How to start using Asana

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• What is Asana?  
• What can you do in Asana?
  • Coordination and collaboration
  • Personal productivity
  • Transparency and accountability in your work
  • Reporting and sharing results
• How Asana is organized
  • How work is organized
  • How people are organized 
• Additional resources

Whether you are working on a simple task or a complex project, Asana makes it easy to collaborate, streamline workflows, and achieve your goals. In this article, you’ll learn what's possible with Asana and understand how Asana is structured.

What is Asana?  

Asana is a comprehensive work management tool designed to help individuals and teams keep track of tasks, delegate responsibilities, monitor progress, and communicate in real-time. By providing a centralized platform for collaboration, Asana helps teams stay organized and focused, ensuring that projects are completed on time. 

What can you do in Asana?

Whether you're an individual contributor seeking to manage personal tasks or a manager overseeing complex projects, Asana provides the tools to help you work more efficiently and effectively.

Coordination and collaboration

Asana allows you to collaborate with teammates in real-time, ensuring seamless teamwork and timely task completion.

Features like multi-homing and @mention help different stakeholders stay informed about the progress of a task. With multi-homing, one task can belong to multiple projects simultaneously without duplication. For example, your Finance team and Legal teams may need to collaborate on the same task but have different projects where they are tracking progress. The task can live in both projects, and all updates made to the task will be mirrored on both projects. As a result, both teams can remain updated on the task's progress, avoiding silos. 

Another feature that helps coordinate your team’s work is workload. With workload, you can track your team’s capacity and ensure everyone's responsibilities are clear and balanced. This helps you avoid overburdening team members and maintain efficient progress. Allocate resources efficiently by tracking workloads across projects and ensuring work is distributed appropriately to meet your objectives.

Personal productivity

Asana helps you manage individual work and boosts personal productivity by improving organization and time management.

My tasks is your source of truth and keeps you organized and on top of your responsibilities. Here’s where you’ll find all the tasks assigned to you, allowing you to prioritize your to-do list effectively. With My tasks, you can view your upcoming tasks, due dates, and task statuses at a glance, making it easy to plan your day and ensure you're focusing on the most critical work. Learn how to maximize your productivity with My tasks. 

Your inbox serves as a hub for receiving notifications related to your tasks and progress on work relevant to you. This ensures that you're always in the loop, staying updated on any changes, comments, or mentions related to your work.

Transparency and accountability in your work

By assigning tasks and setting due dates, you can keep teams accountable for the work they are responsible for. Each task has a single owner and a due date, clarifying who is responsible for a task's completion and providing a timeline for when work is expected to be finished. This clarity on assignees and due dates ensures that responsibilities are well-defined,  making tracking progress easier and completing work on time.

Asana provides a transparent window into the progress and status of work. Team members can easily access project timelines, task descriptions, and status updates, promoting a shared understanding of project goals and individual roles. This visibility encourages better communication and collaboration among team members, enabling everyone to stay on the same page. 

Reporting and sharing results

Asana allows you to share project progress, updates, and key metrics with your manager or stakeholders, ensuring everyone is informed and aligned on the status of work. 

Share project progress and metrics by creating status updates that keep your team and stakeholders informed, ensuring everyone is aligned on the current status of work. This minimizes the need for catching everybody up, saving time in meetings, and making them more productive.

Establish clear objectives and key results in Asana with Asana Goals, providing a framework to track and achieve your goals effectively. By setting and monitoring goals directly in Asana, you centralize goal management, align your team around shared objectives, and ensure everyone is working towards the same outcomes. Asana Goals streamline the process of measuring progress and success, making reporting on your achievements to stakeholders easier.

How Asana is organized

Asana’s structure is designed to create a seamless connection between users and the work they are responsible for. Here's an overview of how Asana is organized:

How work is organized

1. Goals: Goals are high-level objectives that represent the overarching priorities for an organization or team. They are set within Asana Goals and provide a clear direction for the work being done.
2. Portfolios: Portfolios are containers that group related projects together. They help track progress toward specific initiatives or objectives.
3. Projects: Projects organize and manage work related to a specific initiative. Projects house tasks and subtasks, allowing for dividing work into manageable units and facilitating collaboration. 
4. Tasks: Tasks represent the individual action items within a project. They have due dates and can be assigned to specific team members.
5. Subtask: Subtasks are smaller units of work within a task, often used for breaking down more complex tasks into manageable steps.

How people are organized 

1. Organizations are based on your company’s shared email domain and connect everybody within your company that uses Asana.
2. Teams are functional groups in an organization that likely correspond to departments, like Marketing or Sales, or functional groups like "NYC Office."
3. Members: Members are users who have full access to the workspace or organization and its features.
4. Guests: Guests have more limited access and are often invited to collaborate on specific projects or tasks.