Productivity tools, Asana

Welcome to building better developers, the developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our interviews and this episode we're going to start a new one. We're going to be speaking with Bastion Sipman and we're going to be talking Asana. We're going to be talking about productivity tools. We're going to talk about productivity hacks. And this is what he does. He has found that Asana is his tool of choice. And you're going to see as we go through this, how he started with sort of a general kind of approach, worked his way into a side hustle that became a very niche or niche side hustle, depending on how you say it. And we're going to talk about that, how he progressed into it and how he has turned it into more than just his little side hustle. It's actually a company. He's hired other people. We're also going to get into talking about virtual assistants and bringing in people that can help you build your organization, even if your organization is an organization of one. But he says it much better than I do. So let's get into our discussion with Bastion. Today, we're speaking with Bastion Siebman, and we are going to talk about a lot of cool stuff that really comes around productivity. He is a master of, we'll say master of, you can be a judge, but I think you're going to find out a master of Asana of using the tool that we've talked about a lot and in a family of tools we've talked about a lot. It's one of those things that is always a discussion is how do we track what we're doing? How does that make that useful to us as well as those that need to in some way monitor progress or if we want to share it with customers, things of that nature. There's a wealth of topics around these tools and around being productive and getting things done. And so I think you guys are looking forward to this at least as much as I am, because I think not to put the bar too high, but I think this can be a good one for us to take a lot of notes. Definitely make sure you've got your pencil and paper ready. That being said, I hope I didn't underplay it too much there, but if you'd like to give us a little background about yourself, tell us about yourself. Yeah, sure. Thanks. I'm really happy to be here. Always happy to talk about productivity and minimalism and Asana because that's actually my passion. It has been for the past 10 years. I know it's a bit weird to be passionate about one tool, but my whole journey led me to today. I think we'll talk about this. I started as just a very, very quick journey. I started as a web developer, created my first company and I chose Asana as a tool to manage the company. And very slowly over the course of about 10 years, I became better and better and started to help people a bit and publish content and all that by doing another job as a web developer and became better. Started doing consulting on the side, side gigs in the evenings, lunch breaks, and that Asana part of my life took over very, very slowly. And then it all leads to today. I now do Asana related things all day every day. I have a team of about a dozen people helping me. We are well known in the Asana world and we help clients all around the world. We had about, I think, more than 400 clients now and we help them use Asana the best way possible and I couldn't be happier. And my background as a developer plays an important role and I think we'll talk about this. It's great to have a developer background in a world of non-developer people. Honestly, I want to start actually with that. Where do you see that? Correct me if I'm wrong because I'm going to paint a little bit of a picture here. I'm assuming that the bulk of your Asana discussions and customers are not with developers. Really more with business users, project managers, things like that. Definitely. These people that they can touch on technology, but they're really more worried about getting projects and tasks and getting things done and measuring that and reporting. So how does your developer background help you? Because I think a lot of people would say that would actually be a hindrance to have that technology background and talking to that group. No, it definitely helps two ways. The first way is very often when you have a tool like Asana being deployed in a company, you usually end up talking with IT and the IT team, they want to see how the tool works. They want to talk about security. They want to talk about all of those topics and it's easier to talk to someone like me rather than to talk about the account executive on the Asana side. Definitely helps. Also, when you have requests for information, requests for proposal, you always have things to answer regarding the API, regarding security. It does also help to have that knowledge. Where it does help quite a lot is if you are a web developer, you do have the ability to use the API. So the API, as people probably know, is a way to talk to the server directly and do things that couldn't be done otherwise. Many clients have no idea what the API is. Many of the partners and many of our competitors have no idea what the API is. So it does give us an edge because it allows us to do crazy stuff, crazy stuff that isn't possible otherwise. And it does help us sometimes fix a problem that couldn't be solved elsewhere or in another way. And it can really help you close some deals because one thing was missing in the tool. So you do solve that problem by using your tech knowledge and the API specifically. That makes sense. It does help another way. In my case, I had the ability to create different tools. And again, using the API, I was able to improve Asana by creating small tools here and there that provide a very small service. And those tools, they act as a lead generation machine. Because every time someone uses my tool, I know they use Asana and I can reach out to them or I can at least consolidate that information. So for me, in addition to the content I create, it's really a way to get all of those clients contacting me through the different tools I'm creating. I guess that sort of begs the question, we should probably back up a step. Because I think most people have maybe had exposure to Asana. And if not, give maybe a what would be like a give a sort of an elevator speech essentially. What does Asana do? And then maybe a little bit of like, what do you bring to what does your organization, your company bring to the table? Yeah, so Asana is a work management tool. So basically, it allows your company to collaborate and have collaboration between the teams. So that would be the good old project management with the Gensha that could be a task list. So it's basically creating, dividing work into small tasks and assigning them to each other. It obviously goes beyond that. But that's the basis of it all. Asana goes a bit beyond but by allowing you to have reporting portfolios, goals, OKRs, all of those embedded into Asana. I usually like to emphasize the fact that it's great for teams, but it's also great on a personal level. When your company has Asana or even if your company doesn't have Asana, you can use it yourself just to organize yourself, organize your own tasks, organize your own reminders, really organize your digital life with everything you have to do and everything you have to be reminded of. In my case, it allowed me to have one job, one day job and have a side business on the side and manage all the clients I needed to work with. I couldn't do that with Excel or just email. I had to have a system and I chose Asana to do this. So really it's about helping with collaboration and go beyond the emails and the Excel spreadsheets that people usually work with and really streamline everything and help everyone save time and energy. And the way we help is it's an easy tool. You can log in, you can create a few tasks and put them into a project. The problem starts when you invite other people to join and when you start having a more complex workflow, you do need help to decide on the right workflow. You don't have six months ahead of you just to test and learn. You usually want to have the best possible workflow from day one. So this is where we come in. We really show you what's going to be in our experience the best way to use Asana because we worked with hundreds and hundreds of clients. So we're going to give you exactly what scales and what works so you can save time. Again, it's all about saving time because obviously you could go and read the Asana guide entirely. You can read all the books I've made. You can watch all my videos, but it's all about saving time. So with one hour of my time, I can actually help you save dozens of hours by just reading everything that's out there. So how do you, I guess this goes back a little bit to the API side of it, is do you work mostly with Asana out of the box? Do you have sort of a, I will say like a tool chest of typical things that you've built that are essentially extensions or enhancing Asana that you say this is normally what you're going to use? Or is it a lot, does it tend to be more custom type things and maybe they look roughly the same, but it's, hey, we've got this, we want to take Asana and how simple it is, but we want to blow it into this more complex workflow. Does that end up being a lot of your work is sort of that customizing, I guess, Asana in a sense? Yeah. Yeah. If you're familiar with tools like SAP, I think you are used to always having the need for a consultant and a lot of customization and stuff like this. I think it's not the case with Asana. When you use Asana, you expect the tool to work directly from day one and you don't expect the need for a lot of customization. So we always push the clients to use all the native features and go as far as possible with what's available natively. We don't want to really push customization if we don't have to. That being said, in some cases you do want to go a bit beyond what's possible. Sometimes you want to be able to do something that Asana decided they would not let you do unless you use the API. So sometimes we do want to go a bit further. Also sometimes what you want to do is so massive that you do need the help of the API. To give you an example, the other day I had to rename tasks so they can match a specific pattern that the client decided. It was 20,000 tasks. You can't do that manually. It's impossible. So I wrote a very simple script. It ran for a couple of minutes. 20,000 tasks being renamed. That's all thanks to the API. You could do it manually. It would take you hours to do this. So sometimes the features are available but it's not scalable or at least you want to go back and really update a lot of things. In that case, the API helps. In addition to this, we do have a lot of things on shelves because very often the same requests come in. So we do tend to push the same things again and again and again. But not everyone is open to customization. I think they're right because most of the time there's a cost attached to this because you have to either pay us to maintain the code or you have to pay your own IT team to maintain the code. So usually you should wait the benefit and the cost when it comes to automation or customization overall. Do you end up doing a lot of integrations as well? Or is it usually they're able to use Asana or is it more often that you're going to find that they're using Asana but they need that data shipped out or integrated with other systems? Yeah, it's actually the way Asana market themselves. They want to be at the center of everything and have all the other tools being connected to Asana. There's a lot of native integration out there. We also use Zapier and Make.com and all of those other platform mid-term solutions. We also use Asana platform middleware often. And sometimes we do have to code integrations between two tools. For example, the other day we coded something to sync from a Jira to Asana. So down from Jira to Asana because the client needed this specifically done. Yeah, it seems like that's usually the case is when you get into these productivity tools they're great on their own but then you have to you've got too many other things you're tracking. And this actually goes to my next question. You mentioned that you used it specifically when you had a day job, we'll call it. You were the web developer. Then you were also doing these side projects. And one of the things that I'm something I've run into and I think a lot of people that do side hustles is your main job you're using something to track your information. And if you use something different, like let's say your company uses Jira. Now you're using Asana. Then there's how do I sync those two up? Do I use one? Do I use the other? So how did you tackle that particular challenge of being able to report really the way you wanted to report and track stuff when it was side hustle stuff versus I'm assuming you had a different sort of set of constraints for your day job? Yeah, so when that happens with clients, we push them to use tools like Unito. If you look up unito.io, this is exactly what they do. They allow companies to work even though there are different tools being used internally. And I think the great example is Jira and Asana. The IT team will always use Jira because it's connected to all the tools that they have. But the marketing team uses Asana. And each one want to see what the other is doing. So you either force one to go use the other one's tool or you work in silos or you find something to connect the two together. In that case, Unito would be a good solution. Back in the days when I was a web developer, my company was using Jira and I was simply copying everything into Asana because it really it was more powerful for what I needed to do. So I was impacting GY when I had to and I was copying into Asana when I had to. It was very manual at the time. If I had to do it all over again, maybe I would do differently. But at the time, it was enough at my level, at my very small level to really copy information between the two tools. And you've said that you are a, we'll say that you are a, you're out there pushing Asana and evangelist as they would say of that. Yeah. And you even sort of drop a little bit of a hint that you see it as being more than just your job. So how do you do you use that beyond your job? And how are some maybe some maybe even some productivity tips or ways that somebody that says, hey, this is I'm starting to like this idea of Asana. How would they would be maybe a good way to start that to find the best value for using that tool. I'm using Asana for everything. It's my digital brain. I have everything in there. I think it helps decrease the overwhelming feeling when you have to remember everything. So anything that I have to remember goes into Asana. What we also do at the company, so the company is called I do. So we're basically an agency. We use Asana to run the agency as well. And we try to do this and we really want to use and force ourselves to use Asana for everything to try to push the boundaries of the tool and see how far it can go so that we can go back to our clients and tell them, OK, using Asana as a CRM, it does work. But here's the limitations. Using Asana for sprint based planning, it does work. But we tried. But here's what we learned. So we really try to force ourselves to do this. But in addition to using it for the company, I use it personally to organize everything. And I think it's a great tool. I know some people only use company tool on the during the workday. But in my case, I use it all the time. I'm also the owner of the company, so I don't really have like a personal life. It's all mixed up together anyway. That's a good answer. So what just something came up as you were going through that sort of a side question is, I think this and you can correct me if I'm wrong. I think Asana actually has a mobile platform and maybe they're just mobile friendly. Do you end up finding that you use it more often as like a sort of the desktop browser version or is it just as good with a phone or something like that? Yeah, they do have a mobile app and a tablet app. I do use the mobile app a lot when I'm on the go. I usually use it to capture things. And this is something I've done. It's actually part of the GTD method to just capture ideas and capture things you have to do. And then when I'm back at the office in front of my desktop, I clean up everything at triage. I put a due date. I put things into the right project. But I do use the Asana app to capture things all day long, just capture ideas. And sometimes when I'm traveling, I can use this to sync with my team as well by reading the different notifications that come in. And then that's yeah, that was just like I said, a little bit of a side note. Another thing that you getting sort of into the productivity world. The first thing we haven't mentioned it yet. But one of the things that I know that you have that you do make use of is virtual assistance. And in particular, I know I've seen some interesting ways to take a tool like an Asana and then make it easier to bring virtual assistance into getting things done. What's been your experience with that? And actually a little bit with that go a little deeper is how did you how did you get into the idea of virtual assistance and using them? And how has that progressed? Yes, I was introduced to that concept after reading the four hour work week by Tim Ferriss. And I thought to myself, so I had my day job. I had my side hustle and I had a lot of a lot of admin work to do. So I started and I hired an assistant and then I found a second one and then a third one. And one day I realized I had like a dozen people I could hire if I needed to. And it made sense to work with them within Asana. So a couple of years ago, I started selling those assistance to my clients. So I started this business of matchmaking assistance and clients. It's a difficult business. It doesn't scale easily. So I had to stop. But when we created the agency with my partner and co-founder, the first one of the first hire we did was actually an assistant. And we can assign tasks to her. She now works part time and we have another assistant to help. And I think Asana is a great tool to do this because when you use Asana, you already divide things into small chunks of work anyway. So then it becomes really easy to delegate some of those parts to specific people. And then you start building processes and you start realizing that one assistant is better at accounting and the other one is better at designing something. So you start assigning different tasks to different people and then their work really fits into the whole workflow. And you can really save a ton of time by using Asana to do things like this. That's funny because I think Tim Ferriss's four hour work week has probably almost launched and supported the virtual assistant industry. That's just so many people I've talked to that said, yeah, that was I got that idea. I got that idea. I said, you know, that's something to try. And they grew it from there. And it really is. There's a lot of good examples of how that's utilized. And like you said, I think that's actually a really key part is being able to break things into those chunks so that you can just simply in a short period of time say, this is what I need done. Give that off to an assistant and let them go. And then then you do end up able to scale things far more than normally. Yeah, but don't get me wrong. It's really hard to delegate and it's really not natural to delegate things because you do have to explain things very clearly. You have to set the expectations very clearly. You have to give a due date, potentially a limit on time. And then you have to review the work that was done and you do have to train them. So at first it feels a bit slower than if you've done it yourself, but then it really becomes like a second nature to delegate everything and it feels so good. Now, does it get easier as you go? Because you've gone through now you've worked up several worked with several virtual assistants. You've built almost a sort of a network of virtual assistants. Did it get it? Was it one of those things where it was difficult the first time, but then a little easier the second. And then you sort of got now that you you have a maybe a rhythm of how you talk with them and explain the details. Yeah, I think you definitely learn from your mistakes. And one of my mistake at first was not to give them a limit, a time limit. So, for example, I would assign something to someone and they would come back to me after working eight hours on this when I was expecting that thing to be done in 10 minutes. So they come back after eight hours of work. You can't say anything. You have to pay for eight hours because you didn't give them a limit. And obviously they did not understand the assignment. So you really learn to tell them, OK, try for two hours. If it doesn't work, come back to me. If you are almost there, come back to me just to show me what you've done. And then slowly but surely you start really understanding how they work and they start understanding the way you work. I think another thing I learned was that an assistant that's really good at admin stuff might not be good at design stuff. And that's OK. You might have to find an assistant specifically for design. It doesn't make sense to try to have someone do everything. I think it's better to have one, two or three different assistants that can work really different, that do have a different skill set. Now, do you go out and sort of hunt them, hunt for virtual assistants individually or do you usually go to a site or resource or something like that to find a pool and then work from there? Yeah, I usually go to Upwork to find someone. If you want to find someone, you can also look at the community you are a member of. So in my case, the Asana community now has a lot of assistants within the community. So if you go on the Asana forum or the Asana Slack we have, you can ask for someone or recommendation and they would recommend someone or they would raise their hand. Basically, they're ready to work with you. And then you just test. I usually do a paid test, one or two very small tasks, and you see right away that fits. And if it doesn't fit, you just move on and find someone else. That's good. Do a little bit of vetting of your resources as well. But now that... Yeah, and I think also, sorry just to finish on this. What has been key for us for the past few months is we're really pushing to document everything. All the processes are being documented and we insist on this. Anything that's being delegated to an assistant has to be documented somewhere. So the assistant can look it up if they have to. That's the first part. But the second part is if the assistant leaves, you have everything processed and documented so you can really replace them easily. And I think that's the key. Because if the person leaves with all their knowledge, then you have to do everything again and you have to teach them everything again. And that's a big waste of time. So really document all the processes that you have. It does also give a lot of value to your company. So if you ever want to sell your company, having everything processed is probably a good idea. That brings up another little side question. You said you do videos and training videos on that. So when you document processes, have you tried for your virtual assistants having some sort of a recording or tutorial type thing? Besides, you know, rewritten documentation, but have something where they can say, hey, watch a video. This is how this process works. And if so, have you have a sort of weighed in on either side where you would you find it's better to just have that written documentation or a video or both? I think it's better to have everything written down. The main reason is if you have a video, it's really hard to edit if anything changes. If a small part of the process changes in the middle, then you're stuck. You have an entire five minute video with 30 irrelevant seconds. So what do you do? You have to edit this or reshoot everything. So if you can just write things down, it's way easier to update and add steps, remove steps and just edit things in general. Good point. Now, I do want to swing back because you sort of mentioned the community and you had mentioned early on that you're you're well known in the Asana world. So is there a how what is that relationship like? Is there and this is partially out of ignorance. Is there like a trusted recommended advisors or how does that how does that relationship work? And how would how would somebody walking into the Asana world essentially end up being introduced to you? Yes, Asana has different programs. For example, they have the solutions partner program, the reseller program, the service partner program. A reseller is someone that just sells licenses. A service partner is someone that only does the consulting. We are a solutions partner. That means we do both. We sell licenses and we also do the consulting. So you can either find us through the content we put out, the tools we created. You can find us through word of mouth, but you can also find us through the Asana salespeople because we do work very closely with the salespeople because the salesperson cannot deliver a training and audit or code anything with the API. They do have to rely on partners. So we keep a very tight relationship with a lot of the salespeople at Asana and they do send us and put us in contact with clients as well. So you have a is it a like with the training side? Is it sort of a certified training program or something like that? Or is it more just, hey, these people, we trust them. They can train you and then you're sort of allowed the freedom to train however works best for you. Yeah, we do have the freedom. Sometimes clients would buy the package from Asana and then we have to deliver that package in a specific way. It doesn't go down to exactly the slides you have to use or the exact training you have to give, but we have specific hours and specific sessions we have to do with specific goals for each one. But we do have the freedom to teach us another way we like. Excellent. I always find that's a it's it's interesting to see how organizations and tools like, you know, like Asana restrict or don't restrict those kinds of things where they where they allow the their partners to really just do it their own way and where they try to do it. Very, you know, very rigid from from partner to partner. Yeah, it's really, it's really based on trust. And we did have to go through fake meetings with them so they can just see the way we behave and they do trust us by now. So not everyone can do this. They have to vet them and really make sure that they do the work correctly. They also I think they also survey declines from time to time to make sure that everything is working properly. So you have to do keep track of on this. Oh, that's good. That that helps you. It gives you confidence if you're a customer that, hey, this this isn't just some fly by dot organization that saw the door when it slapped a logo on it. This is somebody that actually knows what they're talking about. That seems like a good place for us to pause. We will be back. We've got another episode. We will wrap up our conversation with Bastion. We will get a little bit deeper into some of his other things that he's done, including don't want to jump too far ahead. But how to write a book in record time is a really interesting approach to how he wrote his book. Actually, a couple of interesting commentaries, reviews, critiques of some others that are out there. But maybe something that's actually a really good fit if you are thinking about creating a book, writing a book. And as always, that's something you probably should. It really helps with your personal brand. And it is not as hard as you think it is, particularly after listening to the next episode. That being said, while you're waiting, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Please check out school.develop-a-nor.com. That is where we are starting to pour a lot of our content. We've taken the lessons, the things that we've learned, all of the things that make you a better developer. And we're putting it there. We have a range of courses from free short courses up to full paid boot camps. All of these include a number of things to help you get better, including templates, quick references, and other things that make us all better developers.