My colleague at Lifehack and the man behind DevBurner, Chris Smith, isn’t a huge fan of the inbox set up in Asana. But again, for those who aren’t into GTD, they still reap the benefits of having those areas in their face every time they enter Asana. Having that sidebar also keeps me on top of my Weekly Review process – a GTD staple. To some it might mean having multiple inboxes, but to me (and likely to those who manage their lives from email, for example) it clearly displays the bigger picture stuff that needs to be reviewed regularly. That means I don’t ever lose sight of all those areas of focus.
With Asana, I can see each area of my life in the left sidebar (Personal, Family, Professional, Lifehack, Mikes on Mics, etc.). It becomes a vast place where everything is kept, and then the layers beneath that one big workspace is where everything gets distributed. As a “productivityist”, I understood that – but if you’re not into that realm as deep as myself and others are, it’s that aspect of OmniFocus that makes it more daunting than anything else.
It’s like having many instances of OmniFocus open, because OmniFocus always felt to me as if it was the one “workspace” and I had many large projects inside that workspace that had smaller project within them.
In my short time with Asana, I’ve already found a few things that it handles better than OmniFocus – and I’m talking beyond the whole team collaboration thing here.Īsana allows me to see things in a far broader sense than OmniFocus, in that my Workspaces can represent large areas of my life that are going to hold projects and tasks for as long as I keep them active.