5 Tips to Fight Asana Overwhelmingness

Overwhelmingness is such an amazing word. First, it is really hard to write without making a typo, especially when you are not an English speaker. Second, it encompasses a lot of the things we’re working on as Asana experts, the goal being that people do not feel overwhelmed.

A few weeks ago, I found myself to be overwhelmed and that’s what triggered me to think about the different levels of overwhelmingness. I feel like the goal that everyone is after is actually level 4, meaning that you either decrease your ambition a lot and surround yourself with a lot of people to delegate things to. Anything below is only about coping with a full plate.

I look forward to reading your feedback on this edition.

5 tips to fight overwhelmingness

📅 Block deep-work time in your calendar and protect it like any other meeting.

🗣️ Talk with your team about focus, deep work, and what helps everyone stay on track.

🤝 Design goals that reward collaboration, not competition between teammates.

🌊 Treat feeling overwhelmed as the exception, not your normal way of working.

👮 Be the well-being police: nudge teammates to log off, rest, and stop skipping their breaks.

🌊 The 4 levels of overwhelmingness

I’ve been thinking a lot about the different levels of overwhelmingness, because even if two people say they’re overwhelmed, they’re often overwhelmed in very different ways.

To me, there are four levels of overwhelmingness.

Level 1: Complete chaos.

You’re lost. Drowning in tasks.

If you use Asana, my recommendation is:

1. Clean your My Tasks view

2. Empty your inbox

Do this consistently, and you’ll move up to level 2. If you can’t even find time to do that, you are at level 0. It’s impossible to help you because you don’t have any time to help yourself.

Level 2: Full plate, but organized.

You’re on top of your system, but there’s just too much to do.

My recommendation:

1. Bucket your tasks: ideas in an Ideas bucket, non-urgent team tasks unassigned in a To-Do bucket

2. Unassign yourself from things that aren’t critical

3. Talk to your manager if your workload still feels too heavy

This unlocks level 3.

Level 3: Self-induced overwhelm.

You’re fully organized. Your plate isn’t that full. But you keep piling more on, because you’re excited and/or you wanna help and/or you keep chasing the next shiny thing.

AI is a good example. There’s so much to explore, and not enough time. You create your own overwhelm by chasing everything that excites you. But you’re still not wise enough to reach level four.

Level 4: Flow.

This is the goal.

You’re organized. You don’t jump on every shiny thing.

You’re available to help your team. And when there’s nothing urgent, you calmly work on your own priorities.

Let’s not kid ourselves: I believe getting to level 4 requires two things. You need a team to delegate things to, and that team might actually need assistance to delegate to as well and/or use AI Teammate. And you probably need to review your ambition. You need to define clear goals for the year and stay on track, and only do those.

—

I think I’m at level 3 most of the time.

Well organized. Not drowning. But I get excited too easily. For example, as I move through Asana, I see things to fix, I chase them, I overload myself. And then I reach level 4, and after 2 days I am back at level 3 or even level 2.

Hopefully, one day, I’ll reach and stay at level 4 more often.

🧙‍♂️ 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: 

🎙️ “Should I put everything in one big Asana project for my team, or split work into many smaller projects?”

🤔🤨🧐

🎓 For me, it comes down to what I call the balance.

You shouldn’t have projects that are too big. You shouldn’t have projects that are too small. You shouldn’t have tasks with too many subtasks.

You need to find the right balance.

And on top of that, whatever you put in a project has to apply to all the tasks within it. If you add a custom field, it needs to make sense for every task in that project. Same with automation. If it doesn’t apply across the board, it probably means you’ve mixed different concepts inside the same project.

What usually gets in the way of good balance is fear of having too many projects. But that’s rarely a real problem.

🎙️ My opinion on…

…can we really reach a state in a company where people are not overwhelmed?

You can absolutely get to a point where people aren’t overworked. But feeling overwhelmed? That still creeps in. Because your client, your business, your ecosystem… are not linear. You’re going to have spikes. Issues. Surprises. And usually, they all hit at once.

The goal isn’t to eliminate chaos. It’s to organize your work in a way that when a fire breaks out, you can drop everything and focus on it, and not juggle it on top of the 10 other things already on your plate. That’s where the overwhelm comes from.

Asana helps a lot with that. Especially when people are involved: someone leaves, someone joins, someone’s out sick. That’s when the pressure piles up on whoever’s left. Asana helps you move things around, redistribute, make it visible. It’s not magic, but it’s a hell of a lot better than flying blind.