Our new collaboration experiment with Asana

Collaborating across different sides of the Atlantic is difficult. Although Bojan and I have been doing it for nearly two years, granting us some improved understanding of each other’s working style and little foibles, the geography between us can sometimes represent a big hurdle in our bid to get things done.

So how do we stay successful? It’s part perseverance, part patience, part ability to adapt. We keep experimenting with our ways of working; exploring opportunities to improve. Some of these efforts are more successful than others, but the process itself rejuvenates us.

We’ve got a lot planned for this year; ambitious plans for all aspects of our lives. There are more people getting involved in Alpha Efficiency and we’re exploring ways of getting the magazine and other great content out to an ever-wider audience. That’s why it felt like a good time to change up our approach to collaborating – we needed to find a new tool.

Enter Asana

I’ve been interested in trying Asana for a while, and I’ve finally managed to persuade Bojan to jump on board. He’s pretty embedded in his Omnifocus setup, which works great for him but isn’t geared up for a virtual team. So we’ve agreed to experiment with what Asana has to offer.

Asana has some great features to offer us:

• A powerful native web app
• iOS apps (though these aren’t as rich as the web client)
• Deep integrations with other tools we use (Dropbox, Google Drive)
• It’s free for less complex organizations (you miss out on a few nice features, but that’s fine for now).

Asana is really going to have to offer us great added value to make it worth Bojan managing multiple task managers, but I think it has potential. It’s great timing too that Mike Vardy and Jeremy Roberts – two people whom I admire greatly – have just launched a handy guide to getting to grips with Asana: Do Better With Asana.

As a total newbie to Asana, the timing couldn’t be better for me to try out Do Better With Asana. I know from reading plenty of Mike and Jeremy’s material in the past that it’s going to be well-written and easy to get to grips with, and as Bojan and I figure it all out I’ll be sharing a detailed review of the new book.

As it stands, I’m confident that if you’re already interested in starting out with Asana, or looking to figure out how to do more, you could do much worse than grabbing an early copy of Do Better With Asana and diving right in.