As a business owner or freelancer, are you struggling to keep your arms around everything on your plate? I had the HARDEST time with this early on in my career. I started using a Google Drive spreadsheet to track everything, but the more work I took on the harder this became. I needed something that was agile, had due dates and could also track my time (both because some of my clients were billed hourly and because I’m slightly neurotic about knowing what I did with my day).

I knew that I needed a project management tool to make my life easier, but it was so hard to find one that worked that didn’t also cost a million dollars in the process. I stumbled upon asana after trying so many other solutions that just weren’t a great fit – and it was literally perfect. Not only was it scaleable as I built my business, the simple version was (and I believe still is) totally free.

Here’s what I love about it:

1. I can easily add tasks, assign projects (both to my team and to my husband – we also have an asana account for our personal life!)
2. I can do a brain dump of all the things that I need to follow up on – again, both business and personal – and adjust the date out as a reminder to follow up over time
3. I can set recurring tasks so that repeatable things (billing, monthly tasks, birthdays, bills, etc.) are simple to create once and never fall off my plate
4. As I added more people to my team, I could easily incorporate them into asana and with the paid version, limit their access so that they could just see the things they needed to have access to
5. I could integrate a time and billing app (I use Everhour) to track time within tasks, making it easy to track time for clients that are billed hourly and giving me more insight to where I was spending my time, helping me to be more productive with my day

I’ve been using asana since 2016, and quite honestly it was the best change I’ve ever made. Over time, I’ve tried other solutions that have popped up, but they just don’t work for my workflow in the way that asana does. However, if you’re not in love with asana, here are a few other platforms that entrepreneurial friends of mine use and love:

• asana – my fave
• ClickUp
• Todoist
• Google Tasks (search in your app store)

Happy Organizing!