Overview
Asana is a powerful, flexible project management tool. It is fairly unopinionated, and many different workflows are possible within it. We have mapped our proven async remote workflow into Asana from Basecamp, where we used to operate.
Use For...
✅ Keeping a project schedule, composed of individual todos, milestones, and approvals.
✅ Keeping track of Cantilever work you are responsible for and ensuring that you meet your deadlines
✅ Communicating about tasks, asking questions, sending for approval, delivering feedback
✅ Tracking internal todos/requests
✅ Keeping notes from client/project meetings
✅ Logging your PTO in the shared team calendar project
✅ Keeping internal weekly reports
✅ Providing visibility on client status to clients (Via public share links)
✅ Requests for platform/project access (Use this project)
✅ Accepting client requests (Via Forms)
✅ Linking to project-related resources in other locations (Drive, Notion, etc)
Don’t use for...
⛔️ Keeping long documentation (Use Notion or Google Docs)
⛔️ Emergency communication (Use texting/phone calls)
⛔️ Client communication (Use email or Slack) – Note: We will eventually be doing more client communication in Asana but want to establish our internal practices first. There are some great client-facing tools we can use in Asana.
Why we use it
We use Asana because it is powerful enough to handle our most complex project management needs, while being approachable enough to work fine for small projects or even personal tasks. We have established a customized Asana workflow to suit our needs.
How we use it
At its core, Asana is a task manager. The “atomic unit” of Asana is the task. It lets you add arbitrary fields and data to tasks, comment on them, add subtasks, put them into projects (or multiple projects), give them due dates, estimate them, and so on. But Asana is for tasks, and the projects they exist as a part of.
To learn more about how we use Asana to manage projects, check out this short loom walking through our process.
Golden Rules
- Tasks should use our standard format and should include all the information and resources necessary to complete the task.
- Tasks should stay assigned to a single team member throughout the lifecycle of the task.
- PMs should only set deadlines when necessary, and should ensure that all deadlines are confirmed to be realistic and reasonable.
- Staff should respect deadlines. If it looks like they won’t make a given deadline, they should reply accordingly so the PM can re-negotiate and update the overall schedule or inform the client.
- All Asana teams should be “public” to Cantilever, so any internal team member can join any team.
Guides
Recommendations
Example settings from Ty – Video has no sound
We recommend:
- Turn off all email notifications
- Have Desktop Notifications turned to “Task Updates”
- Have Project Notifications set off by default (unlike Ty) but set them on for the specific projects you want to be following.
You may also want to try Shift for consolidating your apps and notifications into a single stream.