hey it's patti scharf CPA and co-founder of catching clouds the leader in
e-commerce accounting and today I'm continuing my series on helpful tools
for e-commerce sellers this time I'm going to be talking about asana and it's
not really unique to e-commerce sellers it's more just helpful for anybody who
has a business so let's jump in and talk about that
all right so before we used asana we were using I think toodle-do is what was
called and it was great it was cheap and it was good for managing just individual
tasks for two or three people once we got to like four or five people it
started to not work very well and I'm super happy that we found asana so I
think we've been using this since had to have been 2014 so we've been using a
long time and I'm not gonna give you like a full-blown demo but I'm going to
show you a few things that I think are pretty cool about it so asana is a
project management tool it's a to-do list it's helpful for
keeping track of other people's work and your own work so if you're trying to
actually hire some people to help you out in the warehouse or just wherever to
help take some of the burden off of you as the business owner and just delegate
some tasks I think it's got some really great features that are helpful for use
so I this program is really powerful so I'm I don't even really know where to
start but typically I will start in my inbox if you are following somebody
else's task and they like mark it as done poof it pops up in your inbox but I
pretty much live in this thing called my tasks where it keeps track of all of my
tasks and one of the things that I like a lot about it is it will automatically
if you put a date a due date in there it will automatically recognize when you're
a week out and it'll put it in your upcoming tasks I'm a little busy I got a
lot of tasks going on every week but it'll automatically bump it up there you
can create like headings just kind of on the fly just by putting a colon behind
it so that you can keep things nice and organized you can label things so like
we've got different teams we've got our clients and all the team's related to
that and you can see all the people who work for us are all on that team so we
can invite just specific members of our team to ones one particular team is what
it's called in here so like we've got one section just for
like me and Scott another one for just me another one for our whole team
another one for just a few members of the team it's really flexible and then
in each project you can have a list of different topics or tasks and things
like that you can assign them to different people you can include
different due dates one of the things that I think is super cool is this new
thing that they added called add custom fields so I created this new field
called stage and when I click on stage up here it will automatically sort what
I'm working on based on what that stages so in my case
as a business owner I am looking to delegate tasks that I'm not supposed to
be working on I'm looking to automate different tasks that I'm not supposed to
be working on and then there there may be some tasks that only I can do I can't
delegate them just because they're unique to me or maybe there are things
that are just my zone of genius that I should be doing that stuff so so I think
that's really cool you can also just click on the little assignee up here and
it'll group it by who owns the task so that's really great for if you're
managing somebody you're working on a project and this person is working on
that that person is working on that and this person is working on this other
thing you can sort it by assignee and then you can see where everybody is in
their in their progress on that project okay and then you can change the view
over here you can sort it by due date or whatever so it's pretty cool there's
just a couple other things I'm going to show you like they've got this calendar
view so if you have all your tasks and due dates and things like that and you
want to see it in a different view you can do it like that you can like have
conversations you can chat about different things so this is one of the
things I really like if you go to a project let's go here yes so this not
only keeps track of your actual tasks but you can have notes you can have
subtasks you can have links in there to special documents so when we were first
starting out and I was trying to offload some of the stuff that was in my
brain I would have a task and I would have links to different videos or
whatever so that somebody who was trying to complete the task had all the
information at their fingertips so that they could actually walk through and
complete the task without me having to like be standing over their shoulder and
training them or something like that it was kind of a living document it was
really great as we got a little bit bigger that started to fall apart a
little bit we needed a more standalone training kind of a learning management
system I'll talk about that another week but but it's really cool to have all
that stuff just accessible and helpful to whoever's going through the projects
and you can leave comments on here and talk about different tasks back back and
forth you can keep track of what people are working on and stuff like that one
of the other things I think is really cool about a sonnet is they make things
really fun so like as you're ticking off projects and okay did that I did that I
did that every once while you'll have like a flying unicorn go across your
screen or Narwhal or something like that it's really kind of cool and then like I
like this this is one of I think you have to turn this feature on but if you
hold down the tab key and then the letter B this really special thing
happens I mean it's just silly and you know work is work enough it's it's fun
to make things fun once in a while so that's it I love asana I think it's it's
working really great for us it's really powerful it's really flexible and I hope
you like it I hope you liked this video if you did please like comment and share
if you haven't already please subscribe and I'll catch you later