Steve Dotto here.
Today, we have a good one for you: Virtual Team and Task Management.
There’s nothing more important to the success of small businesses, and even large businesses,
as communication, making sure that we’re on the same page and working in the same direction.
That challenge is enormous when we don’t work for the same company, or we work in different
time zones, different offices, or different countries.
Finding tools that help different project teams work towards the common goal is a very
important piece of the whole productivity equation.
Now there are a lot of different tools that people can use and a lot of different techniques
they can use, but the one that I’m really enamoured with these days is one called Asana.
It is free for up to 30 users.
You can buy the Premium version which gives you some additional features but the free
version alone is an exceptionally capable task management tool designed for collaborative
team environments.
Now I was first actually shown Asana by a friend of mine, Mike Vardy, former editor
of Lifehack.
He’s got this great article—I’ll post a link to the article—on why he chose Asana
as the tool of choice for him.
It’s a good overview of what Asana gives you versus what some of the other different
tools give you.
Let me take you on a quick little tour of Asana abd see if it might or might not fit
your life.
Asana is a web-based tool.
Most of the time, you’re just going to use it in your browser interface.
There is an app which you can install on your iPhone, which I’ll show you a little bit
later, but for the most part it’s a complete web 2.0 tool that you can access through any
web-enabled device.
It crosses all platforms because of its web capabilities.
How they basically set it up is you set it up yourself as a user and sign in for free.
Then you have Personal and different Business profiles that you work within.
You can see here that I’ve got my DottoTech profile which is my main work profile.
If I l click here on the Profile button, I can actually switch over to my different Personal
Projects but I can keep all my different to-do’s in one place.
This is really important because all the different projects that I’m working on with different
groups of people aren’t necessarily related to each other but they all flow into my own
Personal Task list.
Here are my different tasks.
Some of them are related to projects that I’m working on with other people and some
of them are just my own projects that I have as my own to-do list.
It’s really important as you plan your day and as you do different things to be able
to see a snapshot of all of your responsibilities at once.
I really like this feature within Asana.
As we move in, let’s get a team project that I’m working on.
I’ve got this Protechtivity.
We’re doing these seminars where we’re teaching people about different productivity
tools so I work with several other people on that.
We each have an account on Asana and we each then share this particular project, these
Protechtivity Team Tasks.
We are all on the team and as different people are assigned different tasks, they can be
assigned from this Administrator Panel.
If we want to add a new task, I just hit the Enter key and that creates a new task.
One task that needs to be done on this particular project is set up our Facebook and LinkedIn
advertising.
I’m going to put in Facebook Ads as the task.
Here’s how I assign it.
I click here and say this can be assigned to me or to somebody else within my team.
It’s that easy to designate who is responsible for any of these tasks.
Now I’m going to assign this task to me because I work harder than anybody else.
If we look over here on the right-hand side, now we have a detail on that particular task.
I can give it a due date.
I can create subtasks on it.
For example in this one here, we might have subtasks.
The first one we have to do is create graphics for the new ads.
I hate those little tiny Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads.
I’m going to create those graphics.
I’ve been working on those so I’ll put that down as a subtask.
You can see that we are now building a nice tree of responsibility and making sure that
this particular task is accomplished.
As I said, I can put in due dates.
I can add tags.
I can even do things like attach different files to it.
I can attach them from Dropbox or from my computer.
I’ve been working on some of these ads myself so I can add that graphic to the task so team
members can look at it.
Maybe I’m asking people’s opinion on which ads do you like or which ads don’t you like.
There’s that ad and they might say, “The text is too small.”
It gives us all of the different resources we need in one place as we work our way through
the project.
Of course what task list wouldn’t be complete without some success?
Once a project is complete, you can click on Complete so we have a visual representation
of how we are proceeding on our different tasks on the project.
We have a choice of just working within this environment here or having Asana reach out
to us, touch us, and tell us what we’re supposed to be doing in other ways.
If I go down here into the very bottom left-hand side, this is kind of your Account Administrative
Area.
I’m going to go there and I’m go to Account Settings.
There I can choose how my account is managed.
Most importantly, do I want to have all of my different tasks emailed to me each day
and be reminded of them or do I want just deal with it within Asana?
That’s a personal choice.
You can set it up any way you want.
While I’m down there, I want to mention one other area.
It says New Workspace.
Asana deals with each of your identities as a workspace so if you have a corporate identity
where we want to have all of Asana within your business but you might also want to use
Asana for managing a softball team, managing all of the different tasks on a softball team,
or something recreational.
You can set up a new workspace so that you can demarcate all of those tasks away from
other workspaces but it allows you to have all of your personal tasks still flow into
your own personal window.
It’s actually pretty creative how they’ve set that up.
The other thing that we see here is this whole Management Panel here on the left-hand side.
This has all of our different projects, tags which will allow us to create better organization,
and all of the different people we work with in whatever workspace we happen to be working
in.
Doing tasks and task management is pretty efficient while you’re on your computer
but it would be silly to think that we just spend our whole life at our computer.
We come up with ideas.
We come up with things that need to be done.
We do things when we’re out and about moving so Asana also has a pretty good iPhone app.
Actually, it’s a very good iPhone app.
Let me call it up and see if I can show it to you.
I’m actually quite impressed with how that app works.
Here is my iPhone.
I go to my Protechtivity section on it and here is my Asana.
When I open Asana, we can see that I’ve got the same basic management tools that I
have in the web version.
Here are all my different workspaces.
Do you recognize it?
It looks almost exactly the same.
Let me just go back quickly into the web browser version and open up Asana.
There we see all of the same tasks.
Let me just put this side by side so you can see that I’ve got all of the different workspaces
here and then I just close back and there are all of my tasks listed out.
Now if I add another task into the Protechtivity Team Task area, I tap on the plus button,
I can type in a new task here on my iPhone, and then I create that task.
Now you see that it’s in the Protechtivity area here, as far as the project there.
If I want to switch with the project that’s in, I can do it there but I’m going to leave
it in that project.
New Task—I’m going to create it—and now it creates it on my iPhone as a task.
You can see right here.
As soon as I sync up here, look at how quick it is.
It’s already done.
It’s online and it’s added a new task here within the web browser as well.
Asana is really worth taking a look at.
I’ve only scratched the surface of the capabilities of this particular program.
For team management and teams up to 30 people, which for most of us is the preponderance
of our projects, you can try it for free.
Use it for free and you may never need to upgrade.
I haven’t upgraded myself.
I wonder what wonderful things I’d discover should I choose to upgrade.
Asana— free online, check it out.
I hope you found this video useful.
If you have, please give us a like, show us some props, and thank you very much for joining
us here on DottoTech.
Steve Dotto0Asana0January 29, 2013
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