We know a post-email world is coming. Asana is the first credible post-email application.
— Justin Rosenstein
Just as the mind emerges from the actions of individual neurons and their cooperation, the success of an organization emerges not only from its individual participants, but also from the interplay between them.
The human brain is a product of natural selection. In the face of scarcity, our hominid great-great-uncles were unable to compete against our sapient great-great-grandparents' abilities to build more elaborate mental models and orchestrate their bodies' movements in more sophisticated ways.
When leaders know how to lead great meetings, there's less time wasted and less frustration. We have more energy to do the work that matters, realize our full potential, and do great things.
Meetings get a bad rap, and deservedly so - most are disorganized and distracted. But they can be a critical tool for getting your team on the same page.
We who work in technology have nurtured an especially rare gift: the opportunity to effect change at an unprecedented scale and rate. Technology, community, and capitalism combine to make Silicon Valley the potential epicenter of vast positive change.
If you look at the history of communication, new technologies like the phone and e-mail didn't just let people do things faster; it fundamentally changed the scope of the kinds of projects people dared to take on.
People spend an enormous amount of time in their inboxes, compulsively checking, and it's slow, distracting, and inefficient. It's almost a counterproductivity tool.
Asana and complementary services are bringing the evolved team brain to the entire world. In great companies like Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, Foursquare, and LinkedIn, people already add information to and extract insight from these systems much the same way our hands and brain exchange signals.
Working together in concert more smoothly not only helps us move more quickly; it changes the nature of what we can undertake. When we have the confidence that we can orchestrate the group effort required to realize them, we dare bigger dreams.
When topics are complex and meaty, don't create a never-ending email thread. It's amazing how much time people waste composing and reading carefully-worded essays, when a 5 minute in-person chat would resolve the whole thing.
Life is short, youth is finite, and opportunities endless. Have you found the intersection of your passion and the potential for world-shaping positive impact? If you don't have a great idea of your own, there are plenty of great teams that need you - unknown startups and established teams in giant companies alike.
Whether you're a programming prodigy or the office manager holding it all together, technology empowers small groups of passionate people with an astonishing degree of leverage to make the world a better place.
When I ask people how much time they spend not doing their job - time spent on 'work-about-work' or phone calls or e-mails - people regularly tell me 60, or even 90 percent. So if Asana could take that down closer to zero, we could potentially double the effectiveness of humanity.
We could go work on curing cancer. We could go work on building spaceships. We could go work on art projects. What's fun about working at Asana is we get to work on all of them at the same time.
In a knowledge economy, natural selection favors organizations that can most effectively harness and coordinate collective intellectual energy and creative capacity.
In general, good tools for staying in sync just haven't been built and made available to the world.
Know when to email vs. when to meet. Logistics are best handled over a non-immediate communication channel like email or Asana tasks. Detailed status meetings will suck the life out of your day.
I do not doubt that services like social games and coupons bring delight to people's lives, and I mean no disrespect to the hard work that has made them possible. But in the face of threats to humanity's future on the one hand and the extraordinary potential of mankind on the other, at some point we must ask: are we capable of more?
Historically, software for business was seen as unsexy because the products were seen as so poor - they provided such a poor user experience.
