I have a habit of believing I can keep an entire project in my head.
Winging it comes somewhat naturally to creative people. We aren’t always the most Type A group. We’re the ADHD, ADD, probably-have-TMJ-from-stress crowd who can somehow spend six hours obsessing over the smallest creative detail while completely forgetting about something else that needed to be done yesterday.
Maybe that’s part of the creative process. We jump between ideas, follow unexpected directions, and sometimes figure things out as we go. That flexibility can be useful creatively. It isn’t always particularly useful for managing a project.
So, when it came time to choose a project management system, I wanted something that would add organization without adding more work.
There are certainly plenty to choose from. Trello has its simple card-based approach, Monday.com offers a lot of customization, and Notion can seemingly be turned into just about anything you want. But I ultimately chose Asana for a much less exciting reason: I already use it every day at work.
That familiarity mattered. I didn’t want to spend more time learning how to manage a project than actually working on it. I already knew how Asana worked and, more importantly, which parts worked for me.
The calendar view is probably the biggest one.
I like being able to see the entire project laid out visually rather than looking at a long list of tasks. Longer-running tasks can sit across the top of the calendar, creating a project hierarchy, while shorter tasks can be arranged underneath them. If something changes, I can simply drag a task to another day.
That flexibility feels much closer to how I actually work.
I can also color-code different parts of the project, add notes to individual tasks, and break larger tasks into subtasks. For example, I keep projects my company does in collaboration with other brands color-coded to make them easy to differentiate, and I keep all my school tasks in blue so I can easily bypass them while I’m at work. Instead of seeing one intimidating item that says “finish project,” I can see the smaller pieces that will eventually get me there. At the same time, I can zoom out and see how all of those pieces fit together.
Setting everything up also made me realize how much information I normally carry around mentally. Deadlines, ideas, things I need to revisit, and little tasks that aren’t urgent enough to deal with yet are usually floating somewhere in the back of my mind.
Asana gives those things somewhere else to live.
I doubt I’ll ever completely stop winging it. I’m not sure I want to. Something about that flexibility works for the creative process. I always have a detailed plan, brief or storyboard, when I’m on set or in the studio, but some of my best shots come to me in the moment. But maybe that’s exactly why tools like Asana are useful. They provide just enough Type A structure to keep the rest of us in line, while leaving enough room to move things around when the creative process inevitably refuses to follow the plan.
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