What is Asana?
Asana is a web and mobile application designed to manage project productivity. Facebook co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, and software engineer, Justin Rosenstein, saw a need to coordinate teams more effectively inside the social network’s operations, and from this, Asana was born.

Whether you want to organize a project, communicate with your team, or simply just write down thoughts and ideas, Asana does the job. Think of it as your digital to-do-list. The beauty of this platform is that everything can all be kept in one place, so instead of scouring email threads or slack conversations for a certain quote or attachment, you can just keep it neatly organized within Asana. It reduces the need for group meetings and email threads, ultimately saving valuable time for a business. It’s also great for staff members who work remotely.

You can create a variety of different projects within Asana, either for yourself or for your team. The clean user interface alone will almost instantly make you feel more productive and in control. So, are you ready to get started? Follow the beginner’s guide below to get started with your first project on Asana.

1. Creating a Project
By selecting the “Create a Project” button shown in the red highlighted box below, you can create your very first project. Projects can be as big or small as possible, but if you put them in Asana, they’re much more likely to be completed.

2. Organizing Your Projects With Tasks
Once you’ve identified the goal and named the project, you’re ready to start organizing the workflow. According to advancesystemsinc.com, a management software group, projects are often complex processes with a wide variety of different tasks that need to be completed in order to reach the overall goal. To organize these projects you’ve created in Asana, you can create ‘tasks’ (shown in the red highlighted box below) and ‘subtasks’.

So for example, if the project is ‘Website Design’, the tasks could be as follows:

4. Organizing Your Tasks
You can assign different tasks to different team members. So, for example, the visual design task might be assigned to the graphic designer, whilst the development and programming might be assigned to the web developer. You can add descriptions to your tasks, due dates, and even color codes to organize them. You can also add ‘followers’ to these tasks, for people who may not be actively working on the project, but might still want to track the progress.

6. Creating a Conversation
After organizing the project, you may still need to communicate in further detail about the task at hand. This is where the comment thread comes in (shown in the red highlighted box below). It’s very similar to commenting on a Facebook post – you can tag other people, post links, and even ‘heart’ each other’s comments.

7. Tracking Progress
You can mark tasks as ‘complete’ by simply clicking on the tick beside each task (shown in the red highlighted box below). The tick will highlight green when you hover over it. This allows for all project members and followers to track progress and see the current status of the project.

The goal of your project will be achieved once all tasks have been marked as complete. Now watch your productivity levels shoot through the roof as you work your way through your Asana projects.

For a few ways to make Asana a little more fun, check out these hacks (they include cats and flying unicorns!)