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As you may know already, I am absolutely obsessed with the tool Asana because of what it can do for you in your business and your life. It allows you to turn your business into a well-oiled machine, which means more time, space, and profit for you! To improve the way you are using Asana, today I’m sharing 9 features you might not be using.

If you're new here, hi, I'm Louise! I'm an Asana expert and I've helped thousands of entrepreneurs organize their business. If you'd like more help with this, grab my free Asana roadmap here 📄

Week View & Unscheduled Tasks 🗓

For the most part, I am working from the “My Task” monthly calendar view because it creates a colour coded calendar of all of your tasks, and then you can just hover over each task to mark them complete. I love that.

However, what you can also do is you can go to the top and you can switch this from monthly view to week view to get that focused view of just your weekly tasks, which is really helpful for when you just want that focused view of your week.

Plus, if you go up here to “unscheduled”, you can click on that and you'll see all the tasks that you haven't actually assigned a due date to, and all you have to do is grab it and drop it on the day that you want do that task for it to schedule the task into your calendar. This is a really easy way for you to quickly schedule any task that you may have missed!

Appreciations 💛

The next feature is really helpful for when you are building a team and you want to make sure that everyone actually adopts Asana and is checking in regularly.

So my little hack for you is to use the appreciations feature. So for example, here is a task that I've assigned to my team member, Taylor:

So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to come down here and I'm going click this star icon right here:

It's going to open up all these little gifts:

Now, it seems like a really small thing, but I swear it makes a big difference!

What I'm going to do is that when I see that she's completed a task, I'm going to click one of those, and it's going to show that I have showed my appreciation.

The team member gets notified and they know therefore, that you can see all of their work, you can see what's getting done and that it's really important that they are actually using this tool and keeping it up to date.

So it's a really simple, yet impactful feature. It's fun, it's motivating, and it helps get new team members used to being in Asana.

Team Calendar View 👥

The organizational structure in Asana is that you have teams and then you have projects underneath, and that is how you separate and organize your work.

Now, when you click on a project, you can click “calendar” and you can see a calendar view of those tasks. However, often what people want is they want to be able to see all of their tasks across all the different projects. Unfortunately, you can't do this for your entire Asana, but you can do it for each individual team!

So if you click on your team name, you will see calendar at the top, and that is then going to give you that full calendar of all tasks across all these different projects:

I find that most people aren't using this, so hopefully that is helpful!

Saving Default View 👀

Next is saving your default view in Asana.

Right now in this example project, I can see tasks that I've already completed and I don't really need to see that. So I'm gonna go up to “filter” and I'm going to click “Incomplete tasks”. Perfect, this will show me just incomplete tasks.

Then I can also choose between: list view, board view, or calendar view.

For each individual project, choose which view you want that project to automatically open in. So, for example, let's say that you wanted the list view with the filter of incomplete tasks to be my default. You're first going to go up to these three little dots next to list:

Click on that and click “set as default”.

Then, you're going to click “filter” and “complete tasks”, and then you're going go over here and click this little save icon, and select “save for everyone”:

Now, if you exit this project and you go into a different one, and then come back into it, you're going to see that that filter and list view is saved. So this is really convenient! Go ahead and apply that for all of your different projects.

New Description Features 📄

Next, Asana has recently added some new features.

If you click on a task and then you go into the description, then if you hit the slash key (“/”), you'll see that you now have a ton of different options for what you can add into the description.

So, for example, you can add in a table to display your information:

I find that I'm using this description area a lot more because I can now just easily embed things. For example, let's say that you wanted to do a video, you can click on “video”, paste in a YouTube video, click “embed”, and then you can refer to that video right in the description.

Custom Fields ✍️

The next feature requires you to upgrade to premium (but it's so convenient that I think you might want to), and that is the ability to add custom fields.

On the free plan, you can have: assignee, due date, and tags, but if you want to add more, you need to upgrade to premium. Adding custom fields is why here I can have “content type” and “content topic”:

To add this, you click “customize”, “add custom field”, and then you'll see that you have all these different options for the type of custom field you can add:

So, I'm using this to give myself even more information about what that thing is and keep an even more detailed record.

I'm finding this really useful and I can create most spreadsheets now within Asana.

So, for example, I added search volume monthly to this SEO board:

I have a spot for some inspo over here (for reels and ad ideas), and I put the inspo link right under the custom field. Then, this just links out to the TikTok video I'm talking about. Then, I have notes on top performing content.

I've also been using this for budgeting and tracking different expenses. So as you can see, I have my list of items, the cost, and then it's going to automatically calculate the sum for you:

Obviously there's so much that you can do with this, but basically the world of custom fields can be unlocked!

Dependencies 🔁

The next feature is a premium feature that allows you to show how tasks are connected.

So, for example, let's say we have “write out objectives” and “create PDF” as tasks, but in order for me to complete this task, “create PDF”, my team member Niamh first has to complete this task (“write out objectives”). So what I'm going to do is I'm going click on this task (“write out objectives”), then go to “add dependencies”, and I'm going to show that the other task is blocked out by this particular task. Doing this basically links your task together and it shows that I can't complete the second task (“create PDF”) until Niamh's task of “write out objectives” has been completed.

That's why it switches over to an hourglass icon, like this:

Then, once she completes her task, I'm going to get notified that I can now get started on mine.

And let's say you need to change needs due date, you can go over to “timelines”, click on her task, and let's say she can only do it Friday, for example, then I will move it there and it's going to move my task as well so that I actually have time to complete it!

Track Your Time ⏰

The next feature requires you to upgrade to business, but it is a pretty cool feature. If you click on a task in Asana, you can now track your time right within the task itself!

You can click here to add your estimated time:

This can be really helpful for seeing like how long are things actually taking me. So let's say we're gonna estimate 45 minutes, then I'm just going to type that in and then I'm going to click “start timer” when it's time for me to actually work on this task.

And I find the power, like the accountability, of the timer really helps with getting stuff done.

Then you'll that adds a timer to the bottom of your asana. So you would go off, do that task and then when you're done, you're going to come back in, you're going to click this stop button under “actual time”, and that's going to display the actual time that it took you.

Personally, I love the accountability of the timer, and it also helps you identify areas of your business that are total time sucks and that you should really be outsourcing.

Rules ⚡️

The next feature is also on the business plan, but it is very cool, and that is rules!

Rules are basically automations in Asana.

I'm going demo to demo this now (click here to watch me demo a rule example).

This example is an automation that we've set up based on moving content along from idea to posted. I have some Instagram content ideas that we have now in one section, but because I have rules set up once I pick up this task and I move it from the “idea” section to the “create” section, it's going to automatically add a task that is assigned to me to create the actual reel or post. So I’m going to go ahead and do that.

Then, I'm going to come in here and I'm going to move this to the “edit” section. In this case, again, we have another rule in place that once it gets moved to this section to add another subtask.

This time it's going to go over to my team member, Taylor. So let's say that she's completed her task, now she's gonna move it over to the “post” section, and that's going to let her know to share this out and to share it to Instagram and Pinterest (the task).

So this is just an example, but imagine how this could apply to your business where there are different team members or different steps involved, and all of the ways you could implement rules.

If you click on “customized”, and then you go down to “rules”, you'll see these rules in place, and it's very simple. I’m basically just saying that when a task is moved to a section, I want you to create different subtask.

So if you click “add rule”, you'll see all the different examples that they have:

You can also just click “create custom rule” and get started creating your own custom automations:

I'm all about efficiency and I think there is a lot that you could do with this one!

So those are the features I recommend giving a try!

Let me know (send me a message!) which one you are most excited about using.

If you like this video, please let me know by giving it a thumbs up on Youtube, leave a comment and don't forget to grab your free Asana roadmap and I'll see you real soon with another tutorial!