I love trying new applications to improve productivity, and was pleasantly surprised when I discovered Asana.com.
Asana was developed to address the frustration of spending too much time doing “work about work.”
The founders, Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, developed this web application to “empower humanity to do great things.”
It works wonderfully for both individual entrepreneurs as well as teams to improve their productivity.
How Asana benefits a small business owner
A small business owner can easily create a project, break it down into tasks and subtasks to be accomplished, and assign these tasks and subtasks to his/her staff. It is a great way to make sure that all staff members are optimally engaged in reaching the goals of the organisation, because you can see at a glance who is working on what, who has too much on their plate, and who can be given more responsibilities.
It is also a great tracking tool of what has been accomplished during a set time period.
An example of how a virtual assistant could use Asana
A virtual assistant can open a Project for every client, and list the tasks, subtasks, and due dates of all that should be accomplished for each client. Every time a new task is received via email or other means, it can be added to the task list for that client. It is easy to see at a glance what needs to be done on a daily basis, as well as for making sure that none of the balls the virtual assistant is juggling fall on the ground. It is also simple to report on what has been accomplished, as the lists and the dates tasks were accomplished are already in an easy-to-use format.
I also like the ability to create repeat tasks for things that have to be done monthly, weekly, or at other preset intervals. Never again do you have to try to remember what needs to be done – it is all there at your fingertips.
If you have people that you outsource work to, you can invite them to specific projects and assign tasks to them as well as track their progress.
Asana can be used for personal projects too
It is not necessary to separate your work life and personal life. You can put all your projects and tasks into one place, so that remembering where you put certain information is never a problem again.
Asana is really a simple, intuitive online productivity tool. I can really recommend it.