Why Asana will win

Over the weekend, Conversocial got access to the Asana beta, and I've been playing with it for the last few days. We've generally found that most project management / task management tools get used excitedly at first, then tend to tail off, or end up being half used along with multiple other systems. Asana is the first tool I've seen that has the chance to become our 100% tool. Why? It covers all of my task management needs - personally, as well as collaboratively. They straight away split the tool into personal and work projects, allowing you to use it as your private to-do list manager, as well as for work to-dos, assigning to-dos for team members etc. It all happens in a single screen that never needs re-loading, with super fast javascript and ajax allowing it to run almost as a desktop app. When a colleague adds items or comments, they show up instantly on your screen.

I've ended up transferring all my to-dos, otherwise stored in Things on my desktop, into Asana; and quickly started using it for managing our marketing, admin, and management projects. The project and tagging system is simple but highly effective, allowing easy management of large lists distributed across teams and projects; and keyboard shortcuts, like gmail, make it extremely fast for power users with minimal learning required. It may even become our dev PM tool. Oh - and it lets me add tasks by email, super useful for my personal to-dos (before, I would email myself then manually add it to Things).

Unlike any other tools we've used, Asana now remains permanently open on one of my screens, with pretty much constant use throughout the day - just like my gmail window. It's the first task/project management tool to do that for me. It's still in Beta, and certainly needs a lot more work; but I see this as a tool that will gain a permanent place on our desktops.