Staying focused is a challenge. According to Asana's research, 80% of employees work with their inbox and communication apps open, and so nearly 75% feel pressured to multitask during the day.
As we know, people aren't good at multitasking, they only think they are.
This environment can make people more likely to miss critical messages and deadlines.
"The rapid shift to distributed work has fuelled distraction and disruption. Message pings and meetings are at an all-time high, while focus time has fallen to the wayside. One thing is clear—something needs to change," said Asana chief product officer Alex Hood.
"We've designed a suite of new offerings purpose-built to align your attention with your intention. Featuring integrations with our newest Asana partners, Vimeo and Clockwise, we're removing distractions and making it easier to do the work that requires your full attention."
Video messaging (asynchronous video communication) is now provided through integration with video platform Vimeo.
The idea is to replace at least some virtual meetings with video messages that provide the same opportunity to express emotion and to share visual content.
Short videos of users and/or their screens can be recored directly in Asana, with automated video transcripts that are incorporated into Asana's work graph data model, allowing for searching and sharing.
My Tasks enhancements include provision for organising work in Kanban, list and calendar versions of personal tasks to focus their attention, and automation to help users get and stay organised (eg, by generating an alert when a teammate completes work that unblocks a dependent task).
Smart calendar assistant integration is aimed at reducing the competition between task lists and calendars. Integration with the Clockwise smart calendar assistant makes it easier to schedule tasks into focus time without leaving Asana, and Clockwise automatically reserves the time needed to complete the task.
Finally, the Asana desktop app for Mac and Windows helps block out noise so users can focus on the tasks at hand, while keeping all the functionality of Asana on the web.
