Asana Review – The Default for New Business and Focused Teams
For a growing amount of tasks of different types and from various processes you need a strong hierarchy and high flexibility. Asana Review
Asana (asana.com) is a highly recommended tool by many – if not a majority – of productivity gurus and consultants. So in this Asana review.
Who and where Asana can help the most?
– Small businesses
– Project teams \ departments
– Freelancers
– Home offices
Toolbox: Asana
In the productivity space, Asana is usually categorized under project management or task management. Lately, they started to use the category term ‘work management’. In Asana site they try to avoid all these categorizations and for a good reason:
Asana facilitates to organize and control almost any aspect in business and personal life.
The free (Lite) version is an excellent to-do list application. However, the premium version is one of the most powerful and successful tools in the productivity space. There is also an enterprise version with added management and admin capabilities.
To understand Asana pricing and billing, visit Asana pricing page and read the FAQ section.
This Asana review is about the premium plan.
What is Asana? Quick overview
Asana is a flexible cloud-based Management Center Tool. It is very well equipped with features for dynamically organizing and intuitively managing assignments and handy information.
Asana has a web app for working on desktops and laptops and mobile apps for Android and iOS devices.
The basic unit in Asana is a task. Each task in Asana is a small working environment where you specify a title, description, due date, assignee, followers, attachments, parameters from custom fields and more. A task is collaborative so all notes, remarks, and discussions related to the task can happen within the task.
Tasks can be arranged and organized in many different ways, so the structure of things to be done and used can fit almost any particular need. Asana is highly versatile; you can make it your own.
A task can belong to another task as a sub-task and to some projects in groups \ teams in a workspace. A user can participate in many workspaces as a member or as a guest.
Projects can be viewed in list mode, calendar mode, and timeline mode. Asana has a board view that is useful for specific purposes. Asana is not a Kanban app but has a Kanban feature.
The key features that make Asana powerful
Asana as a leading task management app has, of course, all the basic and advanced features you would expect: workspaces, teams, projects, discussions, task descriptions, due dates, reminders, assigning, sorting, filtering, search, etc..
Yet, some features give Asana the extra force to become a winner:
- A straightforward and intuitive user interface
- Close to perfect task anatomy
- Strong custom fields
- API
- Multi-projects tasks
- Guest users
- Smooth collaboration
- Comment-only projects
- Integrations with many useful third-party tools
This list of features as a whole defines the flexibility of Asana, which is the main argument for choosing Asana.
When to prefer Asana as the management center of your life?
A combination of large and growing task pile, of many types and from numerous processes (projects, clients, etc.) that you need to follow and track form various perspectives – this combination of needs requires a flexible and powerful tool. Asana is such, and it is cost-effective.
We recommend Asana as the default starting point for new business and focused teams.
Cornerstone content: Task Management Solution
Not perfect, but evolving
It is not that Asana has nothing in the MBF department, but as an evolving platform Asana is challenging issues and fixing problems regularly. When testing Asana consider that things you miss now are probably already on the agenda.
Asana Review: Conclusion
For small businesses, self-employed, home offices and freelancers Asana can be the central management system. Everything that is going on is represented in Asana.
For project and department teams Asana is the place to stay in focus and sync on processes and goals.
Asana has the hierarchy to support structured resolutions with the flexibility for customizations and exceptions. This is a powerful mixture of hallmarks. It takes time to utilize a task management solution that works exactly as you need and want and is ready for the unexpected. Asana has its learning curve as well. Yet, Asana is compelling to mistakes and re-thinking, thus trial and error is a good strategy.
Asana is a mature product, a leader in its segments, that keeps moving forward, so you can’t go wrong if you bet on it as your task management solution.
