The next mistake we see all the time is people not using due dates.
This one is really confusing to me because putting a due date on a task is
one of the most important bits of information about the task.
You know, a task should tell you what you need to do,
who's doing it, and when is it due.
When I'm working with a client and I ask "Why didn't you put a due date on that?"
the reason people often give me is they'll say something like
"Well, it didn't really have a strict deadline. it's just something we need to do soon."
In situations like that I actually recommend still putting a due date on the task.
Even if it doesn't have a strict or hard deadline that you need to hit,
it's still good to use the due date as a way of setting your intention,
and saying "I'd like to do this by Friday".
Even if you end up changing the due date and pushing it back to next week
because other more important work comes up,
it's still better and it's a more effective way of working to have a due date
that you maybe even change later, versus having no due date at all.
The issue with having no due date on a task is,
you might find that lots and lots of tasks that which none of them have any due dates,
all build up and there's no sense of urgency or way of prioritizing the work,
whereas if you use put some kind of due date on the task and say
"I'll do this one today, this one tomorrow, this one Friday,"
again even if that changes later, that's going to be more efficient,
more effective compared to not putting any due date on the task at all.
The next mistake we see coming up a lot is when people are too vague with
task details and really just not providing enough information about a task.
So an example of that might be simply having a very vague task name
maybe not even putting an assignee or a due date on
and not elaborating here in the description
or not including things like attachments and documents that are relevant.
You want to really be thinking about
when you assign a task how is the other person going to know what to do.
"Am I providing enough information so that when they click on this task,
are they going to know what to do
without having to come back to me and ask lots and lots of questions?"
So here's an example,
this is a task that I assign to my virtual assistant Judy.
It says exactly what she needs to do "Create WordPress post".
And she can see it's a subtask of this earlier video that I made.
And I've actually included a big old checklist of everything she needs to do.
So this is how I use Asana
to store standard operating procedures or SOPs.
You can check out my video on this and how I use templates for SOPs.
You can click the video up here.
So you can see from Judy's point of view,
when she receives this task, she knows what she needs to do.
She can click back to the parent task
and she can see what parent her subtask is related to.
And she's got this checklist here of everything she needs to do.
So hopefully, she can just do the task,
she doesn't need to come back to me and ask any clarifying questions.
Okay, and finally the final mistake we see a lot coming up with Asana users,
is using too many channels for communication.
And what I mean by this is not just Asana,
but also other tools and apps and services that you use for communication.
All tend to overlap quite a lot, and there's not enough distinction
about when to use different tools and services.
A common example might be something like Slack.
We work with a lot of clients who use both Asana and Slack,
and they're often because there's lots of different ways we can communicate
obviously we've got email as well.
We often find there are conversations happening in multiple different places
and so the advice we often give is that
you need to clearly define when to use each tool.
For example, with Asana we recommend if you're talking about a task or a project
which by default is probably most of the conversations you're having
should be task or project related.
Then really that's a conversation that should be happening inside Asana.
And the benefit of doing that is then we can keep the conversation
linked with the actual work that we're doing.
So when I click on a task I can see the conversation taking place.
I don't have to go switching over to Slack to go and find the conversation.
But if I've got some of the conversation in Asana,
some of it's happening in Slack where I've got different threads going,
on maybe I've got a couple of email threads going,
I've now divided the conversation up among multiple channels,
and it's really hard to make sense of "where are we at?" and "what do we need to do next?"
So when you adopt a tool like Asana,
because this is one more tool that you can use to communicate in,
you want to clearly define to your team when do we use a sign of a communication,
and how does it fit, and how do we use it alongside other channels
and other tools that we can communicate in like Slack,
email, instant messaging, texting, and so on.
And so there we go.
Those are some of the common mistakes we see people making again and again with Asana.
As I mentioned before, if you have any questions leave me a comment below.
And if you would like one-on-one help with setting up your account,
training, and learning how to get the most out of Asana and onboarding your team,
then check out the link in the description below
to learn more about our Asana consulting options.
One more time, thank you very much for listening,
and I will catch you in the next video.