How to organise your workload using Asana

Manage your working day, and organise your schedule

Welcome to Finding Simple & Calm, a place where I share my journey to living a slower life when everything about my life says otherwise. I write about the realities of simple living, motherhood, and being neurodivergent. I’m also passionate about creative small businesses, and I love writing about and teaching methods on how to reduce the overwhelm, spend less time doing the tedious business-y stuff, and more time being creative. I hope you can join me?

Short:

Use Asana to organise your work, your day to day tasks, and your important dates.

Asana is an online platform where you can input all of your workload and see an overall look at what your day/ week/ month/ year looks like.

I use Asana to plan my daily workload, but I also use it for my personal life too. I write everything in my Asana and I could not live without it. Dentist appointments, meetings, the children’s sports day, bank holidays, invoice days, email reminders - you name it, it’s in my Asana.

Maybe Asana could help to get everything out of your head and into one, simple, organised space? There’s also an app for your phone so you always have Asana with you!

Long:

If you’ve never heard of Asana, let me explain what it is…

Asana is an online management platform.

It’s a space to put all of your tasks/ projects/ goals and to-do lists.

There are many features, including some only available through their paid tier, but I find the free version to be more than enough for a sole trader/ small business.

How to use Asana:

I use Asana daily, for everything! You can use it via the website (asana.com), or you can download the app from the App Store if you have a Mac. Both work exactly the same, so whatever works for you.

There’s also an app for your iPhone/ iPad too.

Once you’ve signed up and created your account, you’ll be prompted to create a workspace. This is your overall space where you can input your tasks, create different Projects, and see your calendar.

You can have many Projects, and my clients have one for each area of their business - instagram, website, emails, book launch etc.

I personally don’t need different Projects, so I just input my tasks directly into my workspace under My Tasks.

Here’s an example of how Asana looks on the Home Page:

You can edit the Home page to add or remove different widgets. I don’t tend to use the Home page, but it’s there if you wish to.

On the left hand side of Asana you’ll see the navigation bar:

The only features I use here are the My Tasks section, but I’ve created a Project so you can see where it’d be (Sophie’s Business).

Here’s an example of My Tasks list:

You can have them in a list format, like the image above, but I prefer to use Asana like a diary/ daily calendar like this:

I find this way so much easier because I can see what I have upcoming for the week/ month, I can plan what I’m doing with my day, and I enjoy ticking each task off when I’ve completed it.

You can also view it via the Boards tab, like this:

In the Boards tab, you can have different sections (columns) for you to organise your tasks. Your tasks will automatically go to your ‘Recently assigned’ section when you create them, but you can just drag and drop them to other sections as you need to.

The sections can be renamed, deleted or moved along easily by dragging and dropping.

Adding Tasks:

To add a task you simply click + Add task on the day/ date you’d like to add a task to.

From there you can put the title, a description (not always necessary, but helpful if you have any notes to add to a task), and assign it a ‘due date’.

You can also set it up to renew a task each week/ month or custom time. This is useful if you always have coaching on a Monday morning, or Yoga every Friday afternoon.

What tasks can you add?

I add both my personal tasks and my business tasks. That’s because I like having everything in one place, and I don’t like flitting from one thing to another. But, if you think it’d be helpful to keep business and personal separate, you absolutely can. Creating different Projects for business and personal would be the easiest way.

Here’s an example of my actual Asana (names covered for privacy):

You can see I have my client work, my childcare hours, my children’s football clubs, and bits and bobs that need doing. My weeks vary, but this is an average week for me.

I open my Asana every morning to check what’s going on that day. I put everything in there including school half term dates, birthdays and dentist appointments.

I’d love to know what you’re currently using to organise your workload. Are you using anything? Would you be willing to give Asana a try? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Speak soon,

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