Since the major layoffs that shook the country in the recent recession, millions of American – half being women – have started to change the traditional notions of how and where work is done. Working parents now compose 39.6 percent of this demographic – 5.4 million strong and demanding attention. A new software called Asana is giving them just that.
Asana is an online collaboration and task management platform based on the principle that busy lives should also be balanced lives. This business was co-founded in 2008 by Justin Rosenstein and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who has recently made headlines by advocating for a balance between work and social life. In an article he penned published by Medium, Moskovitz writes, “We’ve worked hard to build a culture at Asana where people don’t work too hard… We are maximizing our velocity and our happiness at the same time.”
Via their new software, Asana addresses common obstacles of parents who work from home. With its ability to expedite communication and its intuitively-navigated design, Asana is a cure-all for the common work-from-home complaint of having zero access to sensitive company documents. Through its team conversation, easy attachment and direct messaging services, Asana allows sensitive work documents to be shared swiftly and securely.
Additionally, two of the top three complaints of people working from home were family-related. The top-listed obstacle, reported by a whopping 59 percent by 24,000 people surveyed from 95 nations, was attention demanded by children and family. The other, cited by 39 percent, accounted for disruptions from children and family.
Asana works to free up its users’ time and to empower employees with a newfound efficiency that allows parents working at home to more effectively tend to their families. Fortune journalist Heather Clancey describes Asana as an app prescription for teams that “spend 90% of its time requesting status updates, chasing deadlines, or trying to remember exactly who’s responsible for what—leaving just 10% of the workday for actual work.”
Asana, a name derived from a Sanskrit word describing a yoga pose, continues its efforts to better balance the lives of its users through its blog. On their blog, they have published two articles dedicated to their users working from home. You can read them here and here.
Through its email-free, all-in-one organization space for project building, task management and team communication, Asana is equipping working mothers and fathers alike with more free time. Thanks to its balance-focused approach, parents across the country have Asana to thank for being better able to make memories with and care for their children.
