My word for 2025 is “Community” and I have been meeting many solopreneurs and small business entrepreneurs through the communities that I joined. At a recent event, one solopreneur asked about applying project management to solopreneurship and another asked about using Asana solo, since most of the Asana documentation focuses on teams.
I pointed them to the Kestrel Omnitech 1-hour online course on project management for solopreneurs and small business entrepreneurs [1]. New project management tools are always coming out. To stay evergreen, that course doesn't recommend any specific tool. So, this blog post will suggest how a solopreneur could leverage the free tier of Asana.
What is Asana?
Asana is a collaborative work management platform with a web interface, desktop app, and phone app, making it easy to use anywhere. In January 2025, Asana calls their free tier “Personal” [2], though it also accommodates small teams. The higher tiers offer functionality geared towards larger teams and organizations. This tiered system benefits a solopreneur because they can keep using the same tool if their company grows and they need more advanced collaboration features.
Learning to use the Asana tool
If you want to get a basic rundown of Asana, they offer a 2-hour self-paced training to get their “Asana Foundation Skill Badge” [3]. It orders their videos and articles into a logical sequence, with examples and exercises. Note: it assumes you work with a team and covers a lot of paid tier functionality. If you are experienced with project management tools and prefer to skip the 2hr course, then the videos + articles linked in the References section below will help you get up to speed quickly. At minimum, Asana newbies should watch the 3 videos on these topics:
Getting started with Asana (note that Portfolios are not part of the free tier) [4]
Navigating the Asana user interface [5]
Work graph model: Instead of a 1-to-1 hierarchy relationship, you can have 1-to-many relationships (such as 1 task being part of multiple projects) [6]
Aspirations --> business goals --> projects
Start with your aspirations for your business. Figure out what goals would support those aspirations. Then, in Asana, create projects [7] to support those goals. I find starting with a blank project using List view easiest, but you might find their templates helpful.
Aside from your exciting projects, it’s helpful to create a project for your fiscal year (FY) administrative work. It should contain tasks for: tax preparation, review of each month’s bank statements, invoicing clients, insurance renewals, etc. This can serve as an annual template to help you remember all the boring bits that need to be done & when to start them. Note that custom template creation is an Asana paid feature - in the free version you would make a copy of the project and reset field values manually (multi-select helps [8]).
Highlighting what requires near-term focus
As a solopreneur, you have limited bandwidth. So, you have to decide what projects to focus on in the next month or quarter. Those projects would go on your Asana "starred" list. The FY admin project should also go on your starred list.
Organizing projects and tasks
Within the projects, you can create sections [4]. 2 useful options to use sections are:
As a hierarchy level, helping you to group together a set of related tasks. E.g. project "New workshop" might have sections: Planning, Research, Module Development, Audience testing, Bookings. This is typically used with List view.
As stages of work in a workflow, when all tasks in the project go through the same phases: e.g. To Do, In Progress, Final Review, Done. This is typically used with Board view.
Then you would go project-by-project and brainstorm as many tasks as you can think of, inputting the tasks into Asana [9]. If you already have a spreadsheet of tasks, CSV files can be imported into Asana projects [10]. A good rule of thumb for scoping tasks: make it something actionable that will take 0.5 days to 1 week of work. Subtasks can be helpful to clarify what needs to be done within larger tasks, reducing procrastination due to intimidation. If a task could belong to multiple projects, use the multi-homing functionality of Asana [11] to associate it with the relevant projects, so that they all stay in sync.
As a solopreneur, you would be the assignee for all the tasks. You can use multi-select [8] to assign everything to yourself quickly.
Taking an agile approach
A useful project management tool for a solopreneur allows you to see all the work, what to do next, and what might make sense to outsource. Lightweight tracking with a little bit of structure can go a long way. Solopreneurs have the benefit of being very nimble compared to large companies. So, I recommend taking an agile approach. This means listing the work you have visibility of, then picking a small number of tasks to work on next based on priority and setting their due dates when you pick them. You might also give a later task its due date up front if there is a hard deadline for that task.
Based on how dynamic your work is, choose a frequent interval (e.g. daily to weekly) to look through your starred (near-term priority) projects to add/adjust due dates or add new tasks . At a less frequent interval (e.g. weekly to monthly), look through your non-starred projects to see if any need to be promoted to near-term projects.
Also, choose an interval (e.g. 2 weeks to quarterly) to reflect on how you can improve your way of working. This may involve tweaks to how you organize your projects or tasks in Asana. I’ve written about the importance of retrospectives for teams [12], and it is likewise important for solopreneurs to regularly reflect on how to become more effective and efficient.
Seeing how all your upcoming tasks come together
Once you have your projects organized into tasks with some due dates assigned, you can see how they all stack up by going to the “My Tasks” view. In “My Tasks”, you can see if you were overly ambitious when setting due dates. If so, re-balance your workload.
What paid functionality could make sense for a solopreneur?
If your work requires a higher level of formal tracking or automation, some features that could be useful to a solopreneur in the Starter paid tier of Asana [2] are Timeline and Gantt views, start dates & times, milestones, custom fields [13], custom templates, project dashboards, automated workflows, and Asana AI [14].
When I did the Asana free trial, this included the paid feature-set, presumably so one would use those features and not want to give them up. Being able to tie my projects to my business goals in the tool was nice, but when you’re solo it’s not worth the cost of jumping 2 levels to the Advanced paid tier. Having the goal in the tool is more impactful for large teams to help them stay aligned.
Conclusion
Asana can be a nice tool for solopreneurs to organize their work into projects that support their business goals and aspirations. The Personal (free) tier of Asana has most of the functionality a solopreneur needs to get started. Helpful training material from Asana is linked in the References section below.
If you want more detailed guidance on how to use project management principles to help you chart a path from where you are to the aspirations you have for your small business, the Kestrel Omnitech online course on project management for solopreneurs and small business entrepreneurs distills it down to 1 hour of videos. The course also provides exercises for you to apply what you’ve learned directly to your business. The course is tool-agnostic, so you can pair it with this blog post to organize your projects using Asana.
References
[6] Work graph model
[13] Custom fields
[14] Asana AI.
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