How I Came To Love Asana

Lately I’ve been working on a bit of a side project with one of my friends. We’re both heavily invested in it and before we actually did any dev work, what we wanted was a solid foundation as a stable company of size two.

To that effect, we wanted to stay organized as much as possible, especially in the early stages of the game where we had no idea what we were doing. Entrepreneurship is synonymous with “early-20s” and this is an effort we are probably going to go through multiple times, hopefully with new lessons under our belt each time.

That said, we began with a very broad range of tools, each with their own purpose. Trello, ToDoIst, Evernote, Slack, and Asana all served a purpose in one way or another. That’s five separate applications: five separate pages for five different things. And it was extremely difficult to keep track of.

So one of the things we assigned to ourselves in ToDoIst or maybe it was Trello or Asana, was to research better alternatives. What we didn’t realize was that we were already using one.

I am not trying to diminish the value of tools like Trello, ToDoIst or to that effect Jira or Rally. These are all tools we opted out of using because they just didn’t make sense in the context of what we were doing.

So what were we after? Well for one thing, we needed to be able to document high level organizational tasks that needed to be done against our fledgling company. Things like reading, setting up social media accounts, branding, configuring Slack integrations etc. So we started by making a project called “Organizational” and dumped all of these tasks there. As they got more numerous, we began to incorporate Asana’s use of Sections and broke them down in ways that made sense to us.

This effectively made Trello obsolete to us, because that was what we were using it for. I also petitioned for ToDoIst to be scrapped as a company thing so we managed to fit things that were previously in ToDoIst into Asana as well.

A few weeks in, we finally managed to agree on an idea and started doing some work around it. At this point, the organizational project no longer made sense, no, we needed one specifically for this project. So we made one. And the nice thing is, because of how Asana is structured, there is no reason for a section in one project to bear the same weight as a section in another one. So whereas in the Organizational project things were broken down by sections such as Administrative, Documentation, Integrations, in our actual project the section names were quite different, and perhaps more familiar: Backlog, Declared, In Testing and so forth.

So far so good, we’ve now effectively narrowed down to Asana, Evernote, and Slack. Evernote too seemed like it was a lot of clutter, and for the most part articles posted in Slack are well preserved but things like photos of hand drawn wires just seemed to make more sense in Evernote. Until we discovered we could also attach them at various levels to projects within Asana. Although we haven’t fully deprecated it, we’ve found that for our purposes, Asana keeps track of attachments in the forms of hyperlinks, google docs, and photos in a very structured and intuitive format that makes it very useful.

Other features also sold us on Asana, things such as tags being entities, much like in Twitter, so that when I inspect a tag I can see everything with that tag. I can break the project down by due dates, sections, tags, and a variety of other formats. I can assign tasks to users. This stuff is probably more standard in project management tools though.

The other feature we really came to like is this notion of a project status. Since we are in our early stages, we are meeting weekly, and one thing we like to take note of is how much we got done in a week. Classic scrum. What did we try to do, and did we get it done? Whereas we used to have to type up a template google doc every week, we were delighted to find that Asana has a built in feature that streamlines this process.

So once we are done and become either millionaires or failures what will we be able to do? Well, I will still be able to use Asana to pick up dev tasks as they come to me, but additionally I will be able to look at all the work we had done over the course of our project, when we had done it, and did it make sense there? Should we have spent so much time thinking about branding in week 3? Or did that make more sense in week 8? Time will tell for us.

There are a few additional perks to take note of, not the least of which is the fact that once in a while a unicorn will prance along the screen. It’s a little cheesy, but if you work in finance like myself, it’s the best form of validation you can hope for sometimes.

One last point to mention is that there were features we would have loved to see in Asana. Things like automatic ticketing (there isn’t a great way to do this yet). And while they don’t exist, I did send out an email to the development team and they seemed thrilled to take my feedback. I am happy to back their product and hope that they keep up the good work, and incorporate ticketing eventually…