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Posted by Ken
Apr 26, 2014 at 04:30 AM
Well, CRIMPing got the better of me, and I just had to give Asana a try in light of my recent trial of Trello. There are things that I really like about Trello, and I can see using it for certain types of work, but like almost all software, it was missing some things that would be useful to me, and I wanted to see what my other options were before having to settle. I spent q bit of time learning about Asana before setting up an account, and now that I have opened an account, I am finding out there there are a lot of features that can be utilized in a lot of different ways. :)
Asana has many levels to handle information. You have discrete workspaces which can have projects that have tasks with sub tasks. I do not like that you cannot have a view of all of the work spaces at once, but my work may be discrete enough that this may not be a big issue. Since this is designed for collaboration, I like that you can assign or unassign tasks within the projects to yourself. This is one way of capturing many tasks within many projects, but not having them all appear when you see what is assigned to you. I suspect that I might use this feature as a type of filter, although ti could just as easily have been handled with tags (which the program offers).
Three features that I really appreciate are the ability to assign a task to multiple projects (in the same work space, but unfortunately, you cannot move a task from one workspace to another), their keeping subtasks independent from their parents (which allows them to have their own dates and assignments, but the dates do not seem to appear on the calendar view), and the ability to create sections within projects. This last feature is quite helpful, as it can reflect a work stage, or some other discrete identifier in the project. Yes, you can do something similar with tags, but for me, this is much easier to use as you can look at a glance without needing to filter. And speaking of filters, it appears that they offer customized default views, but I am not certain how many different customized views can be saved.
I do not believe that this is any nirvana for task managers, and I still need to test the mobile apps, but I am quite impressed at the tools that it offers. I hope that it is reasonably stable and bug free, and am looking forward to further trials.
—Ken