Hey everyone. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the inbox processing flowchart, and how I plan my day in Asana and how I use this task management tool to structure my week and my day. And again, you can use any task management tool for this. But the process I'm going to show you can be applied in any well powered software. But I do like Asana because of its simplicity, and it's also free. So I have created Here is a sample project with a bunch of fake tasks, the kinds of things that you might throw into your inbox on a given day or week, things you want to remember to do.

And what I'm going to do is go through these one by one, and show you how I plan them. So let's look at our inbox processing flowchart First of all, so this again comes from the Getting Things Done approach by David Allen. I've tweaked a few things about it and of course made it prettier, but If you follow this, it's a very effective way it looks, maybe maybe it looks a little bit intimidating or complicated, but it's not. And it can become second nature to you after you've done it enough. So what happens is you take everything that comes into your life, you throw it in your inbox, and that's what we have. Right here.

This is kind of a foe inbox. I have built it for demonstration purposes, but you take everything, put it in your inbox. And then you'll go through and ask yourself a series of questions about each task, for example, is the task essential to your goal? If it's not, and if it's something that really doesn't need to be done, trash it, remember the elimination step, we want to get rid of the things that really aren't essential that that we're just gonna are just going to take up our time and maybe good, but not the best. Next, if it's essential to your goal needs to be done. Then ask is it actionable.

Another way to put this is is it definable, if it's not actionable, you want to either do a few things with it. Put it in the trash. If it's something that's not really worth worrying about. If it's something that is like a reference, let's say you you wanted to remember a website you wanted to visit one day, or you want to remember a resource that you'll probably use months from now, you could put that into a references file, so that you can find it later. And then maybe it's a it's kind of a, an idea or a dream you have for the future. It's not really actionable, but it's just kind of like a big project.

You can put that in your, in your incubation, maybe someday later file. And again, look at that later. Now if it is immediately actionable, and you're ready to do it now, then you can ask, how long will it take? Now, this is really important to be able to help structure your week and your day as you're planning so that you can accurately estimate how long it's going to take you to do things so that you can get them done efficiently. The way this flowchart works is if it's going to take less than five minutes, five minutes or less to do the task. Then just do it now, right as you're planning, like stop going through your list and just do the task and get it over with.

That's really only if it's going to take a very short amount of time though, I think in getting things going, he says less than two minutes. But you can use whatever measure you want there. Depending on how much time you have how many tasks you have, but very short tasks, go ahead and do them. Now get them off the list frees up a lot of space and energy and also keeps you motivated and feels like you're accomplishing something. Now, if it's going to take more than five minutes, it's something you can't do right now, you've got to schedule it, or you're going to do a few things with it. So first, if you need someone's help or input on it, then you're going to want to delegate it.

Now this could mean writing somebody an email right now, it could just mean clicking a button in Asana to reassign the task to somebody else on your team. It could mean a few different things. And then once you've delegated it, you want to put it in a follow up area so that you can remember that you've delegated this and that you're waiting to hear back from them. And if you don't need someone's help on it Then you can just schedule it, put it on your calendar, either for some time later, a specific day and time in your calendar or your task management system, or right away. Like if it's really urgent tasks you just want to do today, it's like your next big thing, then put it in your next actions area. So that is kind of an overview of the Getting Things Done approach to task management, super powerful.

And it allows you to move through your inbox quickly from top to bottom, rather than kind of what a lot of people do is they open up their inbox, whether it's an email inbox, or a paper inbox or whatever kind of inbox. Maybe they won't go one by one, maybe they'll kind of look through and say scan and say, Well, this one seems more important, or this one seems easy. So I'll do that one next, and oh, this one seems hard. So I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of wait on that one, or whatever it happens to be. But this makes sure that every single item in the inbox gets processed and put in its place on the calendar or in a reference file or in the trash. Everything gets dealt with.

Now the time that it takes for you to go through Through this process with your entire inbox will depend on the size of your inbox. It also depends on how complicated your tasks are, and how much extra work you need to do to go through it. But I'm going to walk you through this a little bit with my tasks, and you can kind of see how how to apply it. Alright, so here are my tasks. So first, we have to take a shirt to the dry cleaners. Now, the first thing I like to do when I look at a task is estimate how long it's going to take.

So I think this is going to take me 20 minutes. Now I'm using a freed free version of Asana here, so there's not a place to specifically to put how long a task takes. So I just like to put it in brackets like that 20 so it takes 20 minutes for me to go take the shirt to a dry cleaner. Now there are a lot of other things about the Getting Things Done approach you can add. I like to add tags for context. For example, this will be an errand so I could I could type errands here, and then later if I'm about to run an errand, I can click the errands And see every every every errand that I have that I need to do and I could batch those tasks together to do them all at once.

So anyway, taking it to the dry cleaners will take 20 minutes. I know I'm not gonna want to do that today, but maybe I could do that on Wednesday, for example. So then I would set the due date to Wednesday. And then what I would do with Asana is get it out of my inbox. Now, if this were my actual inbox, in Asana, there would be a little button here where I could choose to make this a task that is either today, upcoming, or later. Now today means Of course, I'm going to do it today.

Upcoming means it's within the next week or the next seven days, and then later is after that. So I would choose upcoming for this one, and then it would get it out of my inbox, and then it would automatically appear on the day that I'm supposed to do it, so that I don't have to think about it or worry about it until that time, although I can always go to the calendar here. I can see that I have a task to take the shirt to the dry cleaners on Wednesday. But that's how that works. So because I've created this as a project, and it's not my actual inbox, that's not going to get rid of it for me. So what I'm going to do is just move it down, actually, I'm going to create a fake category here called upcoming, which is basically this week, and then later, which is after that Asana has these automatically, but again, I'm showing you this as a sample.

So it hopefully that's not more confusing. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to drag this down to upcoming because it's not here yet. Okay. Next, we have email, john about proposal. All right, so this is probably going to take me, you know, five minutes, I just need to ask him a quick question. So right now, I would leave Asana go into my Gmail, write the email, and then I would come back here, and I would drag this to waiting, because I'm waiting for John's response because I need that information.

From john, in order to move forward on the next step. And then if I don't hear back from john in a few days, this will remind me that I need to follow up with him again. All right, next we have prepare a presentation for conference, you know, that's gonna take like, hours and hours, I haven't even thought about my topic I have to write the content is, this is almost a project in itself. So there are a few ways you can deal with that when this is something that will take many, many hours, years. Remember, we don't want to create any task in here, that's more than a couple hours. Otherwise, it's going to be hard to schedule it at a specific time on your calendar to get done.

So one thing we can do is we can actually turn it into a project in Asana, you can click here and create a new project and or even over here, and convert it to a project and then start making tasks for that underneath it, which will look basically like this and you can organize your tests however you want with all these categories. But another way is you could create sub tests. So you can say, you know, choose a topic for presentation, and then write outline for presentation, etc. That's one thing. And then you might say, I can choose my topic in an hour, I can write my outline in two hours. And then you can move on and continue with the rest of the tasks.

So this kind of stays here as a task, but it's not something you can complete in a specific timeframe. So what you would do then is probably move this, for example, two goals this month. If you want to finish preparing your presentation this month, then you would put it there and you could look at this and go in and check these off when you actually finish them. Okay, does that make sense? All right, let's keep going create online course this is another one. That's a big project.

But let's say I don't really expect to complete this for like another two months. So this one, absolutely you would turn it into a project for an online course you would break out so all the tests that are Along with that, and then each of those tasks would come up here as appropriate, you might have one that comes up today to, you know, write an outline for the first module or you know, a few weeks in, you might have another task to record a video. So this one again, because this is a sample, and I'm not going to do anything with it, I'm just going to delete it or move it down here, I guess, to later. But normally, you would turn that into a project right now you probably clear this task and turn it into a project and build several sub tests with it as part of your planning session.

And if you don't have time, right now to go through and create all of the different tests and think through the whole thing didn't just create a task to break down the online course project into tasks as part of the project. So I'll just show you really quick we're going to create and convert it into a project. And now we have a project for the online course. So first, we will write an outline. We will record Video for module one, whatever the different tasks are. And as you're creating the task, if you know about how long it will take, it's always good to put the time in there as you're doing it.

So that's how to create a project. And then these tasks will show up in your My Tasks area when they come up and do date and such. Or you can just go to the project again and review anytime where it's at. Okay, next, we have research Facebook ad strategies. Oh, I'll do that in a couple hours for it'll take me a couple hours. And I will do that this week.

But when so is another one you'd want to set a time for. We'll see Thursday. I know I have some time on Thursday. So you set it, then you change it to upcoming. But because this is not my regular test area, I'm just going to drag it down to sell my old computer. That's a similar thing that might take me 45 minutes.

But the thing is, this is a task that is actually multiple tasks, right? Because you'll have to draft an ad, maybe you'll have to take photos that you'll have to find a platform to post it on, maybe you'll have to register for that platform, depending on how you want to sell the computer. So this is another one that you could either turn into a project or make sub tests for, and then make that either a goal for a week, or for the month or whatever. But just be sure that if you're creating tasks, that you're scheduling them at specific dates and specific times, so you can be sure to get them done. For now, because this is a sample, I'm just going to move it down here. Watch new Star Wars movie.

You know, this is one of those things, it's not maybe not important, and you can decide whether it's urgent or not. If you want to watch it in a theater, watch it at home, if you have a whole list of movies, see I often put in put in Asana movies that I hear about that I think sound interesting. So what I will do is actually move these to a reference file I have another file called movies to watch that sitting in a different project. So what I would do is I would take Star Wars. And I would put it you know, here in my list of movies to watch Star Wars and along with, you know, all the other movies that that I have here. And then when I when it comes time for me to want to watch a movie, whether it's with my family or whatever, I would just open up this reference task called movies to watch and I would look at the movies and then make my decision.

Now if it's specifically the Star Wars one, you want to watch it, you really want to watch it this week, then yeah, go ahead and schedule it on your calendar at a specific time. Or if you're not sure when it's playing in the theater, you can create a task to look up the showtimes and determine when you want to go. So this is going to be referenced file that would go in later area or it would just not have a due date at all because it would just be a reference file. Alright, process photos from vacation. That's something else. Maybe that will take an hour and I will do that on you know, Tuesday.

Maybe let's let's do this. We don't have anything that we're doing this yet, let's say not super important, not super urgent, I can put it off for a couple weeks, we'll do it on the 23rd. And that will go into later. Learn how to program PHP. Man, that's a, that's a pretty big project. That's something again, that would take a long time.

So it's not something I can just say it's a couple hours that I can check off here. So this is one, you could turn into a project. Or let's say it's something that I just want to dedicate a certain amount of time to every day. But I don't know exactly what you know, the process will be. So let's say, for 30 minutes every day, I'm going to practice PHP programming. And then I could put in the description, you know, maybe some of the resources that I use for that, or I can take notes on it.

And then every day, I can make this a recurring task. So set it to repeat period. will repeat daily. And then every single day, when I check this off, it'll disappear. But then it'll come back the next day to remind me to do it again. So then this can become something that is just an automatic reminder for you every day.

So that you can practice your PHP programming, whatever the task ends up looking like for you on that given day. So that's pretty powerful. And I would just check that off and it would disappear. But because, again, it's a sample, I'm just gonna move it down to today, I'm doing doing it today, make a dentist appointment. This might take me 10 minutes because I have to look up the dentist phone number and make a call and everything and I can make separate tasks for that but I'm just going to move it to today I'm going to do that. And then I would, you know, maybe set the due date to today as well.

And I could even put in a specific time if I wanted to. Alright, so that hopefully gives you an idea of how to use Asana to schedule your tasks, whether you're doing weekly planning or daily planning. It's a powerful inbox processing system. Now, I guess we didn't really have anything that we eliminated. We had a few things you put into reference someday maybe we had some things under five minutes that we did. Now some things over five minutes.

Some things we delegated and put into a follow up folder, some things we scheduled for later. And some things we determined we were going to do right away, which I guess was the dentist appointment. But I hope that makes the process a little bit clearer for you and that now you feel a little bit more comfortable jumping in and planning your week and going through your inbox. And then again, when you look at the calendar, this shows you everything that you've scheduled at a specific day or time. And you can also sync this with Google Calendar, or other calendars that you might happen to use. You can color code things and you can add different tags.

And there's only you know, a lot of different features here that we didn't cover. You can watch us on his tutorial videos for more information on that But I mostly wanted to show you the process of how I handle my test specifically, seeing the goals this month having that at the top. So every day when I'm logging in here, and I'm looking at this, oh, yeah, preparing that presentation. That's like my big goal for this month. So I got to make sure I schedule time for that. If I have a particular goal this week that would go here.

Things that I've got to do today, like these are my big main tasks I want to accomplish today. They would go here, things I'm waiting on, which I will review regularly and follow up if necessary. And then the stuff after upcoming and later, I don't really need to see that. And really, when you're using Asana for yourself, you'd go to my tasks, and you can hide, you know, you can collapse these areas. So you don't even have to look at this stuff, unless you want to, because this is stuff that's going to come later it's going to come you know next week after after seven days or within the next seven days. But as soon as the day arrives, it'll pop up in your list of tasks here and you'll be able to drag it to the appropriate spot for your daily planning.

During your daily planning session, and one other thing we didn't do, I guess is if we are delegating, you know, I'm assuming here when it when I put it in waiting that john is not necessarily on my team or using Asana. If I'm sending it, you know, or if I make a dentist appointment, I'm sending an email waiting to hear back from the dentist, I'm not going to add him as a as a user in my Asana project. But let's say I don't want to make an a dentist appointment. Let's say I have an assistant, and I want her to make the dentist appointment for me. Then I would click on assign, and I would simply choose the person on my team who I want to do the task. And then it would disappear from my list and it would go on their list is something they're going to do.

I love delegation, because it kind of like completely removes things from your list. Of course, if they don't do the tasks, then you've got to follow up with them and you can look up a pert you can look up all the tests you've assigned to certain people to follow up with them that way if they are on your team, and also whenever they make updates to tasks or they add a comment to them or they complete them. It shows up in your inbox here, and you can review what they've done. Now I realize all of this could just sound like a big sales pitch for Asana and I have no stock in the company. But I've used several different task management software's throughout the years. And this is the one that I found most helpful for me in my life right now.

That's also at a price that I'm happy with, which is free. If you have a system you already like to use. That's fantastic. You can use that. And if you happen to be able to set up categories like weighting and the goals, so that you can review this, I mean, this could be done in paper, too, if you want to really, it's just a little bit harder to rearrange things and prioritize. Let's see, this is higher priority, so you'll put it at the top of the list.

It's a little harder to do stuff like that on paper. But there are other systems out there and I'm sure new systems will be developed that'll be even better than this in the future. But hopefully this gives you some insight and some courage to begin taking action now. So enjoy and happy planning.