Introduction

I. What is Asana? (I thought it related to yoga...)

Asana is the epicenter of our productivity at DoStuff and will be the epicenter of productivity for your DoXXX team (if it isn’t already). So what is it exactly? It’s not email or a calendar or a simple to-do list. It combines a bit of all of these tools as a comprehensive task management system. Most basically, with it you can:

• Assign yourself or a team member a task

• Set a due date for that task

• Communicate around that task

Check out Asana’s Guide: Basics to read their explanation.

​II. Why Asana?

There are many components, both minor and major, that contribute to maintaining and growing your business. You have a team of a few members who share a range of responsibilities regarding your DoXXX content, partner relationships, social media, and office stuff. Add to the mix random ideas that you want to capture, DoStuff needs, and new interns or hires to include. Your business will quickly become a complicated beast to tame.

Here’s Do512’s advice to new teams: “Take it from us, use Asana. Don’t not have a system to keep up with all of the [stuff] or you will never keep up with all of the [stuff]. Right now is only the beginning, it’s as easy as it will ever be for you.”

Asana uncomplicates the beast. By breaking down the various components of maintaining and growing your business into projects and tasks with projects, it creates a targeted to-do list. By way of due dates and priority-designation, it enables you to stay on top of what needs to get done when. By allowing you to assign tasks and comment around tasks, it facilitates communication in a more efficient way than e-mail.

Asana is the most effective tool we have found for Getting Things Done so that you can increase your productivity. Try it to believe it.

​III. How to Use It

This series of articles and tutorials will go into our specific recommendations for how you can make Asana work for you. Here is a general outline for how you will use it:

1. Content management: You will track and check-off all the routine and one-off tasks related to all the content on your site in a specific project.

2. Partner relationships: Every venue, media outlet, or promoter that is a potential partner or existing partner demands varying amounts of attention. By way of Asana, you will track the conversations that develop those relationships in a CRM project and the delivery of each partner relationship in a specific project.

3. Social media: A Tweet for this ticket Giveaway, a St. Patty’s Day list, a blog post on all the awesome new venues opening in your city... How can you keep track of it all? Easily enough in an Asana editorial calendar project and with specific tags (more on this exciting feature later) to sort through it .

4. Operations: A project with tasks related to internal maintenance such as bookkeeping and regular team meetings will enable you to keep on top of this stuff.

5. Ideas: Want to consider incorporating a new social media tool or have a unique idea for a contest? You’ll have a bucket to remind you of these strokes of genius when you are ready to address them or godawful ideas you want to remember never to have again.

6. Communication with DoStuff: We <3 Asana (and <3 Asana’s <3 feature). We will ask that you use it to communicate with us your ideas via our Do Stuff DoStuff project when you find an area on our site that could improve. We will also set up program related projects, such as our ACL festival flyaway, within your Team (more on this super structure to come) to communicate around delivery.

IV. Have we convinced you yet?

​If we haven’t, Asana bears systematically trying out to appreciate its utility. Our recommendations are based on what we have seen works best, but we want your feedback for what does not necessarily work for you. That way, we can improve our recommendations and even our own efficiency. ​