Dear Necat Bolpaça (Asana Bookmarklet)

Dear Necat Bolpaça,

Thank you for being you - a wonderful sharing creature who has created something for themselves but shared it with the world. Because of your generosity, my daily life has been made much, much happier. Thank you in particular for the Google Chrome Bookmarklet that you created - I called my version Managing Sections in Asana.

It’s funny how it is the small things that really can make a difference. I’ve been extremely happy to FINALLY have found my way to a task management system that works for me. Not that it is perfect and I never misjudge a timeline or forget a piece of the project puzzle. But that I have committed to one place to have all my projects and tasks and that I use it regularly to organize and prioritize my work and tasks. I don’t get it right all of the time - it can be tough to form this habit. I’m still working on it for the last 20 years. Committing to one task list also makes it really overwhelming at times - because the list always gets longer and we’ll never really get to doing it all.

I manage my tasks in Asana by using Projects as a top-level of the organizational hierarchy which are my clients, my business, my products I’m working on, and my personal tasks. Within Projects I use Sections to categorize and group tasks together. I also use a Project called Big Rocks that I add tasks to as a secondary project to their original, which helps me organize and call out the Big Rocks I’m working on. When I look at the Big Rocks project, I am grouping by the other Projects that the tasks are in, so I see my Big Rocks organized by client or project. Something like this:

You might be able to imagine that this just can get really long, with a lot of sections and tasks in the hierarchies. Like this:

Lots of scrolling to get to the bottom of these lists. Now technically this really shouldn’t be this long. I need to take some time to prioritize my Big Rocks and demote some tasks. See, I don’t do this perfectly all the time.

But what I really really really wanted to do was to be able to collapse all of my Sections so that I could just expand one at a time - the one I would use for my focused work time at any moment.

I’ve been dabbling with coding and creating apps for the first time, which has been super fun, and I started to go down that route…but then a google search led me to your reply on an Asana forum topic from someone who wanted the same functionality as me. I had never heard of bookmarklets before - these little pieces of code that you add as a “bookmark” in your chrome browser.

Now I have a beautiful little button in my browser that does exactly what I need - to collapse the sections in Asana which in turn collapses all that noise from my mind, letting me focus on one project/task at a time.

Thank you, Necat Bolpaça. Your generosity has reached someone on the other side of the world and made their life a little better every day.

Peace,

Emily