Why Asana Matters
In the struggle to live in the present, the future and the past are walls. They cage us in. As we hurl ourselves against them, bouncing moment to moment from thoughts about what someday might be or once could have been, our ability to engage, to let go – to embrace the time we’ve been granted with every ounce of our being – begins to dwindle.
As we battle to hold onto it, we are up against forces that want to tear it away, that have been meticulously crafted to interrupt us, to barge in and bang on things until our attention breaks. Little hurricanes of distraction, they form in the cheery audio emissions of new messages entering our inbox. They gather strength in chat windows and casual games and reach the height of their force in the rhythms of a news cycle that never sleeps. When they land on our psyches, they douse our minds with dopamine, batter our concentration and wreak havoc on any semblance of inner peace.
The result is that we spend so much time and attention on everything but right now that we let our dreams, our goals, our grandest aspirations, slide on by.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Our brains are like magical 8-10 pound gifts from the universe – bits of exploded stars reassembled by apparently chaotic processes into consciousness and the capabilities to experience and feel, think and do. We can certainly make more of these gifts than most of us are prone to believe.
Enter Asana
At the most basic level, an Asana is a sitting yoga position – or pose – that can be maintained without physical strain or discomfort for a theoretically endless period of time.
The ideal of an Asana pose is to become so in tune with the present that your mind “merges with the endlessness of space” and enters deep focus. This focus is noiseless: there are no fears or fantasies about the future, no nagging regrets or pleasant nostaligias about the past. In it, you navigate around distractions the way a river navigates past large rocks. You flow.
It is no coincidence that Asana is the word Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein chose as their company’s brand.
Asana’s vision is to become the conduit between groups of people and the work they seek to get done. This vision has been baked into the core of Asana’s technology: from the real-time web framework that make interactions feel instantaneous to the frictionless interface for capturing, ordering and structuring tasks, every aspect of Asana’s product has been designed to elicit flow – to enable individuals and teams to focus their collective intentions (and attentions) towards common goals and push inexorably towards these goals until they have been achieved.
The future of team communication
Teams are like brains: emergent masses of specialized components whose wholes are (or can be) far greater than the sum of their parts. Executing at their maximum potential, they can do great things. But when the tools they rely on to communicate and operate in unison are pushed beyond capacity, their cohesion fragments. In the best case, they hold together, mushing on despite the odds. In the worst, they collapse before reaching their potential and break apart.
Email is currently the centerpiece of team communication and collaboration, but it is no longer up to the task. Over the years, its failings have sent us into the arms of spreadsheets, intranets, shared document repositories, wikis and even social status update apps. But in the end, these tools, too, fall short: Every time we try to get out, email pulls us back in.
And so we go on, foisting our requirements on a fifty year old messaging protocol that was never built to handle them, contorting ourselves to wedge into its impossible constraints. This is not sense; it is madness. But what choices have we had?
Asana is here to give us back the choice. The team spent over a year designing a new foundational framework for group communication, built from scratch with 21st century web technology to meet 21st century demands. Like email, Asana’s underpinnings are abstract enough to address a huge range of needs, but unlike email, Asana is adaptable enough to do all of them right.
The Asana ideal, writ large
The traditional Asana ideal is about discovering our center, about silencing the noise of past and future and embracing the present so deeply that the siren calls of distraction fall away, freeing us to focus on what matters, after all.
The Asana product is about mapping the Asana ideal to the web and using it to transform the entire world.
This is a huge ambition. Thankfully, Asana has Asana to help get it right.
(Note: I used to work at Asana in Content Marketing, but I don’t own any shares.)
