On World Productivity Day, here’s why you should focus on collaboration instead

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World Productivity Day is June 20th. Usually, we’d be gearing up to share tips and best practices on how to be your most productive self with Asana. But with the various challenges teams have experienced in 2020, our definition and expectations of productivity have changed. This year, instead of focusing on individual productivity, we want to help you center on connecting and collaborating with your team in order to be at your most effective—together. 

To “maximize” your productivity on this World Productivity Day, look to your coworkers, friends, and colleagues. Focus on the goals you can achieve and the high-impact work you can accomplish by collaborating with your team.

Three collaboration strategies to boost productivity

1. Reduce work about work

One of the biggest barriers standing between you and collaboration is work about work, like attending meetings, chasing approvals, or searching for information. The average employee spends 60% of their time on these tasks. That’s valuable time you could be collaborating with colleagues and getting important work done. 

When you have a central source of truth, you can share details and data easily. Let your work management tool handle the work about work, so you can increase team collaboration. Here’s how Asana can help: 

• Cut down on time searching for tasks with Advanced Search and reporting. When all of your work is in one place, you can spend less time sorting through tasks and more time actioning on them.
• Say goodbye to hunting through spreadsheets and emails to find data for project updates. With Asana, you can share status updates with a few clicks of a button. 
• Integrate all of your favorite business tools, so you spend less time switching between tools and more time on strategic work. 
• Reduce the time you spend getting projects started so you can focus on meaningful work with your team. The Asana CSV importer helps turn spreadsheets into projects—fast.
• Maximize task visibility to coordinate cross-functional collaboration. Once you’ve created a project, you can assign tasks to multiple projects, so you can work cross-functionally without having to duplicate tasks. Watch how:

2. Automate and eliminate manual work

When you eliminate manual work, you and your team have more time to dedicate to high-impact, strategic work. Eliminating manual work comes in two parts: 1) standardizing the processes you already have in place, then 2) optimizing and automating that process.

With Asana, you can do this by pairing Forms and Rules. With Forms, you can standardize the requests intake process to make requesting and tracking work a breeze. Create an Asana Form to capture the information you need for any request—the details you need to launch a design, get started on a marketing campaign, fix a bug, or anything else. 

Then, once a Form has been submitted, create Rules to assign the request to the right people and projects. Instead of manually assigning the task, Rules do that for you, so your team can get straight to the high-impact work.

3. Increase clarity across projects

When teams work in silos, it’s hard to get good work done. Not only is this bad for productivity—it’s also bad for motivation and collaboration. Research shows that when employees have clarity on how their individual work adds value to their organization, they’re 2X more likely to feel motivated. As teams continue to work while distributed, it’s more important than ever to have clarity and visibility into your projects, in order to connect the dots and empower your collaborators. 

With a work management platform like Asana, you can bring clarity to your team at all levels. 

• Tasks: Clarify who is doing what by when. 
• Subtasks: Break work down into manageable pieces, and clarify who is responsible for each piece.
• Approvals: Highlight that you’re waiting on feedback before you can move forward.
• Collaborators: Add collaborators to keep stakeholders and cross-functional team members aligned. 
• Dependencies: Map out what work needs to be accomplished before getting started.

This World Productivity Day, focus on collaboration 

True productivity comes from connection and collaboration. As the saying goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” So on June 20th, instead of trying to maximize your own personal productivity, focus on supporting your team so you can get your best work done together. 

Asana can help your team connect and collaborate, no matter where you might be working from right now. Read more on how Asana can help your team collaborate, or get started today.