Organizing Chaos: How I Use Asana to Turn E-mails and Slacks into Tasks

So, you’ve got issues. (Don’t worry, we all do).

Maybe you’re trying to track support tickets. Maybe you’re fielding client requests or quashing bugs. Issue tracking is a critical piece of Project Management (and many other arenas), and there are a lot of services out there designed to fit every exact situation you could encounter…for a price.

But if you don’t have the money, or aren’t sure you want to commit to an expensive software yet, I’ve found Asana is a great way to track issues until you’re ready to graduate to ZenDesk or another ticketing solution because it’s relatively cheap and easy to manage.

Overview

Here’s a video overview if that’s more your thing. Otherwise — see below!

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Price: Free

Good for:

• Situations when you have a lot of tasks that a single team is tackling, such as bugs or customer service issues
• When a spreadsheet isn’t enough to track tasks, but you’re not ready to buy a more specialized software
• When you want more context on individual items, such as email history or chats back and forth
• When you want to pull in requests from Teams, Slack, email, and other locations.
• If you’re already using Asana for other tasks in your organization!

Not a good fit for:

• This solution is great to start using issue tracking, but not great for advanced uses. If you’re handling thousands of phone and email customer service requests, you probably want to shell out for a different software.
• If you have a lot of custom reporting needs. Asana has some capabilities, but I find in-depth reporting to be pretty limited
• …if you hate Asana? I like Asana because it’s pretty flexible and powerful, but I do find that coworkers and clients can be intimidated by it

If Asana isn’t your thing, many of its competitors can do similar things (Trello, AirTable, etc.).

1. Setting it Up

At a minimum, you will need a Task Date, Description, and then I like using Category and Priority columns, but the rest are up to you.

Asana has a bunch of ticket tracking templates that you can use to get off to a quick start: https://asana.com/templates/use-case/ticket-tracking

If you’re completely new to Asana, here’s a great starter video: https://academy.asana.com/get-started-with-asana/587487

Next, the not-so-secret sauce of what makes this work are your add-ons. You can always add tasks manually, but if a client emails you, just click a few buttons and add it to Asana, sync your emails, and you’ll be able to trace your whole conversation.

Here are some of my favs:

• Asana for Gmail: https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/asana/923474483785
• Asana for Outlook: https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-nz/product/office/WA104381833?tab=Overview
• Asana for Slack: https://slack.com/marketplace/A01734836JY-asana
• They have a whole bunch of other integrations here, including Teams, Jira, and more: https://asana.com/apps?category=all-apps
• Depending on your Asana subscription, you can also set up a form to collect issues as well.
• If you’re a little more tech savvy or have a bit more cash, you can use Zapier or similar service to create an automation to automatically add from your inbox, or use an Asana form to collect responses.

2. Define Your Process

Now the most important part: you have to have a process for using this board. Tech is one thing, but it’s pointless unless you and your team actually uses it. You have to make time to train yourself and your team on your special formula for resolving tickets.

Here are some of my processes:

Decide on a priority. It seems straightforward, but I highly recommend defining what types of issues fall into which priorities. Priorities help you organize and assign work efficiently. Here are the common proriorities I use for my projects:

High — Anything that blocks work from getting done. These typically need to be resolved immediately.

Medium — priorities are things that can be accomplished with a workaround, though it may not be ideal. Typically, I need to solve these in 1–2 weeks.

Low — issues that are more aesthetic, such as extra commas in a template. These take the longest to handled. I tend to try to let them pile up and get them resolved at regular intervals, such as once a quarter, depending on team capacity.

Use Categories to find common issue types and spot patterns. Choose areas that will help you either 1)Help you quickly find patterns in what is breaking and/or 2) Make it faster to resolve those issues.

Example:

-Bug -Change Request -User Error -Maintenance Request -Other This format helped me track that a client had a bunch of user errors around how one part of their automation ran, specifically when a new team was using it. Now, we provide extra training around that step before launch, which has reduced issues. The categories helped us hone in on what causes our biggest pain points.

3. Just Do It

Start simple, because it will be harder to maintain complex boards.

Create a habit of immediately adding issues to the Asana board. You can’t resolve issues if they never make to the board. Train yourself and your team to add issues immediately as they come in, and then you can use the Asana board to ensure that it gets resolved.

As you get used to your system, you can add more complexity, automate, and so much more…

Extra Credit:

• If you really get into it, you can use Rules to move things to certain sections; for example, I’ve used it to track bugs vs. edit requests. For example, I move all my Edit and Enhancement requests to another section of Asana.
• Now that it’s in Asana, you can create Dashboards to show how many tickets you’ve closed, average time to complete the task, and more. It’s also very easy to share with clients as a view only, so they can see the types of issues.
• At my work, we hooked this up so that the Asana board automatically created a Jira ticket and sent a Slack message to our engineers. Our Jira tickets have to be set up a certain way for our time tracking and engineering needs, so instead of me waiting to get a Jira ticket in, this automatically gave the engineers what they needed.
• My absolute favorite way to use the add-on is to track approvals; since I always ask for email confirmation, I log important conversations in Asana. It has been a lifesaver many times over, especially since I can see the context of the emails back in forth.

There’s a lot you can play with from here!