Unless you perhaps register somewhere on the autism spectrum and/or every moment of your life is being painstakingly managed for you, you are probably struggling more than ever to juggle a seemingly endless barrage of things you want and need to do on any given day. And multiply that by at least a few times if you happen to fall anywhere on the ADhD continuum!
While no tool can offer a perfect solution for keeping organized, I have tried quite a few over the years and the best I’ve found for me to-date is Asana — which is 100% free, if you happen to be working alone or in a fairly small team!
Despite having been recently designed, though, navigating Asana can still be a bit unintuitive for the unfamiliar, so I decided to share a few techniques I use, in hopes that you’ll find some utility in them!
Only assign high-priority tasks to individuals, assign everything else by Project
I highly recommend assigning everything that’s not an immediately pressing task by Project and tags, and not assigning a task to a person (including yourself), unless it’s something that needs to be acted on within the next few days. Otherwise, you’ll end up with an endless, overwhelming list of to-dos that will sabotage that crucial sense of progress, accomplishment and clarity that is so essential to the process of organizing and getting things done. This allows you keep your project management separate from your task management, going back & forth between the Project and Team Member views.
Only use ‘Headings’ for milestone-markers, within Projects, not as task-containers!
As you may know, ending the name of a given task with a colon turns it into a ‘heading’, but when you drag to reorder these, they move independently of any tasks that fall under these ‘headings’, which brings me to my last tip:
Keep every complex task organized with its own sub-tasks, but only go one level deep
If you weren’t aware, you can (and should!) ‘nest’ tasks within other tasks in Asana to group smaller tasks within overarching objectives. I recommend doing it this way because, unlike Headings (see above), it is easy to grab and rearrange them by their ‘parent’ task in any task list. The reason I suggest only ‘nesting’ them only one level deep is because navigating any deeper than one level through Asana can be a bit of a nightmare, and it’s almost impossible not to lose sub-tasks if they are nested any more than one-level in!
NOTE: In order to effectively use this method, it is also essential to keep the task description empty for any ‘parent’ tasks (objectives), because Asana lists sub-tasks below this, and adding descriptions more than a line or two long will push the sub-tasks down out of view!
I hope you found these techniques to be beneficial — Please drop me a message and/or leave a comment either way! Cheers.