Asana enables us to do more meaningful work asynchronously with a team spread across the world. Over the years of working on a large number of simultaneous projects, a growing number of people – we’ve developed a number of ground rules and etiquette surrounding how we keep things running smoothly, let’s dive in:
- Tasks should have an assignee – it is essential that this is properly updated. More on that procedure below in Handling Assignments in Asana.
- When you want to see what’s on your plate, go to My taasks. This will be everything that’s currently on your plate from all the projects & teams you’re a member of. As well as tasks that are not a part of a project (incl. those that you have created which are private to your area and your Asana account).
- Whenever updating a task assignment or posting a comment relating to the stage of the task changing, make sure you also actually move it to the relevant kanban stage.
Handling Assignments in Asana
If something is assigned to you, it means that according to our systems the ball is in your court – meaning that the todo is waiting for something from your end.
If you need to loop someone else in to get something done together on a particular task, assign the task to that person, notifying them in the thread.
If you are handing off, un-assign yourself so it is clear that the ball is no longer in your court and this is for them to handle on their own.
When complete with what needs to be completed on your end, if someone else is required to do something, remove yourself and then assign it to someone else (do not complete it and then re-assign it as this will require it to be re-opened).
BAD:
Todo assigned to Justin, Alex, and Vladan. All 3 working in it.
Not possible to know without opening who’s currently working on the task.
My stuff/My assignments section flooded with tasks that you are not actively working on and that do not expect your action yet
You get 5 updates, get stuck on the first 2, you lose the last 3, can’t know what’s waiting for you without investigating, because you have multiple tasks assigned in your name that don’t require your attention
GOOD:
Todo assigned to Justin. Justin assigns it to Vladan. Vladan assigns it to Alex. Alex assigns it to Justin.
Everyone knows exactly without opening the task who is currently on it
My stuff/My assignments section displays exactly what’s on your plate waiting for you
Even if you miss all 5 updates, you will know something is needed from you if the task is assigned to you.
Note: if you’re just requesting a second pair of eyes and not actually handing a todo off to someone, tagging them is fine. But if you are no longer working on something and waiting for something then it is important to un-assign it so that person knows it’s time for them to step in to move things forward.
Example #1 — The Content Team
Post for client needs to be written, and it sits without no assignee in clients BC queue.
- Vladan takes the post and assigns it to Naman so Naman can research the topic and write the outline.
- Naman completes that and needs Vladan to approve the outline so he updates the thread that the outline is completed, unassigns himself from the task, and assigns it to Vladan
- Vladan sees there’s a task assigned to him, gets in, approves, updates the thread, assigns it back to Naman.
- Naman completes the post, sends it for review to Vladan, notifies him in the thread, and assigns Vladan.
- Vladan approves the content, unassigns himself, assigns Justin to it for the second review, and updates the thread.
- Justin sees the task has been assigned to him, he completes it, removes himself, and assigns Alex to it.
And so on, you get the bigger picture.
With this system, Asana is going to be a lot easier place to handle everything, and efficiency will be improved as “Assigned to” won’t mean that someone is managing that task and being responsible for it, but it means that certain tasks require attention from that particular person.
Asana Commenting Convention
Whenever commenting on a todo, check the people subscribed and ensure that you are only notifying those that need to be made aware of the comment you’re posting.
Simply scroll to the bottom where you’d leave a comment and hit Add/remove people…
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And then ensure that only the relevant people are selected to reduce the number of notifications people get.