Streamline Your Creative Business with Asana: A Guide to Project Management for Entrepreneurs

As a creative entrepreneur, managing your daily to-do list is an absolute necessity. We don’t subscribe to a typical 9-to-5 schedule, often working around the clock to hit deadlines and give our clients exactly what they want.

Project management isn’t always easy, despite being one of the most essential skills every entrepreneur should have in their arsenal. Fortunately, there are a number of tools that can help, my favorite being Asana.

What is Asana?

Put simply, Asana is a project management software designed for businesses. It’s a versatile application that can be used on numerous devices—such as your phone, computer, or tablet—and helps you manage tasks and projects, communicate with team members, and track your progress. 

Though Asana is a game-changer for businesses of all sizes, it’s more than just your run-of-the mill project management software. Asana has a number of useful features for creative entrepreneurs, including:

• Timelines, a feature that creates project plans and—as its name suggests—timelines to ensure that you stay on track. The Timelines feature allows you to create step-by-step processes for each of your projects in a clearly defined and easily understandable manner.
• Team Calendar is a feature that is exactly what it sounds like. This feature is especially useful for creative entrepreneurs that work with a team of employees. Team Calendar lets you view every task on your staff’s to-do list, making it easy to delegate projects and help your employees hit their respective deadlines.
• Asana’s Reporting feature is fantastic for small creative businesses, as it can pull data from any of your teams or projects and convert them into charts and graphs. This allows you to examine data from across the board, helping you spot weaknesses and strengths in your business and project management strategy.

These are just a few of my favorite Asana features. I also love that Asana offers a number of integrations—meaning that the Asana software can work with and pull data from other types of software—with popular tools like Google Drive, Slack, and Trello. Ensuring that all your business software can communicate and work together is a must!

How Can I Use Asana in My Business?

Asana has become one of the most important tools in my toolbox as a creative entrepreneur for one simple reason: it works. Asana’s capabilities are so varied that the possibilities are nearly endless. It can help you manage client projects, stay organized and on-task, and even track your social media content.

Better yet, Asana is a collaborative project management tool, allowing your employees and partners to work with you through the platform. You can assign tasks to team members, set due dates, priorities, and even add attachments or comments on each task.

As mentioned earlier, staying organized is an essential step towards ensuring that your creative business is successful—Asana helps you do just that!

Asana: the Pros and Cons

Just like any project management tool, Asana has its benefits and drawbacks. Before downloading the software, you should consider the platform’s pros and cons. Here’s what I’ve noticed while using Asana.

The Pros:

• Asana is extremely versatile. You can use Asana for virtually any task or project.
• The user interface is intuitive and simple, making it easy to use for creative entrepreneurs who are familiar with similar types of software.
• The platform’s automation tools are extremely useful, helping you streamline project management and simplify your business. 
• Asana offers a free plan for teams of 15 members or less, which includes unlimited tasks, messages, projects, activity logs, and storage of up to 100MB for each team member.

The Cons:

• Though its user interface is simple, Asana’s sheer amount of available tools can be overwhelming and confusing for users that aren’t tech savvy or familiar with project management tools.
• If you are just getting started in your creative entrepreneurship journey, Asana may simply be too big for your needs. It may not be a great fit if you just need a few project management tools.
• Asana’s free plan may seem robust, but many of the platform’s best features are locked behind a paywall. Even more, Asana becomes expensive quickly, with Premium and Business packages starting at $10.99 and $24.99 per user/per month, respectively.

Is Asana Right for My Business?

Are you wondering whether it’s time to take the plunge and subscribe to Asana? Consider your business’ needs and your own project management skills. 

Are you struggling to keep track of tasks? Would you forget your deadlines if it wasn’t for timers, calendars, or email reminders? Do you have an office covered in sticky notes? If the answer is yes to any of these questions, it may be time to give Asana a try.

Asana may seem like a daunting tool. However, with a free plan for up to 15 members, it costs you nothing to try this software out! Who knows—it may be a perfect fit for your creative business!