Follow up/reminders

English Forum Use Cases
,
1

Hello! I use asana a lot for many tasks and for my team. I also send out a lot of tasks to people outside of asana that require follow up or some next step. Right now I send an email and then if I remember I create a task to help remind me that John in accounting owes me financials. I wanted to see how people were using the tool to coordinate with their email to help them get reminders of tasks or “waiting for items” from people outside of asana. Let me know what you do! Thanks! :slight_smile:

2

Here is how I would approach this. If you use a PC, talk to me about my Sendana Outlook to Asana integration. It will work great. The easiest solution is to get the “outside of Asana” people to start using Asana. If neither of these are feasable I would do the following::

  1. Set up a Project such as “Waiting On Outside Parties”
  2. Use Sections to break up in an organized way
  3. Make sure when you send your outside party an assignment to put in the To or CC field X@mail.asana.com.
  4. This will create a task in your my tasks which you can then assign to the “Waiting On Outside Parties” project in the Section divider of your choice. Put a due date on it for either a true due date or when you want to follow-up on it.

Hope this helps.

3

Also, if they don’t want to sign up for Asana, and they are a group of reoccurring people you could create a custom field and put names in it.

4

I agree with both of @James_Carl’s ideas. If it were me, I’d use the separate project or custom field approach to highlight tasks that I’m waiting on. You could also consider using tags and then favourite this tag so that it saves to your sidebar.

As James said, the best thing to do would be to get the rest of the team using Asana. Can I ask, why aren’t they using it already? It’s likely it will help them with their other work a lot (as well as yours).

5

I would most likely use tags. Create a tag “Waiting on” or similar and star it as Paul mentioned. This gives you a one-click view of all tasks that you’re waiting on, and you can save it sorted by due date or project, whichever makes sense for you. If you were concerned about other people using the same tag, that’s fine. Just create a Search Report for tasks assigned to you with Tag “Waiting on” so it ignores tasks assigned to others with the same tag.

You could just scan that list daily and decide if you need to take any action. The other option would be to also create separate follow tasks for key tasks you absolutely can’t lose track of. Tag those as well so they all show up together in the sidebar.

1 Like