Speaker 1: In this video I want to talk you through an approach that I use to better organize my projects in Asana. Reason being is that one of the common frustrations and areas of confusion I see working with clients when getting set up with Asana is this idea around how best do you set up your projects? What's the best way to set things up? And it's tricky because Asana gives us, it's such a blank canvas when you get started. It's a really good thing because we have so many options and so many different ways that you can set things up. So we've got lots of different options, but it does mean that finding the best way for you and your company and how you like to work might be a little bit tricky. And it's worth noting that finding the perfect solution may never happen. I find that my project setup is continually evolving and developing as I refine my work style, as I test and try new things. So don't worry too much about finding the perfect sweet spot, but certainly there are some things that you can do to be a bit more organized. And one of the most common areas of frustration I see is this, one of the most common problems I see is people creating lots and lots of projects on the left. They have lots and lots of projects going on. And when you have lots of projects, it can kind of contribute to this feeling of overwhelm because people just think, ah, I have so many projects. I just don't know where to go or what to do or how to find anything. So the overall objective that I try and get people to get towards is to minimize the total number of projects that you have to deal with, is to keep this list here on the left nice and fairly concise, make it easier to manage, because when you have so many projects on the go, it gets a bit tricky and it gets a bit disorganized. So that's what we're working towards today and what I want to guide you towards, which is to minimize the total number of projects. So the first piece of advice I give is with these projects on the left is to think of them as almost not like projects, because a lot of people, when you think of a project, you kind of think of like a temporary piece of work with a number of tasks, maybe like a marketing campaign or a product launch or a development sprint or something like that. And it's kind of got a sort of start and end date. And you definitely can use a project like that and you might have a number of these temporary projects on the go. But what I'd encourage you to think about is to actually organize those, what I'm calling temporary projects, those campaigns and things, into master projects, which I'm going to call areas of your business. So these projects on the left, the primary ones I'm dealing with, business, products, content, and sales and personal, these are sort of like departments of my business. These are the areas of my business that these projects will never come to a close. They'll never end. They don't have an end date. They're just constantly ongoing kind of departments of my business, areas of my business that I categorize tasks and mini projects into. So that's the first thing I'd get you to think about is what are the departments or areas of your business that you can group your tasks and your mini projects into? So for example, if I show you my business project, this is for general. You can see I've got like a planning section, analysis, systems, which is like my tools and automation and things that I have set up, e-commerce activities, website updates, email marketing, advertising, content marketing, administration. There are a number of sections here that I basically use to organize the different tasks for kind of all areas of my business. A lot of the tasks that I create pretty much go in here. And then I have a products project, which is for organizing the products that I'm working on and I'm using sections for the different products that I have and planning what tasks need to be completed for those products or updates that I'm making. And then I have a content project, which is where I plan out my content calendar. So I'm planning blog posts, videos, and things that I'm working on. And I'm using sections to organize these pieces of content by month. So I can see in chronological order what I'm working on. And I have a sales project. I won't click into it, but that's where I have like I'm managing clients that I'm working with and other sales revenue generating activities like affiliate marketing and sponsorships and so on. So these are the main areas of my business. I have some other kind of summary projects that I use, Kanban and 2017 goals. Have a look at my other videos around how I use summary projects and how these are used. But basically these summarize the key tasks from these kind of primary projects. So that's the first thing is think about the areas of your business. Now what you can do is think of tasks almost as like mini projects. So for example, if I click into the products project, I've created just an example one here. Let's say I want to write a copywriting e-book. This is like a fairly big project. I'm using the word project as like, you know, this is like a temporary project that I would be working on. I need to write an e-book. And so what I'm now doing is I'm actually using I'm treating this project as a task. So writing the book, here it is. It's a task. And one of the advantages of doing this is now I can summarize this task into one of my summary projects. So you can see here it's actually also residing in my Kanban board. So if I click Kanban, you can see here it is in the Kanban project. It's currently in progress. And so this sort of solves one of the common questions I hear about Asana, which is, is there a way to view all of my active projects or organize my projects? The short answer is no. Like apart from just viewing your projects on the left here, there isn't really a way to organize projects. But what you can do is, like I'm showing you here, basically demote a project, a temporary project that you're working on, like in this case the e-book, demote that to a task and then add that to an Asana project, in this case the Kanban board. And so now what I'm essentially doing is I'm looking at the projects, the temporary projects that I'm working on, like my copywriting book, some other experiment that I'm running here. I'm viewing those in my summary project. And so it's kind of a way of seeing what balls I have in the air. What is my kind of work in progress situation look like? So that's one of the nice things about demoting your projects to tasks, is that you can organize them using a method like this, like the Kanban approach, which I'm becoming a big fan of. The next piece of advice I have is to really take advantage of the hierarchy that Asana gives us. So obviously we have the products project. As I've said, this is like the area of your business or department. Then you've got the sections within that project. So in this case I'm using sections to categorize the different products. And now I have a task. Now as I said, the task represents like a mini project that I'm working on. So in this case I'm writing a copywriting e-book. And I've already added it to my Kanban kind of summary project. And now we're drilling down and using subtasks. And you can also see I'm using sections of subtasks to further dissect and plan this project. So just like if I was setting this up as a project, like an actual Asana project, I would have sections like these ones here and tasks. But by demoting the project to a task and having sections and subtasks like you can see here, I've achieved that goal that I mentioned earlier. I've minimized the total number of projects that I have on the left there. It makes it a lot easier and cleaner to manage. It makes maintaining your account that much easier. So really taking advantage of the hierarchy that Asana gives us here with these subtasks and sections. And as a reminder, you can create a section by just simply typing the name of your section and then adding a semicolon. And you can click and you can drag and move tasks between these sections if you want. So that's my third real piece of advice is to really take advantage of the hierarchy that Asana has given us here. So really using these subtasks and sections to plan out those mini projects. Now finally, it's worth mentioning as well, when setting up your projects, do you go with a list or do you go with a board? In general, I recommend using the list approach like you can see right here. The main reasons being is that you can see a lot more information on the page because the tasks are a bit smaller and more condensed. So you can just kind of see more of the project. Also because when you, if I'm working in a board like this one, if I click on a task, the task pane takes up the entire screen. And now I can't see my project. In fact, if I want to go back to the project and select another task, I have to kind of click out of that task and then select the next one. And it sounds a little bit trivial. But personally, I find that when working in a list, because you can click on a task and it expands on the right, I prefer this layout because it means I can still see my task and I'm not covering up the rest of my project. And I can click on another task over here to quickly view that without having to close the last one. So in general, I do recommend the list view. It also means as well, one final point is that you can take advantage of the custom fields a little bit more. So if I show you my content project, I've got a custom field here that shows me the status of each post. And in the list view, I can quickly change and update that field, which is something that's just not possible in the board view. In saying that, though, boards definitely have their place. Like you can see, I'm using the Kanban board. It's great for, I think, like summarizing tasks like this, if you want to use like a Kanban methodology. And if you're moving tasks through a workflow and you want to drag things around, the boards are fantastic. So if you're working in like a Kanban style or like Scrum or Agile planning, I think the boards are great. If you're doing some brainstorming as well, because the cards display like any attachments, you can see this task has some attached images. It's actually shown on the card. So if you're brainstorming and you've got lots of visual components in your tasks, it's nice to have that in the board layout. So boards definitely have their place. I really like them and it's a great addition to Asana. But in general, I recommend sticking to the list view. So there you are. I hope this has been useful to you and has given you some inspiration for how you can better set up your projects. As I said, really the key here is about minimizing the total projects you have on the left to just make things easier to maintain and to help kind of address that feeling of overwhelm that I know a lot of newer Asana users can feel. So yeah, taking advantage of these sections and thinking of your projects as areas of your business are kind of the key takeaways here. Hope you enjoyed this video. Thanks very much for watching. If you need more help with Asana, then feel free to book a completely free introductory call with me today. I can learn about the specifics of how you need help with Asana, how you're currently using it, and together we can audit your account and train your team. Head on over to poolminers.com slash Asana.