Speaker 1: It's 2024 now, so it's time for an updated tutorial on how to sign up for and use and optimize the free version of Asana. It's no secret that I love Asana. It has been a game changer for my business and my clients' businesses, and it has completely transformed the way that we work. It's user-friendly and really allows for you to jump right in and start using it. Of course, there are ways to dig deeper and optimize your systems within Asana, but really anyone can begin pretty easily. And if you need any help optimizing your systems and getting more out of the free version, I would love to help support you further. Go to samanthacasbrick.com slash Asana and choose from done-for-you options or do-it-yourself options. So let's go, and I will show you how to get started. All right, so you first want to head to asana.com, which I have already navigated to, and then you can click one of these big Get Started buttons. And then you can either sign up with your Google account or your email. Now, here is a pro tip, is to sign up with your company.com email, just like it says here. If you have one, if you are a business with a business domain name, you're going to want to sign up with that domain name email address, if you have that set up. Asana is just going to provide you with more layers of organization within your Asana account, as opposed to signing up with a Gmail or Hotmail account, for example. All right, so you're going to click in here and I am just going to use my demo, samanthacasbrick.com. Don't email me at this email, I do not check it. Okay, we are going to sign up and then it will ask you to verify your email address. So once you're in your email account, you will open the email from Asana. It will just say, action required, reserve your Asana account. And then you will click this verify email address button and it will take you back to Asana. All right, and then you will just go through and fill out your information. All right, and you can upload your photo now, which I highly recommend that you do. And then you will continue adding your photo, especially if you are working with people, just adds a personal touch to it. Every task that is assigned to you, you will see your photo beside it. And same with your team members. It's really, it's really beneficial because it feels like you're working with actual humans. So I recommend setting this up anyway, just because then you see your own face and just, otherwise it's just a circle with your initials in it. So this just, it just adds some personalization to it. So I highly recommend setting up your photo right away. And then you are going to continue filling all of this out. So you will select manager. Well, you won't, but I do. And then you can select what kind of work that you do. You can fill out what your main objective with Asana is. Asana will recommend certain templates and things to you based on the information that you provide them here. So go ahead and fill all of these out. If you're not sure how you're going to use Asana yet, you can just click you're not sure yet. And then Asana is going to ask you to set up your first project, just like this. You can continue with this just to get that first project set up. I will show you other ways to set up projects, but let's just go ahead and play along with Asana for now. So let's say that we are working on a course. So we will continue. And then what are a few tasks you have to do with that course? Well, we need to create an outline, we need to record videos, and we need to edit videos, right? I mean, there's like a million more tasks to do when it comes to creating a course, but we'll just start there. So then Asana asks how you would like these to be grouped. You'll learn more as you go how you like things to be organized. So for now, we'll just stick with the defaults that Asana suggests. And then it gives you the option of organizing your new project into a list format, a board format, timeline, or a calendar. Timeline is actually part of the paid plan. So if you are not planning on paying for Asana in the future, you probably don't want to start using this and get used to it. It does give you a trial of the paid version though, so it does give you the option to select that for now. But again, if you're not planning on paying for Asana in the future, if you're going to stick with the free version, at least for the foreseeable future, then you're going to want to click either list, board, or calendar. So for now, we will just select list and continue. And then here, it gives you the option to invite any team members to your Asana account right off the bat, but we are not going to do that for now. But if you did want to, you would just enter their email address here and then click continue. And then you're all set. We can download the desktop app, which I highly recommend. That's what I use on a day-to-day basis. You can also get it on your phone, iOS, and Android. All right, so we're going to skip this for now. Then it will just open the browser version to get you started if you didn't download any of the apps. Here, it tells you that you are going to start your 30-day trial, as I was saying earlier. So it does let you experiment with the paid features. So if you are planning on just staying with the free version, I would just avoid those because otherwise you might miss them when they're gone. Because you can really truly get a lot out of the free version of Asana if you optimize it the way that I teach. So let's just click let's get started. And then see, here is my image. So you'll see it automatically assigned these to me. If you go to your profile, this is just a summary. You can see your information. So in order to, you can set an out of office, you can edit your profile. So we can just go ahead and start editing your profile. You can also access this through the settings button. So you can either choose this option or click settings and it'll take you to the same page. So you'll see your profile is here. So you can upload your new photo if you want to change your photo or if you want to add your photo. You can update any of your information here. You can add your job title, your pronouns, your department or team. This works really well if you are working on a team so everyone is aware of everyone's roles. And then you can add a little bit about yourself, tell people anything that they need to know that will help them collaborate with you in Asana. Like Asana, for example, adds the times that this person is working. So you can add something like that in there or you can just give any information that will help people collaborate with you in Asana. You can also set an out of office if you are going to be away and then it will show people that you are away for those days, which comes really in handy if someone tries to assign you a task on a day away, Asana will notify them that you are away that day. So if they forget or whatever, then they will have that reminder in Asana. All right, and then the next tab over is notifications. So for notifications, Asana loves to send a whole bunch of notifications to your email. I highly recommend turning most of them off if not all of them off. I actually typically work with all of these turned off because I have made it a habit to go into Asana and check the inbox and my tasks every single day. So I do not need reminders sent to my email. However, if you do, if you are still creating the habit, then I would recommend just checking these ones off and leaving the daily summaries on, and then it will email your email address up here at all of the daily summaries telling you about your tasks and due dates, anything you missed, things like that. And that will really help you get in the habit of checking Asana through that reminder. But once you are out of the habit, I recommend unchecking this if you feel like you don't need it anymore. You can also go through these other notifications and decide what you would like to set here. Project notifications, this is for specific projects. This is your default. You can actually change each of these within each separate project as well, but this is the default settings. So if you want to be told about status updates, all status updates within the project, all messages happening within the project and all tasks added within the project. If you have a large team, a lot of people, a lot of moving parts, a lot of different projects going on, this can get quite excessive and really clutter your Asana inbox. So I recommend turning actually all of these off unless it's a really important project that you wanna make sure that you are aware of everything going on within that project. But if you have a smaller team and just a few projects, then if you want to keep these on, then you can and it shouldn't get too cluttered. But if it is becoming a problem, just know that this option is here because the last thing we want is for Asana to take up our time, right? Asana is here to save us time and to make us work more efficiently. So let's make sure that we are aware of this and we can control those notifications. All right, so next is email forwarding. You can go ahead and send emails to Asana by emailing this email here. You can also install an integration into Gmail and then you can directly send your emails and they will appear as a task in Asana. That's a really handy option if you have trouble remembering to deal with emails or if there's things you need to, if there's task-related things from emails, if you turn them into a task in Asana, it makes it much more easier to remember and to make sure that they get done. The account tab, this is just all of your account information. I won't go through this. I think it's pretty self-explanatory. You can change your password and all of those things. Your display settings, you can play around with these. You can change it from black to gray, things like that. Last thing I'll show you is the hacks. I think everyone needs to turn on this extra delight option. This sends unicorns and narwhals flying across your screen as you complete tasks and it's just, it makes it really fun. So I really recommend turning that on. These other two are optional. Well, I mean, they're all optional, but really not. You need to turn extra delight on it. It will just brighten your day more and make Asana more fun. It'll make more fun to complete your work. Let's just leave these two for now and I'll go through and show you about Asana once you start using Asana, you can go into these and adjust them as needed if you choose to turn those on. All right, so let's reload to apply these changes. Okay, so the next thing to know about Asana is this sidebar here. So your home just provides kind of a summary of things. You can customize this and you can move things around and play around with them. You can get rid of certain boxes, whatever you want to appear here. So I'll go over my tasks and inbox in a moment, but first we will go through the rest of the sidebar. So the insights option, these actually all three of these are only available in the paid versions of Asana. So we will just minimize this and drag and drop it to the bottom and pretend it doesn't exist for the purposes of this video. So Asana is organized in teams and projects. So your teams are going to hold your projects. So you'll see it says Samantha's first team, and then it has this project that we created here for the course that we're working on. So you will have a list of projects under each team, depending how many categories you have in your business. So the way that small businesses tend to use Asana is by using teams as categories, not as actual like teams of your business, because chances are you just have one team and it's probably on the smaller side as an online business owner. So use this option as more of like the categories of your business. So things like you can have your business central, where you would store all of your business information, your operations, things like that. And then you could have your content calendar as a team, and you could have any projects that you are currently developing, like work in progress projects, things like that. And then underneath the teams, you will have your projects. So if you have your projects under development or whatever you wanna call that, then your course would go under there, right? Because you are currently working on that course. And then once that course is complete, maybe it would move to a new team that houses your products that have actually been published and are out in the world, so that you can plan for updates and things like, and ongoing tasks and things like that. So this section is optional. You can also just minimize it and move it to the bottom as well, if you would like. But it does give you an option to see projects that you have most recently been working on. So you can see your most recent, you can sort them alphabetically, or your top projects. It just shows a few, a list of them. But you can also create your own list like this. So if we were to minimize this, for example, and move it to the bottom, then you can organize your projects by clicking into the project here. And if you want, you can click the star here, and this will show your starred ones. So that is how I prefer to organize my Asana because then it is fully under my control and it's just the ones that I really want that quick access to. You can always access all others through here. I will quickly just show you in my own account. So here is my account, and you can see that here are my starred ones. So these are the ones that are most important to me currently, and I can always change these as I see fit. But these are the ones I am really going to most often at the moment. So these are the ones that I have starred. If you see, I have my projects down here, just as I said. So if I expand that, then it actually does have those same ones here, but it also has way more. And I just like to keep it a shorter and more concise list. So let's just toggle that back down. And as you can see, I have all my teams here, so I can go through and access my projects right here as well. So it's up to you how you would prefer to use this. I, as I said, just like to have a shorter, more concise list rather than that very long list, and it's under my control. And then if I want to access any other projects, then they are all available right here as well. If you're unsure how to organize your whole business in Asana so that you have control over how you do things and to really systemize everything, be sure to head to samanthacasbrick.com slash Asana and either book an Asana VIP setup, where I come in and set up your custom systems and templates for you, or sign up for my course, Asana Essentials, where I guide you on setting it all up yourself. My systems will change the game for your business, creating efficient work management and easing your stress and saving you time, seriously. So now when we go into a project like we have here, if you didn't add team members earlier, you can do that later here. So within each project and within each team, you have the option of inviting teammates. So what you can do is just click here to add members and then you add them by their email, and then you can send them a message. You can choose how to add them either as an admin with full access to change settings, modify or delete the project, or as an editor, they can add, edit, and delete anything in the project. This commander one is actually for the paid version. So don't choose that because it will change when you switch over to the free version and your trial ends. Okay, so that is how you add a team member. Just a quick overview of that. So now I mentioned that the different layers are teams and then projects. So under project is tasks. So these are the tasks that we added earlier when we were setting up our account. Underneath tasks are subtasks. So under this subtask, or under this task, you see this example subtask and you can click in here and it gives you all the options that the task has as well. And you can even add a sub-subtask if you need. So in order to assign tasks, you can either click here or you can do it right from the list view, but I'll just click in here to show you and, well, I'll show you with a new task actually. Let's just create a new task. And we can go ahead and assign it to myself. We can select a due date of tomorrow. We can choose which project it goes under if you actually want it under a different project or you want it under an additional project. These are not applicable. They're not available in the free version, so we will ignore those for now. And then you can add any description here, anything that helps whoever is completing the task to complete it. You can add links, you can add attachments, you can add images, videos, whatever helps the person doing the task to do the task. You can add right within here. And then again, you can add a subtask here and you can assign this to your team member or whoever, and you can also select a due date for it here. All right, and so you can also do those things from this view as well. So here is another task. So you can assign the task by clicking here. You can assign the due date by clicking here. And just really quickly to show you the different views. So we did choose that list option, but at any time you can also go to board option and board view and see all of your tasks. It keeps all of your data as you select the different types of views. And then you can also see it as a calendar view as well. Okay, so one more thing within the tasks at the bottom, there is this comment option here. So if you're collaborating on a task and you want to comment something like, hey, I need this information. Oops, could I type today? I need this information. Oh my goodness, I can't. I need this info for whatever. And you can tag someone. So I can tag my assistant, for example, and then she will get notified that I need this information in order to continue with this task. This commenting feature is really handy. It makes collaborating with your team so much easier because you can comment right within a task that you are working on. So there's no confusion what you're talking about. Things don't get mixed up and muddled. Like if you're just talking on Slack, for example, it's hard to keep track of what you're talking about with this option here. You are commenting specifically about this task within this task. So there is zero confusion. It's really, really helpful when it comes to teamwork. All right, and so when you are adding comments here, these will appear in your inbox. So I will just show you the inbox for a moment. So the inbox is where anything that you need to be notified about, you will get in here. So you don't have to go through searching through all of the projects to see what is going on with this task, what is going on with that task. If you are involved as a collaborator on the task in any way, if you assigned it to someone, if they tagged you, if they commented with your tag, you will get notified in the inbox. So if you are managing a team or if you are part of a team, then this will be kind of like your email except better because it's a task specific and you're right within Asana so you can just jump right in and get to work. And the really nice thing about these is when they pop up, I'll just show you really quickly in mine. So as you can see, here is my inbox. These are my archives. I've already gone through these, but here is my assistant sending me a little appreciation sticker. So if I click on this notification here in my inbox, then I can see what she said and I can respond right within here. I can change anything in the task right within here. I don't have to exit my inbox in order to deal with this. And then once I am done with that and I have dealt with whatever it is that I need to deal with when it comes to that task, then I can archive it. And I highly recommend you get into the habit of archiving each task that you have dealt with, otherwise you will get a cluttered inbox and no one wants that. So here, for example, let's say this was a task that I had dealt with, then I will click this archive option and it will go away into my archive. The next important section that you need to be checking every day. So you're going to be checking your inbox every day and you're going to be checking your My Tasks every day. So this My Tasks is everything that you are responsible for. All of the tasks that are assigned to you will appear here. So now you can also view this as a list board or calendar view. I personally prefer the calendar view because as you can see, you can view your week laid out like this and see all the tasks that are assigned to you for that day and for that week, as opposed to the list, which just, it doesn't work for my brain the same way. I need to see it in a calendar view so that I can see, okay, here's my tasks for today. Here's my tasks for tomorrow. They're all color coded and beautiful. And it just helps my brain to see it all laid out like that. But you can choose which option works best for you. You can also view it as a board and you can obviously organize these in any way that you wish. These are just the defaults here. And then also in order to see your team members, task progress, you can go to the home option and then scroll to the bottom and then your team members will appear here. I'll show you in mine. All right, so you'll see that my team members appear here. So here is my assistant. And if I click on here, I can see all of the projects, all of the tasks that she is working on and all of the progress there. It also shows me updates in my inbox as I showed you previously, anything that she changes, if she changes the due date, if she marks something as complete, that shows up in your inbox as well. So that is how you can keep track of anything that your team is working on. And then just a tip too, when it comes to tracking your project progress, you can click on the project here, you can click the overview option and you can see just the overview here. You can update things like this, like you can set a due date for an actual project and you can set the status and see everything that everybody is working on in here. You can see messages right here for this specific project just to help you as you are getting used to using Asana, if this is helpful for you. For a thorough tutorial on how to create and set up a project step-by-step from start to finish, click here to watch this video next. Thank you so much for watching this video. I hope it was helpful for you. I will see you next week. Bye.