Can you use Asana and Evernote together?

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Evernote and Asana are two online-based tools that excel at different things. But if you are running a business in the digital age, you understand the importance of software interoperability. Sometimes, it takes more than one platform to guarantee seamless and smooth team collaboration. 

So the question is – can you use Asana and Evernote together?

The short answer is 'yes'. But there is a bit more to it so let's see how you can put these two platforms together.

The key is to using Asana and Evernote together is to divide and conquer. That is to say – use Asana to track and communicate about tasks and use Evernote for project notes.

There is a simple two-way integration between Evernote and Asana, which allows you to automatically create a note in Evernote each time there is a new Asana task. You can also add a task in Asana each time you make a note in a specific Evernote notebook.

A good rule of thumb is to keep one Evernote notebook for every Asana project, with the same name. This will make it easy to keep track of the notes left for each respective project in Asana.

There is another option of capturing Evernote tasks (e.g. meeting notes), but managing those tasks (along with all other tasks) in Asana. 

You can use software that lets you clone your tasks from Evernote to Asana and vice versa. There are several such on the market, so it's worth shopping around and trying some free demos before choosing one.

The combined benefits of Evernote and Asana

Asana is an excellent project management tool for collaborative teams as its strength lies in how it can streamline work management by enabling more peer-to-peer decision making. You can ask someone to do something by simply assigning them the task.

Asana has excellent functionality. You can use it for:

• Creating tasks - and discussing what needs to happen.
• Assigning tasks - and discussing who should do what
• Communicating status - e.g. "I'm getting blocked on X"-may lead to creating other tasks.
• Indicating task completion - you get notified when someone else finishes a task.
• Todo list - Keeping track of what I need to do today

On the other hand, Evernote shines through to make it easy to get a ton of different types of documents into the same place and make them easy to find. It's great for making data acquisition casual: you can write something on a post-it and snap a photo, or take an audio note, or grab a web page and it's all in the project notebook.

Evernote is best suited for:

• Document drafts - e.g. it can be an ideal place for first drafts of contracts, marketing emails, blog posts, etc.
• Receipts and invoices - Whether electronic or photos of physical receipts
• Signed contracts
• Project plans - e.g. the preliminary notes you made at the beginning.
• Random notes - include bits of information related to the project, such as screenshots of web sites similar to what you're designing or photos of locations you are scouting.
• Meeting agendas and minutes

If you want the best possible integration between Asana and Evernote, it'd be wise to follow a workflow to figure out where something goes.

Workflow

• The first step is to create a project overview note in Evernote. This needs to cover the tasks that come up in the initial brainstorm and things like primary goals, concerns, people to contact, etc.
• Start creating that project and tasks in Asana. This is the phase where things sort of overlap, and it isn't ideal. But the initial project plan in Evernote makes it easier to think through the overview of the project. Later, it also gives you more visibility of how the project progresses and changes.
• Add everything relevant to the project. It's convenient to glance through the notes in the project notebook and see all the receipts, contracts, invoices, meeting notes, etc. Be sure to tag everything, so that if all you want to see are meeting notes, you look for that tag.
• Update the project plan slowly. At this stage, Asana becomes reflective of the current state of the project, whereas Evernote includes details of "what the project is supposed to be about." It's recommended that you keep a copy of the very first draft of the project plan separately from subsequent plans so you can see if you've started to go off target.
• Archive the notebook when a project is complete. If notes are correctly tagged, get in the habit of moving them to an archive notebook. There's no point in keeping around notebooks for finished projects; instead, you should find them by tag.

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