Setting Up Asana for Small Business: Automation Rules That Save Time

Episode #134: Setting Up Asana for Small Business: Automation Rules That Save Time

If you’ve ever thought, “There has to be an easier way to keep track of all the things,” you’re right — and Asana is that easier way.

In this episode of Tech Savvy 101: AI & Automation Made Simple, I’m walking you through you how to set up your Asana workspace from scratch with automation in mind. 

We’re diving into how to structure your projects, build out recurring tasks, and use automation rules that actually save you time (instead of just looking pretty on your screen).

This is Part 2 of our Automated Systems That Scale mini-series, where I walk you through the real tools and workflows I recommend to take work off your plate — not add more to it.

Whether you’re managing content, client projects, launches, or even your weekly schedule, you’ll walk away from this episode with the confidence to turn your project management tool into a time-saving system that supports your growth.

✨ NOTE: This episode is part of the Automated Systems That Scale mini-series, where we're exploring how the right project management system can transform your business from manual and chaotic to automated and streamlined. Throughout this series, I'll show you exactly how to leverage Asana's powerful automation and AI capabilities to create systems that run your business for you.

IN THIS EPISODE, I COVER:

➔ How to structure your Asana workspace for real efficiency
➔ The best time-saving features inside Asana (that most people ignore)
➔ How to automate recurring tasks, content planning, and client workflows with just a few clicks

RESOURCES:

📌 Asana – Free and paid plans available
📌 AI Evergreen Content Machine Waitlist
📌 Done-for-You Custom GPT Setup

RELATED EPISODES OF TECH SAVVY 101:

🎙️ Episode #133: Asana Tutorial: How to Automate 24 Hours of Work Each Week
🎙️ Episode #128: Systems That Scale: How to Create SOPs That Actually Work for Your Business

⏱️  TIMESTAMPS:

00:59 – Setting Up Your Asana Workspace
03:34 – Organizing Projects for Automation
07:04 – Creating Recurring Tasks and Dependencies
12:10 – Leveraging AI Features in Asana
13:37 – Integrating Asana with Other Tools
15:54 – Automating Tasks with Asana Rules
18:31 – Conclusion and Next Steps

LET'S CONNECT

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🖥️ Website
💻 Facebook Group

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Transcript

Sarah Baker 0:01

Hey there. Welcome back to Tech Savvy 101: AI Automation Made Simple. I'm your host, Sarah Baker, your tech savvy bestie, who's here to help you simplify your business, embrace automation, and save hours every week. Today I'm excited to bring you the second episode of our automated systems that scale miniseries, where we're exploring how the right project management system can transform your business from manual and chaotic to automated and streamlined. Throughout this series, I'm showing you exactly how to leverage asana's powerful automation and AI capabilities to create systems that help you run your business on autopilot. If you're tired of repetitive tasks, eating up your day, if you're drowning in follow-ups and deadline tracking, or if you are ready to scale without working more hours, this series is your roadmap to building an automated business machine. In today's episode, we're focusing on setting up your Asana workspace with automation in mind From day one. By the end of this episode, you'll know exactly how to configure your account, create projects, and set up your very first automation rules to start saving time immediately. So let's dive in. We're gonna start by talking about how to create your Asana account with automation in mind. If you haven't already set up your Asana account, now is the perfect time. I'm gonna walk you through the process, step by step, focusing on the choices that will set you up for maximum automation potential. First, obviously, you're gonna head to asana.com and click on"Get Started." You can either sign up with your Google account, an Apple account, or your email address. I recommend using the account that you use for most of your business tools because that's gonna make integrations so much easier down the line. Once you're in Asana will ask you what you want to use it for. Even if you're a solopreneur, I recommend selecting"work with my team." The reason for this is because rather than"organize my work," which is the other option, the team functionality unlocks more automation features, even if your team is just you, yourself, and you. Next, you're gonna choose your primary role and department. This helps Asana suggest relevant templates. The templates are amazing. You don't have to start from scratch. It's going to auto build a lot of the projects for you. You can always access all of the templates regardless of what you select at this stage. But do not forget about the templates, and we're gonna dive into that a little bit further. Now you're gonna come to the workspace creation step. This is really important because your workspace name becomes the overall container, like the umbrella for all of your projects. I recommend naming this, whatever your business name is or just a clear descriptor of your business function. According to a survey by Wellingtone, 56% of project management offices reported a significant improvement in efficiency when they structured their digital workspace to match their organization's structure. So when you are naming that umbrella part of your Asana workspace, think broad. Now that you've got your account set up, it's time to think about how to organize your projects in a way that sets you up for automation success. There are several ways to structure your projects in Asana and the right approach depends on you and your business. It also depends on what makes sense for your brain. But there's one principle that applies universally, which is organized by workflow, not by client or time period. So what do I mean by that? Instead of creating a project for client A or another for client B, I recommend that you create projects based on the repeatable processes in your business. Like client onboarding or content creation or product launches, things that you can then duplicate in the future if you have another launch or another client onboarding, or more content creation by month or by year. Why is this? Because automation works best when it's applied to consistent, repeatable workflows. According to a study by PMI, organizations that structure their project management around repeatable processes are 52% more likely to complete projects on time and within budget. So let me give you an example of how to set up a few key projects that most businesses need. One example is a client onboarding process. For this one, I would recommend using Asana's board view, which is where it's like a Kanban board style. You can create sections for new leads, a discovery call scheduled, a proposal sent, a contract signed, onboarding in process, onboarding complete. All of these creates a very visual representation of where all of your clients are in the process. You could create a project for content pipeline creation. And in this example, you could create either a board style or a calendar view, which is extremely helpful for content creation. And sections could include content ideas, in research, in production, ready for review, scheduled, and published. You could also create an operations hub depending on your business style. This would be where you could manage all of your business operations tasks. Now in this case, you could use maybe a list view with sections for finance and accounting, marketing and production, team management, or even systems and tools. Now for each project, you can then add in custom fields, which are incredibly useful for automation. You can add fields like priority: low, medium, and high. Status: not started, in progress, waiting on, and complete. Things like due date, or even assigned to, if you have multiple team members, to keep track of who's in charge of which project. According to Asana's own research, teams who use custom fields effectively save 33% more time through automation than those who don't. These fields become critical triggers for the automations that you can then set up. Speaking of that, let's now talk about setting up those recurring tasks and automated dependencies. One of the very simplest forms of automation in Asana is setting up those recurring tasks. This ensures that routine work happens automatically and in the right sequence. A study by Harvard Business Review found that knowledge workers waste an average of 41% of their time on discretionary activities that offer little personal satisfaction and could be handled by others. What does that mean? It means they're doing boring tasks for almost half of their workday. Recurring tasks help eliminate this waste of time by ensuring routine work gets done without manual intervention. So let's talk about how to set this up. First, you're gonna create a recurring task in Asana. For example, you could create a recurring task for"review weekly analytics." This could be for your YouTube channel, your podcast, your blog, your website, anything that has analytics, which is practically everything these days. This could occur every Monday morning and be a recurring task. Inside Asana, it's as easy as clicking on the calendar icon next to the due date and selecting, make this task repeat. You can choose how often you want it to repeat daily, weekly, monthly, or even a custom pattern like every two weeks or every 10 weeks, or every fourth Thursday, every first Monday of the month. Then you set up task dependencies, which means that you're creating a sequence where one task automatically becomes active when another is completed. So it's reliant on the first task becoming complete. Once you check the little box in Asana that you've completed the task, the next task becomes active. So, for example, in the project that we talked about earlier about creating content, if the task is"schedule social media posts," that task won't become active until you've completed the task of creating graphics. One of my favorite features is also subtasks. Subtasks are perfect for breaking down really complex processes and also for projects that you repeat over and over and over again. It removes a lot of the mental to-do list because instead of having to remember all of the steps that it takes to complete a project or a task, you can create subtasks and then go through and check all of the subtasks off each time you complete the task. For example, in the client onboarding project, you can create a task for welcoming a new client with subtasks for sending a welcome email, sharing an onboarding questionnaire, scheduling a kickoff call, setting up your client in your billing system, and so on and so on. I have over 20 subtasks for each of my podcast episodes, for example, including creating the podcast, scheduling the podcast, editing the podcast, creating the cover art, scheduling a blog. All of the steps that it takes from coming up with the topic all the way through scheduling and promoting. And I have a project for all of my podcasts. That's the umbrella. And then I have tasks within that. Are each episode and then subtasks on each episode or task that represent all of the steps it takes to publish each episode. So that way I am one consistent with how I handle each episode's production. And two, I don't have to think about it for each time and remember, did I skip a step? When I'm producing each episode of my podcast, I can go through all of the subtasks and know that yes, I hit all of the steps. I didn't forget to do anything, and I have completed each episode. It is incredibly helpful for all of those repeatable tasks. According to research via Asana, breaking work down into subtasks increases completion rate by 20% and reduces the time spent on coordination by 25%. For me personally, using subtasks removes that mental burden because I don't have to keep the running to-do list in my head because I know that it's in my asana. Therefore, I don't have to have a constantly running to-do list either in my head or on a piece of paper on my desk because I know it's in there and that I haven't forgotten anything. So it removes that level of stress. Now let's explore how to leverage Asana's AI features to make your task management even more efficient. First, I'm gonna recommend using Asana's Smart recommendations. As you create tasks, Asana's AI will start to suggest due dates, assignees, and even related tasks based on your past work patterns. These suggestions get more accurate over time as the AI learns your workflows. So the more you use it, the better it gets. Next, leveraging natural language processing for task creation. Asana's AI can understand natural language inputs. So for example, if I type"schedule client meeting with Sarah next Tuesday at 2:00 PM," Asana will automatically create a task with the correct date, time, and assignee. Finally using AI for workload management. Asana's workload view uses AI to help you visualize team capacity and balance work more effectively. This is crucial for preventing burnout and ensuring your deadlines are realistic. According to a study by Gallup, employees who feel their workload is well managed are 70% less likely to experience burnout. Asana's AI powered workload management helps ensure that no one on your team is overloaded. Now let's talk about integrations with your existing tools to help you create seamless workflows. The real power of using Asana as your automation hub comes from connecting with all of your other business tools. So let's talk about a few key integrations. First off, you can integrate it with your email. You can create Asana tasks directly from emails by forwarding them to x@mail.asana.com. This is a huge time saver for turning client requests or important information into actionable tasks. Research by McKinsey found that professionals spend 28% of their workday managing email. Yikes. So by integrating email with your project management system, you can cut that time significantly. Next up, you can sync your calendar with Asana. You can connect Asana with Google Calendar or Outlook, and that ensures that your task deadlines appear on your calendar and that your calendar events can be reflected in your Asana. You can also use Zapier connection. Zapier is the bridge that connects Asana to over 3000 other apps, so you can create Zaps that will create an Asana task whenever a new form submission comes in from your website. According to Zapier's State of Business automation report, businesses that use integration tools like Zapier save an average of five hours per week per employee. There are literally hundreds of other integrations. I have the Slack integration, I have the Google Docs integration and the Google Drive integration, so I'm able to connect tons of my documents right into my Asana. You can integrate Microsoft Teams. You can integrate Canva, Vimeo, Figma, salesforce, there are hundreds of integrations available. If you use it, there is probably an Asana integration for it. Now let's talk about setting up rules in Asana to automate repetitive tasks. Asana's rules feature lets you create an if this, then that automation without any coding. Here are some of the options. First off, I want to mention that they have quick start automation templates that you can implement immediately. So you do not need to start from scratch. You do not need to reinvent the wheel. Here are some of my favorite automations. You can set up automatic status updates. For example, when a task moves to a specific section, then change the status to match the section. This ensures that your task statuses are always up to date without you having to manually change them. Next due date follow ups. When the task is approaching its due date, then send a notification to whoever the task is assigned to. This creates automatic reminders without you having to check in manually. Another one of my favorites is new Subtask creation. When a task is moved to, for example, a"contract signed" section in client onboarding, then it will automatically create all onboarding subtasks, and assign the task to team members. This ensures that your entire onboarding process kicks off automatically when a new client signs on with your business. The onboarding subtasks, would be preset in a template that you create. And finally, another one I really like is a new form response automation. When a new form is submitted, or received, then it creates a task and assigns that task to a team member. And adds it to a specific project. This is perfect for client intake, content requests, or support tickets. So all of these are really, really great ways to automate repetitive tasks using rules. According to Asana, teams that use rules effectively automate an average of seven hours of manual work per week. That is a whole business day. And these templates can give you an immediate headstart on how to get started in Asana.. So we've covered a lot of ground today. You now have the foundation for an automated business hub in Asana. We've talked about how to set up your account. We've created strategic business structures. We've talked about how to configure recurring tasks and dependencies, how to leverage the AI features, how to integrate with other tools, and we've talked about how to implement your first automation rules. The key to success with Asana or any project management system is consistency. Start by moving one workflow at a time into your new system and focus on setting up automations for that workflow before moving on to the next one. This incremental approach will help you avoid feeling overwhelmed while still making meaningful progress. In our next episode, we'll dive deeper into advanced automation strategies, showing you how to create complex workflows that run your business while you focus on growth. If you're finding value in this mini series, I'd love it if you could subscribe and leave a review. It helps other tech curious entrepreneurs find the show. Thanks so much for tuning in to today's episode of Tech Savvy 101. I'll see you really soon.