One of the keys to staying on top of administrative tasks is finding ways to be efficient and yet thorough. There are a lot of aspects to managing an organization that contain details and can be repetitive on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. Having a tool to stay on top of these details is critical to avoiding errors and reducing the time spent on admin.
Welcome Asana (www.asana.com). This is a web-based app that's like a super-charged checklist. It is so powerful that even the free version works for managing the 25-plus clients of the Admin Hub. Here are some things I love about this tool:
The ability to create different projects helps me keep all those loose ends straight. I've got a project for each ministry we take care of as well as projects for big-picture organization development stuff. Within each projects are the tasks that go into doing that project well. Tasks can be assigned to dates so each day I have a list of priorities - some urgent, some not but important, to get me going in the right direction. They can also be structured as lists or boards depending on the project.
Projects can have recurring tasks and subtasks. This helps with items like a monthly or quarterly close - I create a checklist of the critical tasks to review and close out a month of bookkeeping and once I've checked off all the items for that task, I click completed and it automatically populates for the next month. (For more on the power of the checklist I highly recommend The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande)
You get the option of color coding both tasks and projects which helps me visually see what needs to be prioritized on a given day. Also, when you complete a task you get a flying rainbow unicorn or similar jolt of joy. You know, sometimes it's the small things that keep you on track.
Files and links can be attached to tasks - so I try to keep links and logins directly on the task so I'm not hunting for it each time I need to do something. Or if I've made meeting notes in google drive a link to those notes to refresh my memory on what needs to be followed up on.
Asana is super helpful when you are working as a team. You can assign tasks to others on your team, add notes to your own and other's items. This reduces the number of emails flying back and forth and strengthens communication.
Also - power hack: you can turn emails into assigned tasks. One of the biggest ways tasks were slipping through the cracks for us were emails that couldn't be dealt with at the time but had an action items. Asana gives you an email to forward those emails and it automatically creates the task. You can do this for your own list or someone on your team. The was a game changer for us!
I'm currently debating upgrading to the paid version (because you can do that for cheap on Techsoup mentioned in the last entry in this series) as it adds helpful tools like start dates, timelines and custom fields.
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