Let me walk you through how to use Asana in this tutorial, you’ll get a demo of how it works, how to set it up and workflows to use with your team and to manage your task and projects.
🕒Timestamps🕒
00:00 Start
2:20 Navigating asana
3:06 Asana workspaces
4:13 Asana projects
6:27 How I use Asana with my team (Kanban workflow)
10:42 Using Asana list
11:11 Asana Calendar view
13:12 Using projects
14:52 Asana inbox (feed of activity)
15:25 My task
17:20 questions
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How to use Asana App – Walkthrough Demo and Tutorial – Video Transcript
And welcome to the live stream whether you are joining live with me now, or if you are catching us on the replay. In today’s video, I’m going to be walking you through how to use Asana. One of my favourite project management tools. I use it actively every day with my team.
And I use it to help me manage all the videos that I produced, particularly during vlogmas and during video challenges that I do so that everyone kind of knows what they’re actually doing. I’m going to walk you through how to use Asana, how to navigate it because it’s a little bit overwhelming, but once someone shows you it’s really easy.
And I can also, I’m also going to show you just, you know, different ways to use it. Whether you want to use it to keep yourself organised, whether you want to use it to help manage a content schedule or just your life in general, I’m going to show you all the ways.
I’m really pumped to be here presenting to you today. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I hope you build your business using video on social media with ease.
Now, whether you are live with us now, or if you’re watching us on the replay, if you have any questions, please drop them in the chat or in the comment section, and I’ll do my best to answer them. And if needed, we’ll create another video to address it if necessary.
Without further ado, let’s go over to my computer now, and I’m going to walk you through Asana, how to understand it, how to use it. And I’m going to show you like real-world examples of me and how I use it with my team as well. Let’s go over to my computer now. Let’s see there. I’m Just going to move myself because I’m kind of
covering stuff. All right.
This is a look inside Asana. Now people love Asana for many reasons. They have free plans and they’ve got a paid plan as well. And to be honest, I’ve always used the free plan.
It’s been more than enough for all of my needs and my needs with my team as well, multiple people as well. They’ve got some really cool features on the paid plan, but it is paid and we love free. I’m going to show you all of the features that you can use on the actual free plan.
Let me walk you through how to navigate Asana first. ‘Cause I think, you know, when you first get it, it’s kind of a little bit confusing. After you’ve either created an Asana account and logged in, or maybe you’ve been given access to someone’s workspace, your Asana should look a little bit like this, right.
And in a Asana, you know, this may be closed, so you’re kind of like, where is everything? Note, that in the top left here, there’s this little hamburger. I’m going to turn off these retro bars because they’re covering the screen. There’s this hamburger and you’ve got this left-hand side panel here.
And in the top right-hand corner where it’s got your little profile picture, here is where you can access all of your workspaces. Now, what is a workspace? This is one workspace and think of it this way.
Within this workspace, I can create, projects and within the projects I have my task and in this workspace, it’s kind of like a house, right? This house can be just for me and I can create another workspace where I can share it with me and my graphic designer.
And I can create another workspace and share that with my video editor and my graphic designer. And, you know, we have different workspaces and it’s only visible to the people within that workspace.
That means that you can have, you know, if you’ve got some private content and you don’t want your other people to see it, you can create a separate workspace and keep it in there. Really, really handy thing to do is to create workspaces.
And it’s all accessible from the top right-hand corner here. All you would do is go to more and click create new workspace. And this will create this space, which you can then add projects to. Then what you do after you’ve created a workspace is you can create a project.
And here’s an example of a project, right? With a project, what you do is you click on this plus icon here, and then you can either use a project template, a blank one, or import one, we’re going to go use the template. And the beauty of projects is that, you know, they’ve got all of these different plans and they’ve got all of these different pre-made layouts that you can use, or you can start from a blank one.
And with Asana, you can either create a project as a Kanban board, which I will show you example of my one, or you can create it as a list layout. I love Kanban boards because I love the visual element of them, but this allows you to kind of really, you know, adapt it to what your needs are and to keep the communications all in one place.
It’s really easy to create the project. We’re going to go with blank project, we’re going to name this let’s call it videos. And you can set the privacy of it to be just, you know, a particular project members or just yourself. You can choose between a Kanban board or a list or a calendar one on the free plan.
And then you simply click on create project. And like that you kind of start to have the, you know, the ability to then manage yourself. This is just a crash course of, you know, workspaces projects, how it kind of all looks and choosing between a list or Kanban board.
Now within your workspace, you can invite people, right? By clicking on invite people, here’s where you can add someone. All you need to do is have their email address, and this will send them an invite. And they’ll create an account and be able to log in.
The beauty of Asana for me is that it gets us off email. I get a lot of emails I’m signed onto a lot of lists Sephora, Mecca Maxima, all the makeup brands, all the clothing lines and so when it comes to the important stuff, like what my team are doing and when my team needs to communicate with me, I don’t want it to get lost within all of the Sephora and the makeup emails that I get on a daily basis.
The beauty of Asana is that we’ve got this system and within this system, everything can be kept in one place. That was a crash course in Asana. Let me show you a real-world example of my Asana and me using it with my team. This is a look at my board, and this is a board that I currently have with my team. And I’ve set it up as a Kanban board.
We go through this particular workflow and this is what works for me, right? I have all of these workflows. When I have ideas or things that I want to work on with my team, I’ll put it in the column for backlog, and I’ll also put templates.
There are certain tasks that my team and I do every week, such as when I release a video, I’m going to click on this. Now I do a certain, a certain number of things that are the same for each task. I’ll embed it to my blog.
We’ll create Canva pins, we’ll add it to Tailwind, which is a Pinterest scheduler. These are all the same thing. I’ve created, created it as a card here as a task. And what that allows me to do is every time I have it, instead of rewriting it each time I can just duplicate it.
That saves me a bit of time. I’ve got all the things that I have, you know, in preparation, ready to go. And once the activity, or once the task is ready to go, I’ll move it into ready to start. Right? For example, I’ve got this create iPhone transcript, and I’ve got the task here.
I’ve got the subtask as a checklist of what I need done, and then I can assign it to someone. I’ve assigned it to Kristina there. The way that we work with the workflow in my team is I’ll move it into, ready to start and assign it to someone.
Once that person has received it, what happens is I’ve assigned it, then they’ll get an email, right? And they’ll get the email and then they’ll move the card into, in progress. And they’ll work on it. If we have any communications that we need, let me remove myself so that I’m not completely covering.
If we have any communications that we need, it all happens within Asana. That way, if there’s things I need to ask them or things they need to ask me, we can talk to each other here. We can add a note here and add a comment.
And then people on this card or people this ticket will get a notification. And when they respond, we’ll have a whole, you know, we can see the whole trail of it here. It’s all in this one ticket or this one card, and we’re not getting lost within 15 email that are fighting between my Sephora and my makeup emails as well.
I can see everything happening. All the communication happens here. And the other thing that I can do is I can also attach images. I can add links to all of my Google drive folders here as well.
Everything literally is contained within this card. And what, what I’ve kind of trained my team to do is once they’ve completed the task, they’ll move it into ready for review. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff. As you can see here, which is ready for review, and these are tasks that I’ve given my team.
Once they’ve completed the things and it’s ready for me to check, they’ll put it here. And then I know when I go into this every day, that these are the things that I need to look at. I will have a look at it, I’ll go and, you know, check the tasks that they’ve done.
If there’s anything that they need to tell me, I’ll check if there’s any communications within the subtask like, you know, there’s a link here for me to review as well. And if I have any issues, I would leave a comment.
Otherwise, I move it into good to go. And then they’d complete it. That’s how I kind of, let’s not X, this is live. I don’t, it’s not actually good to go yet. I haven’t reviewed it. This is how I kind of really work with my team.
And as you can see this particular card, this is a video I did recently, and I was able to add, you know, the thumbnail images, you know, links to everything all within this one place. Me and my team, we’re not like scrambling, or where did she put that?
Where did she add that it’s all within one place. And that makes communication so, so, so much easier, so, so much easier. This is one way that we use it. We use it as a Kanban board. And as you can see, like once everything is done, it goes in the done column and just, it makes everything easy because it helps us keep a track of everything.
I love the Kanban board format because I’m a really visual person, but you can also structure it so that you can see things in a list view. You can switch it between board and list. I’m going to click lists now. I don’t love the list view because I prefer to see it visually.
And I prefer to see things in columns, as opposed to in lists like this. But this is what it looks like if you switch to a list view. You have all the same tasks that you created but they’re in these lists sections, and then you can see who it’s assigned to, and you can also assign dates to it as well.
That’s what it looks like. If you add dates to things you can see them in the calendar view. You can see there’s one thing here that happens every Monday, but with the calendar view, it’s also really handy because you can use this to plan things and you can create your task directly here.
Let’s say that I want a task to happen on Christmas Eve. I would click on it. I’d write, let’s say I have a vlogmas video and like that it’s created the task for me. It’s due that date. I can go in, I can assign it to someone.
And then I can add all the communications and the sub-tasks there as well. That’s how easy it is to kind of have a view of, you know, all of your projects and tasks.
And even though I’ve got multiple people on this, like I use it in the board format, ’cause that’s better for me. They can use it board format, if it’s easy for them to switch to the list view, then they can switch to that. I believe we all use it in the board format. I don’t know, but yeah, I really love it in the sense that it just keeps everything all in one place.
The other thing, you know, I think to talk a bit about is, you know, in terms of the calendar view, it’s a great tool to have to help you with your planning, right? You can easily see, you know, you’ve got access to a calendar.
You can choose to have weekends on or off, and it just allows you to plan. You can plot out, you know, the days that you have a video that you want to drop. Let’s say video, drop, and then you can see, you know, that it’s due from the calendar view and you can write all the tasks that you have upcoming and you can see them as, you know, they’re coming up.
You can check this all the time. It really depends on how you want to work and kind of, you know, how you want to make it all. I really love Asana because they give you the flexibility of managing all of your projects within one place.
I have within Asana, I’ve got one project for the weekly tasks that happens with my videos. After I do a live stream, after I release of video, I get the video transcribed. I have Pinterest images created for it. It gets embedded to my blog and we do a bunch of SEO.
I have one project specifically for that. I’ve got another, Oh, it looks a bit empty right now, I’ve got another project with my video editor and I, we’ve got a couple more but I haven’t created the tickets, but same thing. Once I’m ready for her to pick up a video I’ll create a task, so it could be, you know, a particular video here.
I create all of the elements and the sub-tasks are the things I need her to do. She’d pick it up and she’d move it along to get it done. I’ve also got one, which is all of the design jobs that I have active with the designer as well. And it’s just, as I said, it’s a simple way of being able to see all of the projects that you have going on and to see it in kind of a visual way.
And this is how I keep organised with my team. I use a combination of Asana with my team. And personally, I also use notion as a tool. I don’t use notion with my team because I struggled a little bit with the notifications in notion.
I don’t know if they’ve gotten better since we tried it, but we weren’t getting the email notifications every time a job was moved or task was moved into another column, which I found really frustrating because it meant that we didn’t know unless we manually went in and it created more work for us.
That’s why I really love Asana. You get lots of emails when people move things. If you go to the inbox section here, you can see that, you know, it gives you a feed of everything that’s happened and you can see it, you know, Kristina’s moved this into, in progress.
I can see that Kristina’s giving me all this information here and links here. You can see all of the activity that’s happening within your workspace if you wanted to scan it. That makes it really, really good.
Like I love this as well. I also scan this in the morning when I open up the app because activity happens overnight. And yeah, so that’s a beautiful way. The other thing is you can also check my tasks so if there’s anything assigned to me or anything that I need to do, it will appear in my task.
For my team members, if I’ve assigned it to them, they all have a my task as well. And that this will be, you know, where they can see it in this view, otherwise they can access it from the project boards here. That is kind of like a crash course in how to use Asana.
I hope that you found it really useful because when I kind of was looking for a project management tool, there was a couple of criteria that I had, so I needed for it to be, let’s go back to me for a second. I wanted it to be free.
I was like, I pay so many subscriptions. I just want something that’s free. Asana has a free and paid plan, as I mentioned. And the free plan is more than enough. You get up to 15 people on the free plan, which is if you’ve got 15 people on your team,
well done. And, anyway, you can do it with Asana as well. The other thing that I, I really needed from project management tool was that I needed it to be visual. That’s why I prefer to use the Kanban style, like the board style so we can move it into workflows so I can see where things are at.
Cause I’m a visual person like that. If it’s just lists, it doesn’t work as well with me, I really want to see visual. Those were the two things that I wanted. Thirdly, I needed it to be really easy to use because I add, you know, people to my team.
Sometimes I have temporary contractors who come on board to help me with stuff here and there. And it needed to be a really low learning curve so that they could grasp it quickly and not spend all this time learning software and just getting there.
And we can just create all the tickets for them to start working on. That basically is a crash course in how to use Asana. I had questions about how to use it. Hopefully that addresses it all. I’m going to go quickly to the comments now.
Hey Paul, great to see you here. Jade Starr love your support as usual. Thanks for being here. Okay. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Jade Starr says, ‘It’s an absolutely a good evening. I finally got to apply to the YouTube partner program 10 minutes ago.’ Jade, that’s exciting.
I hope you get approved. Ooh, that’s so exciting. I really love Jade Starr’s channels. Check it out. I love just listening to, I don’t actually create music. I’m not a musician, but I love this. I love, I love Jane. I love Jane. That’s all
I can say. Ah, let’s see. Let’s see what else we got. Jade Starr says, ‘Great demo’. I’m glad that you found it really useful. Now Paul says, ‘How long have you been using Asana for and what are the watch outs you found?’ I’ve probably been using Asana on and off for a good six, seven years now, to be honest.
They’ve been around for a while. I think, they’ve definitely evolved. When they first started, it was so ugly. As I said, I’m a visual person, I’m a creative, you know, the way it looks is important to me in terms of software and the user interface.
And when I first came out, it was just like, Oh, this is hideous. I don’t want to use this, but they’ve, they’ve done quite a bit of work to make it look better. You know, it’s much more aesthetically pleasing now than it, than it was when they first came out.
They’ve definitely come a long way. I also love that they’ve moved to giving us access to boards. They didn’t have that when I first used it in the beginning, it was just lists. And I was just like, it just felt like an Excel spreadsheet. But now with the Kanban board, it’s kind of, you know, coming to life.
The other thing that I like with the boards and the Kanban boards is that you can add images and they show up. For me, I’m a visual person. I like to see colour, and that makes a huge, huge difference.
That essentially wraps up today’s live stream crash course on Asana. You know, if you are looking for a project management system, if you’re looking for like a task management system for yourself, or one use with your team and you’re not kind of sure, you know, give Asana a go, the free plan is phenomenal.
It does a great job and it’s really, really flexible. Hopefully, it does, you know, helps you as it has helped me. Now, if you found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already for more software tutorials, live stream tutorials, social media training and where we have a lot of fun as well.
And make sure you also grab a copy of my Social Media Checklist. I show you how to get up and running on all of the major social media platforms. You can start leveraging the power of social to grow your business with ease.
That’s a wrap, amazing people! Thank you for being here tonight. I will see you in the next live stream. Bye for now.
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