The Future of Productivity: Mastering Asana AI

It’s been a while since I last published an edition of this newsletter. The official reason is that I couldn’t find the right angle. The real reason is that every angle I found was somehow related to AI, and I had the feeling everyone was already tired of hearing about it.

But at this point, we can’t really ignore it anymore. Asana is clearly moving toward a world where AI plays a big role in both the product and the go-to-market motion. If you’ve tried Asana AI Teammates, you probably know what I mean: they’re genuinely impressive, and they really do feel like the future.

5 Asana tips & news

🤖 ChatGPT can now help build and edit Asana projects directly from a conversation.

✨ AI Studio can read Dropbox and Box attachments, so workflows can use file context instead of just task text.

↕️ You can reverse-sort comments in the task pane, which makes it easier to jump to the latest update first.

⚡️ Rules keep getting more capable with recent improvements including:

• scheduled triggers
• a trigger when a collaborator is added
• using the project schedule to set dates in rules
• using working days and skip-weekend logic in rules
• rule ownership transfer
• branching and conditioning
• reordering rules in the workflow menu
• custom scripts in Portfolio rules

🪎 There is a treasure at the bottom of your todo list

Twice a year, I manage to get to the bottom of my to-do list. It happened again this week.

And every time it happens, I get the same feeling: there is a treasure at the bottom of that list.

Not an actual treasure, obviously. The treasure is the journey to get there.

When you work through old tasks, especially the ones that have been sitting there for weeks or months, you realize a few things. First, some of them are already done. They were just still there, quietly taking up space in your head. Second, some of the things you kept postponing because they felt hard are actually very easy once you finally touch them. They were difficult mostly in your mind.

But the most interesting ones are the weird tasks. The ones that are still there because you genuinely did not know how to do them. Once those are the only things left, pushing them to later is no longer a strategy. You have to get creative. You need a different approach, a different tool, sometimes even a new AI teammate to help.

That is also why AI now feels different to me inside Asana. For a while, it was easy to see it as background noise around the product. But when you are staring at one of those stubborn tasks that survives every cleanup, practical help matters more than hype.

And to be clear, getting to the bottom of the list does not mean doing everything. It means putting things in the right place. Some tasks get done. Some go into a proper ideas list. Some go into a bucket for somebody else to pick up. The point is not to empty the list at all costs. The point is to stop letting vague leftovers occupy your brain.

Maybe that is the real treasure at the bottom of a to-do list: a clearer view of what matters, what was never that hard, and what now needs a smarter way forward.

🧙‍♂️ 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: 

🎙️ “I am afraid AI teammates will waste my time.”

🤔🤨🧐

🎓 That concern is valid. If an AI Teammate is used on work that is too broad or too vague, it can absolutely create extra review work instead of saving time. That is exactly why narrow use cases matter so much. The key is to start small, give clear instructions, and adjust your way of delegating over time. AI usually improves coverage and speed first. The quality still depends on the context and guidance you give it.

🎙️ My opinion on…

…Asana and SaaSpocalypse.

There are two camps in the SaaSpocalypse debate. One thinks tools like Asana are about to die because companies will rebuild them with AI and vibe coding. I don’t buy that. You can maybe recreate what you see, or the small subset you personally use, but not the invisible layers that make a product actually work: backend logic, edge cases, compliance, integrations, and years of product choices and experiments. If you only use Asana as a basic to-do list, then yes, you can clone your version of it. But that is not the same as replacing Asana. The hard part is not building a rough copy. It is maintaining a coherent, reliable product over time, at a lower cost than simply paying for the software. That’s why I’m not worried about SaaS disappearing anytime soon.