Being a creative entrepreneur is all about finding ways to streamline your internal processes to get you back to doing what you love most. At Aspen Theory we’re all about keeping things transparent, streamlined, and as collaborative as possible. Today we’re uncovering our client process and taking a deep dive into how we use Asana to organize our client projects. For a look at some of the other tools we use in our business, you can check out this post here.
Managing Client Projects
This is the main way I use Asana in my business. As soon as a client completes their contract we send them over access to our shared Asana project workspace. We’ve created templates for each of our major projects (ie. Web Design, Branding, Branding + Web) to help automate the process a bit.
Within each task tile, we provide more detail about what each piece of the project entails as well as a due date for designer uploads and client feedback. We do this to keep the project transparent AF and make sure everyone is on the same page about who needs what and when.Â
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Linking It Up To Google Drive
We use Google Drive to create templated folders, feedback forms, and workbooks that we’re quickly able to upload into Asana. We use GSuite Tips to be able to copy Google Docs within folders.
Some of the things we use Google Drive to manage include:
- Feedback Forms
- Discovery Questionnaire
- Account Password Tracker
- Website Content Workbook
- Website Photography Uploads
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Internal Asana Project Management
We use Asana internally to help manage bigger ongoing projects as well as schedule repeating tasks in our business. We have individual projects created for longterm goals like passive income projects (…hint, hint, at some exciting stuff in the works). We also have our content calendar set up in Asana to help manage everything from email marketing to Tiktok posts.
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Content Calendar Breakdown
We have our content calendar broken down into four major categories:
Content Planning | We create a new task board each month to brainstorm ideas that we can quickly pull from while batching our content. We also set aside some time each month for brainstorm batching and checking in on our social strategy to make sure we’re staying focused.
Content Batching | We have these broken down into three repeating tasks (Video Content, Nonvideo Content, and Pinterest). Each task has a breakdown of the necessary steps for each section.
For example, the Nonvideo content includes subtasks for:
- Creating Visuals
- Writing Captions
- Upload Content + Schedule In Plann
- Add Hashtags to Posts
We have each task set up to repeat every other week, so we’re able to batch about 2 weeks worth of content at a time. I’m still playing around with the exact “batch length” that works for us, but 1.5-2 weeks seems to be a sweet spot of getting it done, without being overwhlemed .
Blog Posts | We are trying to get a blog post out every other week. The easiest way to do this is to actually just go in and lay them all out in Asana in advance. Then within each board we have subtasks relevant to getting the blogs written, scheduled, and uploaded to our site.
Email Marketing | This one is really just to cover our monthly newsletter. Any additional email marketing campaigns get their own Asana board or are associated with other long-term projects. These again follow the same subtask breakdown of what are all the things that need to happen to go from idea > execution for our monthly newsletters.
Admin Tasks
We have a separate board set up to help us manage weekly, monthly, and quarterly tasks in our business to help keep us organized. This is definitely the least sexy board, but it helps keep everything running smoothly. It includes things like:
- Reconcile accounts in Quickbooks
- Quarterly goal check-in
- Upload Stats to Social Growth Tracker
- Clean Up Desktop
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Why I Love Asana
Lists are my love language and spreadsheets are my poetry. We’ve found a system that works really well for us in Asana. I know there are so many other platforms out there like Notion and Trello that offer similar services, but I’ve found that Asana is by far my fav. It keeps all of my tasks in an easy to view dashboard, allows you to run searches on overdue client tasks (super helpful to keep your projects running smoothly) and gives me an easy space to collaborate with clients and team members alike.
If you are interested in giving Asana a try, we’ll save you some of the legwork. Download our exclusive Content Calendar template— this is the exact one I use to manage our content schedule. To use it you’ll just upload the CSV file into Asana and watch the magic unfold.