This month, I have been busy. I created an Asana-related game, I destroyed hundreds of data, I tried to get Asana to invite me in their newsletter every month, and I started promoting AI Studio Plus to our clients!
5 Asana tips & news
💘 You can use Asana to check your team pulse, check out our demo.
🎮 We created the very first Asana-related game called “Chasing Inbox Zero“!
✨ You started to test AI Studio but you don’t have enough credits? Reach out and we can discuss the AI Studio PLUS and PRO packages with enough credits to run your processes!
✏️ Asana now has a LinkedIn newsletter called “Work in Tandem”. I was actually featured in the very first edition. I tried to convince them to let me write every month but they wouldn’t. Can you push for my return in the latest edition comments? 😆
🧑🎨 You probably realised iDO branding changed, we are now called “i.DO” with new colors and design, with big ambitions!
🤦♂️ How I destroyed 1200 data points in Asana by mistake, and fixed it
I was doing a major cleanup of our account. One project contained two very different types of tasks. Each type needed its own custom fields, views, rules, and dashboards, but everything was mixed together. My solution was to split the project in half.
The plan was simple: duplicate the project without tasks, move half of the tasks into the new one, then clean up views and rules on each side. On paper, perfect. I did it, felt great, shared with the team.
Then someone came back saying: the values in some fields were all showing as TBD. At first, I didn’t believe it was my fault. We jumped on a call, and she was right. I destroyed values!
What happened? The original project had a rule: “when a task is added > set default values for some fields”. By moving tasks into the duplicated project, that rule triggered again. Three fields on 400 tasks were reset. That’s 1,200 data points gone.
There’s no undo for this kind of bulk change. The only options: restore a backup or use the API. So I wrote a script (in Custom Scripts) that went through task histories, found the overwritten values, and restored them. It worked, all data was recovered.
What I learned:
- Always trust your teammates. The ones closest to the work will notice problems before you do.
- When moving tasks between projects, review the rules carefully. Especially rules that apply defaults on “task added.” Always use conditions.
- Having someone who can quickly script fixes is a lifesaver.
Mistakes happen. Fixing them is where you really learn.
🧙♂️ 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 are the different Asana workshops we can have with an Asana partner?”
🤔🤨🧐
🎓 When working with an Asana partner, there are lots of way to help deploy and improve Asana.
Q&A: a simple Questions & Answers session where the consultant would answer a pre-defined list of questions. The consultant could potentially illustrate the answer with examples and demos.
e.g.: “how should we use milestones?”
Demos: just like a picture is worth a 1000 words, we often do demos to show how Asana can be used. We have an amazing demo space ready with tons of use cases.
e.g. “we need to manage a content calendar, do you have examples?”
Workflow implementation: a consultant would discuss a specific workflow with a client, for example managing meetings, creating an “onboarding” template, building dashboards, organise a content calendar, analyse resource allocation…
Change Management and Adoption Strategies: a consultant would help the champion carry out the deployment and anticipate roadblocks and common questions. We would often be invited to the company kick-off call for example, or invited to talk directly with the CEO.
Goal Setting and OKRs Implementation: even though we aren’t OKRs experts, we have experience tracking goals in Asana so we can help navigate the goal feature!
As a rule of thumb, we usually do not implement for our clients, but instead teach them how to build by having them hold the mouse and keyboard!
🧑🌾💂🧑🚒 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…
…the “stages of deployment”
It is like the stage of grief, but applied to deploying a tool in a messy organization 🤣
1️⃣ “We are not efficient anymore, this doesn’t work”
Email and Spreadsheets aren’t enough anymore, data gets lost, notifications are overwhelming and you feel that pain every day. You’ve felt it for a long time, and you finally have the budget to deploy a work management solution!
2️⃣ “Our processes are REALLY a mess, we are glad we have help”
Once you start deploying Asana with a consultant, and they ask you about your processes, you can’t even explain them. Or you do, but your colleague explains something different. Only when you deploy a work management solution you realize how complex everything has become. This is a great opportunity to simplify and streamline!
3️⃣ “This is hard, but I feel like this will be awesome”
I am not gonna lie, you won’t magically go from Excel and emails into a magical world of unicorns and tasks. You’ll need champions, you’ll need meetings, you’ll need rules. But that’s worth it!
4️⃣ “How did we work without it again?”
You will never go back. But now you have another problem: you are trapped and you can’t work for a company relying on emails and Excel anymore 😅.
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