Article summary
In the past, I’ve tried out many different tools for managing tasks and projects. There’s never been one that really stood out to me as superior or one I enjoyed using all that much. But I recently gave Asana a try and was very surprised by how much I liked it.
At its heart, Asana is a task tracking application with the same base set of features that you find in similar products: due dates, reminder emails, collaboration and sharing, subtasks, etc. But what I really like about Asana is the various options for viewing tasks. These options create a huge amount of versatility and flexibility, so you can work in the way that makes the most sense for you.
Task List
The most basic view is the Task List:
This is good if you want to use Asana as a simple task tracker. By default, every task has a Due Date field and an Assignee field; however, you can also add custom fields as needed.
Task Board
On Task Board, tasks are arranged into a Kanban board where each section becomes a column:
You can easily drag cards from column to column as the status of a task changes. When you click on a card, you’re given a task details window where you can write a detailed description of the task (with a pretty decent text editor) and even upload documents to attach to it.
Task Timeline
Finally, there’s the Task Timeline view that allows you to see how all of your tasks fit together over time:
I find this view to be really useful for project planning. For any given task, you can set a start date and an end date; this lets you easily see when tasks occur in time and which other tasks they overlap with. Tasks can be marked as milestones, which changes the visualization and adds a vertical line through it.
Hybrid Functionality
One final thing that I really like about Asana is that any given task can be added to multiple projects. This means that you can have one project setup as your timeline and another set up as a Kanban board, but you can have a subset of items shared between the two!
I know I’m late to the party with Asana as it’s been a product for over a decade now, but I still wanted to give it a shout out. It offers a lot more functionality than what I included here, so if you’re intrigued, I highly recommend you give it a try!