Mastering Inbox Zero: Why Archiving Saves More Time Than You Think

I hope you are enjoying (or enjoyed) your Summer break! It is time to get ready, empty that Asana Inbox, email Inbox and clean your task list. You can do it!

And while you are at it, here’s a quick task to complete right away: subscribe to our second newsletter about the monthly release of Asana features.

5 Asana tips & news

✏️ I am giving Substack a go to share my daily Asana thoughts, tips and tricks, follow me there!

🧹 Summer break is the best time of the year to try and reach the bottom of your task list!

💰 Asana costs around 20-30$ per user and per month. Are you telling me you are not wasting way more every month by juggling between emails and Excels? Email us if you want to save time (and money).

💡 If you want to be creative with AI, especially AI Studio, you need to know that a specific set of actions can be done via AI Studio like change the assignee, title, description, field, date… Look at the guide for the whole list!

👋 We hired a CSM and an AE at i.DO, the team is growing, with the goal to always serve our clients better!

☠️ Death by a thousand buttons

There’s a great article called Death by a Thousand Buttons by Tobias, touching on something that comes up a lot in the Asana forum: people asking for new features simply because the community wants them.

The usual suggestion is: just put a button, just add a toggle, let us choose. This often happens when Asana takes a clear decision between two paths, and part of the users disagree. Rather than change course and upset the other side, the request becomes: why not offer both options?

But if you’ve built products before, especially SaaS, you know adding options isn’t always the right move. Take Zoom for example: have you ever been inside their settings? It’s wild. There are so many customizations that it’s overwhelming. You end up confused about why something behaves a certain way, because a hidden setting is off somewhere.

Asana, on the other hand, is praised for its simplicity, ease of use, and flat learning curve. Over the years, some tools have become more powerful but also far harder to learn, while Asana has tried to maintain that balance.

A good example: no multiple assignees on tasks. More than 10 years ago, Asana explained that this was about accountability. When multiple people are responsible, things tend not to get done. Many don’t like that decision, but we’ve also seen teams move from Monday to Asana precisely because they don’t want
multiple assignees and the accountability issues that come with them.

Every new option brings complexity: more code to maintain, more documentation to write, more training to update. It also makes the tool harder for new users to adopt.

Sure, it gives consultants like me more work, but I’m not here to become a Salesforce consultant, building labyrinths of complexity. I’d rather build simple solutions to complex problems, not the other way around.

Good luck Asana!

🧙‍♂️ Asana geek riddle

You want to be in the shoes of an Asana consultant for a minute? Here’s a real example from a session:

🎙️ “What use cases do you have for using Saved Views in projects?”

🤔🤨🧐

🎓 In a project, you can indeed define “tabs” at the top, which are filtered-sorted-grouped views you save for everyone. We use them A LOT. Couple of ideas for inspiration:

1. create a tab to only see elements to treat (elements in a “triage” section or with a specific status)
2. create a tab to only see tasks assigned to you (or the current user using “Dynamic me” as a filter)
3. create a tab to only see tasks for your team or department
4. have a tab with a Timeline sorted by Start date and another one without a sort to see the swim lanes
5. have a tab with a Calendar view with only top priority tasks
6. create a tab which hides completed work or only shows completed work
7. create a tab to see latest tasks added at the top
8. create a tab for each type of task you have

🧑‍🌾💂🧑‍🚒 Job hunt

We are still looking for a French+English speaking Asana consultant based in a US-friendly timezone to join our team. If you know Asana well (at least Advanced plan) and have experience being a consultant or champion + more than 15h/week availability, apply now!

🎙️ My opinion on…

…Inbox zero.

I have been very intense about Inbox Zero but in reality I don’t care too much if you are at Inbox Zero or not. What I do care about is that you don’t fool yourself: by keeping a long list of notifications (or emails) in your Inbox, you are wasting energy and time every time you open it. There is no argument there. So now the main discussion is probably: “is it more expensive to archive things, rather than just having that visual and mental overload?”. And I do believe it is cheaper to archive.

However, if you tell me you are not reading your Inbox and just wait for people to assign a task to you, or mention you, I usually get mad.