What is Asana and Why Should We Use It?

Asana is the task management tool that everybody is talking about. It is a great way to manage even the largest and most complex projects. It provides a platform where teams of various professions can come together and collaborate on one space.

Asana was founded in 2008 by two former Facebook executives Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein. The word Asana is an old Sanskrit word, which refers to a popular yoga position. Channelling the inner conscience, the main goal of Asana was to improve work efficiency by greatly reducing the number of emails and meetings that team members often need to engage with, in order to effectively communicate.

Asana places itself as a tool that can help replace the slew of emails, spreadsheets and sticky notes on your desk with a far more all encompassing solution with everything you need in the one place. It is flexible to work in a way that is most effective for you; whether it be in a kanban-style board, checklist or a Gantt chart. Asana can be used to keep check on day to day tasks as well as monitor the overall goals and progress of the project as a whole.

The main features of Asana is the ability to create a comprehensive list of tasks, share details on actions that are required and set deadlines for the whole project. This allows everybody to have goals assigned to them and allows the team to work in one common direction. Planning out a project in this manner allows potential risks and bottlenecks to be spotted early on and ensure the project flows as effectively as possible — even if the project was to change half way through.

Creation of Projects

When creating a new project, the tasks can be set out in a style of your choice. The project can be laid out in a good old fashioned list or in a kanban board layout.

In the kanban board, we can split tasks out into different categories, which can come in handy if tasks need to be split into different priorities levels. For instance, when I develop a website, it is useful to split out tasks for each page into a separate list. Sometimes it can be useful to have a list of tasks that need to be complete by the end of the project, but not necessarily the immediate priority.

Boards can also be split out into a list of tasks that need to be completed by a different person, so everybody is clear about what is required from them. Each board could potentially be a list of tasks for each day, week or month. As mentioned previously, Asana is flexible and can adapt to your needs.

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Image credit: Asana