with Cam Petty

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What to expect from this episode:

• 5:26 – We All Need A Task Management System
• 10:48 – Asana App Benefits
• 14:08 – Using Asana As A Team
• 18:25 – Pros & Cons & Non-Negoitables For Your Software(s)
• 20:52 – Send Us Your Podcast Requests

Let’s dive into this week’s episode all about how to juggle owning a business while being a mom, friend, and spouse!

Learning how to prioritize tasks

When you’re working by yourself it can be challenging to prioritize what is the most important. After all, you are the only one doing everything. It can be too easy to get distracted or be less productive than you’d like because you have an overwhelming list. Even if your list isn’t super long, you might have tasks in such different categories that choosing where to start is a task in itself.

“Having a task management system isn’t only beneficial for those who have an entire team to oversee, they’re great for anyone trying to accomplish specific goals.”

Cam Petty, The Render Podcast

The first reason we’re going to share why Asana is so beneficial to our team is that you can set deadlines according to projects and allow the system to manage them for you. Additionally, you can prioritize these tasks in low, medium, or high priority. If you need to focus on one area of your business, with or without a team, Asana can help you view just that area… instead of allowing easy distractions by looking at everything

Know Your Preferred View

With Asana, there are several different ways you can view all of your tasks. You can look at them on a board in a weekly view, through a calendar, and as a checklist. What’s cool and convenient about the different views here is that each of our team members has a different preference for managing their tasks and they can choose whichever view suits them best.

For some, it can be overwhelming to see everything at once on the checklist. On the other, viewing things on a calendar can look like a lot too to some team members. Finding your preference and sticking to it is going to allow you to move through tasks more efficiently by eliminating distractions or undesirable feelings.

Collaborating As A Team On Asana

Like many businesses, our company has a lot of moving parts for every project we work on. Projects also aren’t typically associated with a single team. Instead, there is often overlap or passing of batons throughout a project in order to see it through completion.

We also have team members who aren’t in the office each day that can touch base on the statuses of projects. Maybe like your company, we have team members who work in the office, remotely, maybe even hybrid. We even just brought on a team member that lives in an entirely different state! Asana helps us all work together and stay on top of project deadlines in an orderly fashion.

Teams, Boards, & Associated Tasks

You can create different teams on Asana and assign tasks specifically within just those teams. So helpful. As you might remember from our team series, we have 5 different teams at Render: sales, creative, operations, floral, and leadership. Your company may have more or less but breaking tasks up and assigning them in these specific areas have helped us follow our processes and complete successful projects.

Another cool thing in doing this is even if you or your team members prefer to only use the list view on Asana, tasks assigned to a team member will still populate on their personal boards, as long as they are tagged. Team members can assign tasks, due dates, and more on team boards, and team members can interact with the tasks however they prefer.

Hiding & Archiving on Asana

Another great feature about Asana is its ability to hide projects and tasks. This can be helpful for a leadership team or for any projects or boards that only certain people need to or would interact with. Consider onboarding new employees. There may be information current team members don’t need to see as your work through the hiring process when it comes to confidentiality. When a new team member is brought on, you don’t want to overwhelm them with the many ways you use the software. Therefore, you might consider hiding tasks not pertaining to their position so it’s not as overwhelming.

Something else we really like is that you can archive old boards for recurring events/projects. think about it, if your office completes the same tasks in some sort of cycle or on an annual basis. Instead of rewriting these tasks each cycle and setting up each project in the system, you could just unarchive the project or board when it’s time to interact with it again. Wildly helpful!!

Pros, Cons, and Non-Negotiables

As you decide if Asana, another software, or your notebook is the best fit for your team and your company workload, we recommend making a pros & cons list for each option. In addition to your pros and cons, we want to highlight the importance of non-negotiables (having due dates, the ability to access the software by multiple different team members, etc.). These are going to be the things that it wouldn’t make sense for you to purchase the software without specific abilities.

Say to yourself, ‘This software has to possess “x” feature(s) before I consider introducing it to my company and team.’

Cam Petty, The Render Podcast

Should you decide to purchase software or stick to your pen and paper, be sure you are managing your tasks in some capacity and with the proper organization. Asana has been incredibly helpful and the main factor attributing to our team’s success. We want that for you and your business too!

Until next time on the Render Podcast!

Joyfully,

TJ White | Content Manager