Are you too busy doing your tasks to explore all of Asana’s possible benefits? I suggest you read this article. This could be the motivation you need to test out some little features with huge potential gains for the efficiency and effectiveness of your team. In this article, we discuss some of Asana’s lesser-known features because we know that you probably don’t have many resources to explore it on your own.
Asana Features to Explore the Hidden Gems
Asana project management tool stands as a beacon of efficiency and collaboration in the dynamic landscape of project management. Here are some tiny yet mighty Asana features that can revolutionize your workflow.
Drag and Drop Widgets
Widgets can be added to your Asana desktop application by dragging and dropping them. This is one of the features that users overlook since they are unaware of its purpose to provide them with a better structured and clear picture of their tasks, projects, collaborators, notes, tasks that they have assigned to others, and their goals.
You can use this drag and drop widget feature on the home page of your Asana account. The home page will help us to see our weekly or monthly achievements; how many tasks we completed, including the number of people we collaborated with.
If you are a newly added member of your team, you might already have some widgets on your home page, and that is sometimes the reason that we think that we don’t need to add something. But if you want a more organized and clearer view of everything, you can click the “customized” button located in the upper right corner.
Once you click the “customized” button, you can now view some options that enable you to change your home background color. Below that option are the widgets. There are six (6) widgets available that you can use, including: My Priorities, Project, People, Private Notepad, Task I’ve assigned, and My Goals.
My Priorities: You can view all your tasks, overdue tasks, and completed tasks here in one place. You can also edit your task details in this widget.
Project: You can view all your projects here.
People: People who you collaborated with on your previous task will appear in this widget. You can invite your teammates and assign some tasks as well.
Private Notepad: You can write down and organize your notes and tasks here.
Tasks I’ve assigned: List of task you assigned to others.
My Goals: Make a list of your goals that you want to achieve. You can also add some goals directly here.
Multiple Task Select
You might not know this feature, but this is one of the simple and helpful features of Asana that you’ll enjoy using since it will help you save time in editing your task details or maybe if you are assigning some tasks too. With this, you can select multiple tasks and edit their information all at once.
Asana already enables you to move your tasks manually by grabbing one task and moving it downwards or upwards, while this one enables you to select multiple tasks. You’ll just need to click on one task, hold and slide it down or up, depending on which tasks you want to select all together. This feature is very efficient for managing your blog with Asana in a more organized way.
Once you select multiple tasks, a bar will appear at the bottom of your screen. Here are the options that you can use:
Move task between sections: You can move tasks between sections with this option, and it will help you organize your tasks. For example, if you select multiple tasks and select “Do today,” all the tasks you selected will be automatically moved to the section “Do today” on your board without leaving your task list area.
Edit project or sections: With this, it enables you to add your selected tasks to a certain project.
Copy task link: With just one click, the link to your selected tasks will be automatically copied to your clipboard.
Delete Tasks: It enables you to delete those selected tasks all at once with one click.
Three-dot option: If you click the three-dot icon besides the delete icon, you access more additional options to mark complete, set due date, reassign, add collaborators, mark as milestone, mark as approval, make dependent, and merge duplicate tasks.
@Mention
You and your team will be able to work more efficiently thanks to this Asana feature. Linking tasks, projects, status reports, messages, goals, and more has never been easier. The @ symbol appears in the task comment section and in the message. You can use the @ icon or the Shift+2 keyboard shortcut to manually encode.
Just mention someone’s name to catch their attention when you are giving them an update on a certain task. If you found an error in your team’s task and you want them to fix it, you can mention the task name. Your team can easily view the task and its details when they click the task name you mentioned. They can also notice the mentioned task since it is in blue text.
Example: @juanreyes (teammate name) or @Your Monday Task (task name)
Subtask
Asana subtasks are an excellent way to organize your task list and add more information about your task. It will assist you in having an organized view that will assist you to not get confused by too many tasks. It is like your checklist, and it divides work into small parts.
Did you know that you can turn a regular task into a subtask? Or convert a subtask to a regular task. If you haven’t tried this out yet in your Asana app, now is the time to do so.
Simply selecting your regular task and clicking on it will display its details. After the task information displays, you can select any regular task on your list and turn it into a subtask by grabbing and holding the task until you can drop it into the subtask slot. A blue line will appear, indicating that you can drop the task.
EXAMPLE:
First, I clicked the “Create a Newsletter for this month” regular task, then the task details showed up, and then I scrolled down till I saw the “Add subtask” button.
Next, I chose the “Make new articles” regular task to turn into a subtask under the “Create a Newsletter for this month” regular task.
Then, I drag the task, and an animated dragon graphic interchange format (GIF) will appear while I am dragging and holding the task till I reach the subtask area. When I reach the subtask area, a blue line appears that signals to me that I can drop the task in that area.
(If you put your arrow mouse on the left side of your task name, six dots will appear, and your arrow mouse will turn into a hand icon.)
Finally, I dropped the task. You can see in this image that the “Make New Article” task has become a subtask of the “Create a newsletter for this month” regular task.
If you want to turn a subtask into a main task, you can use the same steps. Just drag and hold the subtask back to your regular task list.
The benefit of this function is that it allows you to delegate some subtasks to your teammates.
It is possible to assign a subtask to oneself or to another person. If you assign it to yourself, it will display on your task list and serve as a reminder. If your list of tasks gets too long, you can remove your name as an assignee in your subtask.
When you assign a task to a specific team member, it will show up on their personal task list. Now you and your teams can get more done in less time. Dates and descriptions can be added to your subtask as well.
Record a Video
You can check this out and use it in the task description or task comment section. It enables you to record yourself if you wish to provide information and advice on other people’s work or explain your own to someone.
After selecting the record button, a menu will display in the right-hand corner of your screen. You can choose between “Screen,” “Yourself,” and “Both.” You have the option of using whichever camera and microphone setup you like during the recording.
Appreciations
Does your team or collaborators give their all to complete their assigned tasks, and does this satisfy you? Well, there’s an easy way to say “thanks” to them in Asana’s comment section for tasks. Sending your team members some adorable stickers to show your gratitude for a job well done is a great way to express your thoughts. With these, you can build trust within your team or organization, boost morale, ease tensions at work, and make everyone more productive overall.
Every new version of Asana includes fantastic new tools that will accelerate your team’s progress toward its goals. Stay tuned for many more fantastic improvements.
Now, go and try these little features on your Asana app! Uncover the joy of small features that make a big impact. If you are completely new to Asana we also suggest you go through our Asana beginner guide.
