Insomnia gets me every once and a while. Usually I am able to use it to my benefit. Recently, I had one of those nights and I found Hill 88.

I adore Asana. I use it with my interns. I use it for my business and with my own VA. I use it with clients, whether they do or not. It is intuitive to me and I love it. Asana is a project management and collaboration tool that allows individuals and teams to work more effectively and efficiently.

From iTunes:

Asana is the easiest way for teams to track their work and get results. From tasks and projects to conversations and notifications, Asana enables teams to move work from start to finish. It’s simple to get started, but powerful enough to run your entire business. And it’s free.

QUICKLY ADD & EDIT TASKS ON THE GO

• Create tasks, to-dos, reminders, and requests from anywhere in the app
• Add due dates, assignees, followers, details, and files to your tasks
• Comment on tasks from anywhere
• Share images directly to Asana, from other apps

TRACK ALL OF YOUR WORK

• View and organize your task list every time you open Asana
• See your Favorites and your full list of teams and projects
• Organize tasks into projects to track your team’s work from start to finish
• Swipe right to quickly complete tasks and notify your team that your work is finished
• Search across all of your work to find the info you need quickly

COMMUNICATE IN ASANA

• Use conversations to make announcements to your team, ask a question in a project, or comment on a single task
• Get notifications in Inbox about only the projects, tasks, and conversations you’re following
• Send a teammate a quick reply with a heart or a comment directly from Inbox

FREE UNLIMITED USAGE

• Add tasks, projects, comments, conversations, and attachments for free—for teams up to 15 people

How do I use it? Each client has her own workspace, and I have my own workspace for my intern and my VA, as well as a workspace for my own private projects and tasks. I just flip between workspaces as I work.

It has so much functionality that I get really passionate talking about it. And, thus, as a seasoned user of this powerful tool, using the words love and adore. It has made me a more effective VA, hands down. And, I love that I keep learning new ways to utilize it. One of the ways we have implemented it has been to use it as a CRM with one  of my client’s highest level clients. Each high level client is a master task within a project, then we have routine subtasks for each one. This allows us to give the red-glove service and nurturing those clients expect and deserve. A little unorthodox, but it works really, really well. Asana can handle just about anything I throw at it with grace and ease.

I only had one problem with Asana. As a VA, it is helpful when I sit down to do my monthly, weekly, and daily planning, that I see ALL of my tasks across all of my workspaces. Asana cannot handle this. Up until recently, that caused a little more work for me. I had to change workspaces as I planned, to get the picture of all of the project demands during a given time. I have made the suggestion that Asana implement this in a future release, but it was not helping me tackle things the way I wanted.

I decided to see if anyone else wanted this feature, and what they were doing about it. That is when, one sleepless night, I found Hill 88 Pro.

While Hill 88 Pro does not support the Asana Inbox feature, guess what it does do? It allows me to see all of my tasks across workspaces. Yippeeeee!

From iTunes:

Hill88 is a truly native Asana client for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch that’s blazing fast and easy to use, giving you all the power you need to manage your Asana tasks while on the go. A unified task list combined with powerful filters, search and task edit keeps the power of Asana at your fingertips. At all times – even when you are offline.

Key Features:

• Create, edit, prioritize and comment tasks on-the-go
• Unified task list across all workspaces
• Manage workspaces (edit name only due to Asana’s API limitations)
• Manage projects (create, edit and delete)
• Manage tags (create and edit)
• Work offline and stay synchronized with Asana
• Search in real-time through all your task information (no global search yet)
• Powerful quick filters and quick sorting
• Attachments

After downloading and beginning to use Hill 88 Pro, I have found that just having that cross-workspace task list is enough for me to be over the moon. It has cut my weekly client work planning time in half and has made my morning routine of previewing the day a snap, and speeded up my end-of-day planning for the next workday, as well. I can easily see every task across my own business and for each of my clients so that I can chunk according to my energy levels as well as according to the clients themselves. Hill 88 Pro and I are just getting started, but I am excited about the possibilities for productivity, collaboration and structure now that I have added this tool to my tool belt.

What productivity and collaboration tools do you love?