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Wojciech Szczepanik
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My Asana journey

A description of my experience delivering projects with Asana

Wojciech Szczepanik
Wojciech Szczepanik

IT

Introduction

Asana is a project management tool. That is all, and that is quite a lot. There are many similar tools on the market, but Asana is the one that has stayed with me the longest because I have developed my own way of working with it.

If we work together, we will probably work in the way described below.

How I use Asana with Google Workspace

My main tools are:

  1. Asana: teams, projects and tasks
  2. Google Workspace: documents, file storage, informal chat and applications

Main principles

  1. Everything related to work is a task. Communication does not happen through chat or email. It belongs in the relevant task as comments, or in an Asana message for project-wide announcements.
  2. Every task has an owner and a due date, except tasks in the Planning Stage.
  3. All files live in Shared Drives. We do not use My Drive and do not upload files from a computer directly to Asana. We upload them to Shared Drives and link to them.
  4. Inside Asana, we link to and mention people, teams and projects by pasting a link or typing @.
  5. The Inbox is the main information hub. It contains updates about tasks and comments you follow or in which you are mentioned.
  6. My Tasks is the list of tasks assigned to you. I recommend organising its sections according to the GTD method.
  7. We care about the quality of the information we share.
  8. We write as comprehensively as possible and anticipate questions: “Make green tea in a large mug with one teaspoon of sugar” is better than “tea”.
  9. We care about language accuracy.
  10. We use descriptive hyperlinks instead of bare links.
  11. We minimise abbreviations such as ASAP, EOD, FY and FYI.

Folder structure and workflow

Over time, you will notice a recurring folder structure across Shared Drives. It represents a general workflow:

  1. Inbox: incoming information and work inputs
  2. Workspace: files currently being worked on
  3. Resources: materials that can be reused
  4. Archive: obsolete files from iterative work; we archive them instead of deleting them
  5. Shared Output: completed files shared outside the organisation

Other folders may appear depending on the needs of a project.

Additional task information

Projects can contain custom fields. One useful field is Task status, which appears in every project.

The possible statuses are:

  • Planning Stage: an idea or a task without a fixed date
  • To-Do: planned for the near future
  • In-Progress: work has started
  • Done: completed; attach the result in a comment and pin it at the top
  • Canceled: cancelled, with an explanation in a comment
  • Parked: temporarily paused
  • Converted to Project: converted into a project using Asana
  • Merged to another task: merged into another task

Emoji dictionary

  • 🚀 Project
  • 🔥 Burned: cancelled or abandoned
  • 👁‍🗨 Website
  • 📥 Inbox
  • ⚙ Workspace: work in progress
  • 🧭 Management
  • 🏢 Company or organisation
  • 🔗 Shared outside the organisation
  • 🗄 Archive
  • 🎓 Training materials

The appearance of emojis can differ between operating systems.

Personalised My Tasks