hello folks and welcome back to the keep productive youtube channel on today's video
i'm going to be passing over to louise henry who's going to be diving into her favorite asana
features now she's going to be talking about the likes of my task task templates and ways that you
can use asana to remember different things across your workday she has a fantastic youtube channel
that doesn't just jump into asana but many more marketing aspects and a brand new course called
up level with asana which you can check out in the link in description so big thank you for luis
to coming on and i'll pass you over to louise hi francesco thank you so much for having me back on
your channel i'm excited to talk all about asana today asana is hands down my favorite project
management system it's simple it has a great user experience yet it's very powerful as well so in
today's video i'm going to share with you my top three favorite features of asana the first feature
is the my tasks tab this is going to give you an ultimate color-coded calendar that allows you to
keep on top of all of your different projects so in asana you'll organize your work into projects
first so for example under the umbrella of sales and marketing we have a project for an upcoming
program launch we have a project for our marketing calendar so this includes all marketing to do's
including social media emails youtube videos and then we have a leads tracker so this is to keep
track of anyone that has expressed interest in our programs and then we can remember to actually go
ahead and follow up with them so dividing our work by projects is great because when you click on one
that is all you're going to see so you're getting a very focused streamlined view of only those to
do's so for example within the marketing calendar you can see some upcoming promotions i have
as well as some emails that we have scheduled so as you're working to keep focused on that specific
project you can just come into the project and see only those to-do's and once you are in the
project view you can quickly and easily switch between the list view board view and calendar
so you'll divide your work into projects first and this is great because it forces you to pre-plan
your projects and get much more organized once you have done that you want to make sure that
you have set a color for your project so in this example i have set my marketing calendar to green
to do that you just have to come over here to the drop down icon then click set color and icon
you'll see your selection of colors and different icons as well so for our launch we have pink our
marketing calendar green and our leads tracker blue so now finally to the my task tab that i'm
obsessed with which is right up here you're going to click on that and this is going to give you
a fantastic color coded calendar so what this is doing is pulling all your to-do's across all your
different projects into one central view this means that all your projects move forward and
you never lose track of important to do's so as we can see these green tasks here are my marketing to
do's here's a lead that i need to follow up with and down here in pink is my upcoming launch so
this is really what i was looking for when i was looking for a calendar and to-do list combined
together it's color-coded i can easily identify what i need to do and what category it falls under
and once you have accomplished a task it actually just fades out into the background
i love this because this allows me to look back at the previous day and see how much i accomplished
which motivates me to keep going and have a productive day today unlike other softwares
where you have to manually go in and click into the individual projects asana centralizes this
all for you and gives you one ultimate to-do list next asana gives you the ability to template both
tasks and entire projects so anytime you have a task with multiple steps you can actually set this
up as a template then anytime you need to do that task in the future you can simply duplicate it
and you have a pre-made checklist ready for you to follow so for example as you can see here under my
marketing calendar i have a section for templates and files one of which is a youtube video because
there's multiple steps involved in bringing a youtube video to life so if we click on that
here you'll see that i have a pre-made checklist with all of the to do's to bring a video to life
so now every time i need to create a video rather than having to remember all the many steps in the
order to do things i can just go up here to these three little dots duplicate this task and then
i have an easy checklist to follow so you can do this for any task with multiple steps but you can
also do this with entire projects so for example that launch i mentioned it has a ton of steps to
it here's an example of that project so i did this in september 2020 and i'm going to do it again
in march 2021 rather than having to rework this project plan and write down all these to do's
i can actually reuse this project and then just simply change out the dates for march this saves
a crazy amount of time and for any of your projects and tasks that do repeat
i highly recommend that you set this up so as you can see i have templated projects for all of
our different programs and then when it's time to reuse it again i click on the three dots here and
i duplicate this project and then there's a really quick and easy way for you to change out all your
dates and third i love asana because it allows you to never forget anything again and there are a few
ways that it helps you do this if you're like me and have a terrible memory this is going to be
very helpful for you so one of the easiest things that you can do is document all of your important
recurring tasks to do's and appointments so let's say that i have an important to do that i want to
never forget again i'm just going to click on that come over here to the due date section
click on that decide on the date that it needs to recur then i'm going to click set to repeat
and then you could determine weekly monthly yearly whatever you need so i'm going to go with monthly
and now it's going to repeat every single month on the 26th awesome and you'll know that it is
recurring because they'll have this little icon next to the date this way you can just document it
in asana and then you never have to worry about it again i have done this for all of my business
tasks but also for my personal to do's as well so this is our first way to remember
all our important to do's the other method i wanted to mention to you was the ideas board
so under my executive team here you'll see that i have an ideas board this is where i store any
idea that i have on the go so i would recommend that you download the asana app so that you can
have that with you at all times but all you have to do whenever an idea pops to mind you can use
your asana to document that idea so rather than jotting it down in a notebook and possibly losing
it forever you can document your ideas in asana instead so for example whenever i have an idea
i'll come over here click on the plus sign add in my new idea quickly and then this is documented
in the correct place and never lost then what i recommend you do is go over here to where it says
overview you're going to go to status just click on track for now and you want to turn this on here
where it says remind me to update every friday so every friday you will get a reminder to come
into your ideas board and then from here you can decide what you're going to do with that idea so
maybe you're going to implement it now and you can actually sort it into the correct project
or you can decide that this is a future idea and simply pick it up
and drag it to the future category so this board has been incredibly helpful for me
and i hope it will be for you as well because your ideas are actually in asana
it's way easier for you to turn them into actionable steps and start making progress
on them so of course there's a lot more i love about asana but those are my top three
you