5 Asana Strategies For A Productive Start To The New Year For Your Team

As 2023 comes to an end, you are likely deep in the thick of finalizing budgets, conducting year-end reviews, and maybe even planning that much-anticipated company holiday party. Amidst all these activities, it's crucial to carve out time to prepare your team for a productive start to the new year.

Asana, our work management tool of choice, has been instrumental in helping numerous teams achieve clarity on responsibilities, gain control over their time, and focus on impactful work.

Here are five ways you can use Asana to ensure your team hits the ground running as the new year unfolds.

1. Maximize the Goals Feature in Asana for Organizational Alignment

If you haven't brought your organizational and departmental goals into your work management tool yet, now is the perfect time to start. Integrating goals into Asana provides clear visibility for everyone on the team. This transparency ensures that all team members understand how their work contributes to broader objectives, which promotes a sense of purpose and direction. It also allows for easy tracking of progress and holds everyone accountable for their commitments. 

Goals in Asana can be directly linked to specific projects and tasks. This feature demonstrates the practical steps needed to achieve your goals and helps in tracking the progress at a granular level.

I recently delivered a detailed tutorial on using Asana for strategic planning and goal setting during the inaugural Asanathon 2023. Check it out to learn how to centralize your organizational goals and keep your team aligned. 👇

2. Centralize Your SOPs in Asana for Efficient Knowledge Management

Establishing a knowledge base in Asana for all your company's Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) is a strategic move to increase your operational efficiency. Not only does this reduce time wasted searching for information, but it also minimizes interruptions and dependencies. 

Sort Your SOPs into Two Main Asana Projects. Think of one project in Asana as your go-to for all the business process SOPs. These are your guidelines on how to perform various tasks in your company. Then, have another project for all the technical SOPs that explain how to use the different tools and software your team uses. That way, you facilitate easy access and clear categorization. Your team can quickly navigate to the right project depending on their needs, whether they're looking for guidance on a specific process or needing help with a particular tool.

3. Make Asana Your Central Hub for Communication and Collaboration

Juggling different platforms for task-related communication can fragment your team's focus, leading to important details getting lost in the shuffle. That's why streamlining all task-related communications in Asana is a smart move. To start, consider these key steps:

• Link Discussions to Tasks: Ensure every conversation in Asana is connected to a specific task for context and relevance.

• Integrate Email and Messaging Tools: Integrate email and business messaging tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams with Asana for unified communication.

• Set Clear Communication Guidelines: Define the specific roles of different communication tools (email, Asana, Slack/Teams) to avoid confusion and streamline operations.

• Optimize Asana for Collaboration: Use Asana's features like comments, @mentions, and status updates to keep team communication clear and focused within the platform.

For more detailed steps on how to centralize communication in Asana, check out this comprehensive guide.

4. Manage Your Team’s Capacity with Universal Workloads

One key element to maintaining productivity is to ensure that your team isn't edging towards burnout. Burnout is a notorious productivity killer, and one of the key ways to prevent it is by having clear visibility over your team's workload. With Asana's Universal Workloads feature, you can monitor and manage the distribution of tasks effectively to make sure that workloads are balanced and your team can operate at its best without the risk of burnout. Here’s how you get a quick start:

1. Consolidate Projects in a Portfolio: Start by putting all the projects your team is working on into one portfolio in Asana. This gives you insight into their workload across different projects and provides a comprehensive view of who’s doing what.

2. Assign Time Estimates to Tasks: Ensure that all tasks have time estimates (like hours or percentages). This step is crucial for understanding your team's capacity and balancing workloads effectively.

3. Regularly Evaluate Workloads: At the beginning of each week, review the workload distribution. Keep an eye on it throughout the week to ensure no one is overloaded and to allocate resources efficiently. 

4. Involve Your Team in the Process: Make workload management a regular practice and involve your team in the process. This empowers them to take ownership of their work and stay aware of their capacity to communicate any concerns proactively.

5. Automate More Workflows in Asana

Finally, embracing Asana's workflow automation can significantly improve your team's overall productivity. With proper and balanced application of the Rules feature, you save your team a ton of time and keep everyone focused on the work that truly matters. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Start Small. If you're new to Asana Rules, start with simple automations. This could include automatically creating subtasks, assigning tasks to team members or sending deadline reminders.

• Find the Right Balance. While automation can boost your team’s productivity, it's important to find the right balance. Overdoing it can complicate things, so focus on automating really repetitive and time-consuming tasks. 

• Customize Workflows to Your Needs. If you already apply Rules to your workflows, see if you could streamline your processes even more. Study your current workflows and look for opportunities to automate tasks that don’t require human interaction.

• Integration with Other Tools. Experiment with integrating Asana with other tools your team uses regularly. This integration streamlines workflows across different platforms, ensuring tasks move smoothly from one stage to the next. As we mentioned earlier, you can connect Asana with communication tools like Slack or email platforms to automatically create tasks from messages or emails.

These are just a few impactful strategies to set your team up for success in the new year. By centralizing communication, effectively managing workloads, embracing automation, and integrating with other tools, you enable your team to make the most of their time and energy and fully harness the power of Asana. 

If you’re looking for a little help setting up Asana for the new year or building Goals and optimized workflows on the platform, make sure to book a call with me. As Asana partners, we’ve helped many teams like yours adapt Asana to their needs and get the most out of its powerful features.