Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could establish your own achievements to unlock and connect the satisfaction of completing a task related to the kind of work you do every day? If you’ve played any console video games or engaged in some of the mobile apps our phones have to offer you’ve likely seen “Achievement Unlocked” and with it that oddly satisfying feeling of accomplishing something. Today we have a variety of task tracking software to organize, encourage and incentivize task completion. From standard ones like Todoist, Monday.com and Hive to conceptual ones like Habitca- a role playing game designed task app which treats your daily work or needs as ways to earn experience points which you then use to level up an avatar and battle against enemies in an effort to increase ‘fun’ while getting things done.

While all those apps have their value, the one I am here to tell you about is the one we use at CSMFO headquarters in Sacramento; Asana- a web and mobile application which helps us with organizing our work into projects, track the progress with comments, the ability to share files and other documents and prioritize and plan a production timeline with due dates, subtasks and more.

What Is The Task?

Creating a task in Asana begins with what I believe most people haven’t considered when first requesting work- What is it? What’s it called? What’s it for? It’s difficult to delegate work when you haven’t thoroughly examined it yourself. We must first label the task in Asana so it shows in the queue of other tasks what it is boiled down to just a few words. By doing that, you’ve now refined what it is you really need. Secondly when creating a task in Asana you must fill out the description field. You should be able to hand this task to a person who knew nothing about it in the first place with the title and the description being everything they need to get started. This too helps us discover the real intention and desired outcome of the task overall. What is crystal clear in your head needs to be translated into a brief description for a general audience. Hone your task, refine the direction and create an even better concept of a task than what you started with.

When Do You Need It Completed?

Asana has also helped identify an underestimated and most important aspect of a task: When. When do you need this done by? When do you want to check in on this? When do you want to get started? Too often a request for something isn’t given a timeline and therefore impossible to determine its priority. When it comes to designing something for CSMFO, knowing the date it needs to be member-facing allows us to build a production timeline from that date and move backward.

How Do We Go About Getting It Done?

Another crucial factor in getting something done is identifying the steps. We can’t have the egg until we have the chicken…right? We know what we want our final result to be and by working backward we can specifically create subtasks in order of their need and assign those subtasks within a large task to different people. We then give each of those subtasks a date or a when and those subtasks can then have their own descriptions and titles. Not only does this create a production timeline but it also illustrates how many people it takes to accomplish a single task and how, therefore expanding the understanding and knowledge of the work being done by everyone on the team.

Who Is The Stakeholder In This Task?

To elaborate a bit on assigning tasks and subtasks to people in Asana; the task ownership or project stakeholder is essential when it comes to follow up, responsibility and further understanding who is the forward mover of the desired outcome. Before using this software at other jobs it was common for me to hear “I don’t know who was supposed to do that.” or “Who was going to get that done?” or “That isn’t my job.” (the latter being my least favorite) Being able to actually assign a name (and depending on your profile in Asana, a head shot) to a task holds that person responsible for that particular aspect of a larger goal, sends them notifications when dates change, comments have been posted or files uploaded and allows them to the opportunity to check that little round window to confirm completion. All of this may sound like a lot of work to work, but we have to challenge ourselves to not just do things but to explore how to do things better. If you don’t end up ever utilizing a task management software at least follow the recipe of: What is it – when do you need it – what will it take to get it done – and who’s responsible? Though if you don’t use Asana you will miss out on…

Drum-roll Please…

The absolutely satisfying experience of accomplishing a task and getting the randomly generated animation of an Asana cartoon character zooming across the screen in celebration of your success. All your hard work paid off in a silly moment that makes you smile. Achievement Unlocked – Task Completed.