A decade ago, we created Asana to help the world’s teams work together effortlessly. Our mission continues to drive everything we do, because we continue to be inspired by the work your teams do.

If you had to guess, how much time do you think you spend on manual work? Looking back, it doesn’t alway feel like a lot, because “manual work” can take so many different forms: setting up documents, routing work, creating reports—the list goes on. But manual work is a huge contributor to work about work, the busywork that takes up 60% of every workday.

In the past six months, the world—and work—has changed dramatically. Priorities have shifted, teams that once sat together everyday are distributed, and ways of operating are different. As an organization, how do you maintain alignment between people and teams in this new environment? How do you sustain clarity about what your goals are and how to achieve them? Objectives and key results (OKRs) are one way of creating clarity in an organization.

Chances are, your company and team priorities have changed since the beginning of this year. And you’re not alone—45% of global companies say their goals have changed at least once since moving to remote work. Without a clear communication strategy, it can be difficult to know how these new priorities impact individual work. Communicating team goals and aligning as a team is already hard to do when you’re working together in the same office.

Whether we’d like to admit it or not, meetings are a fact of work life. When conducted consciously, they can be a highly effective tool for sharing ideas or making decisions. Unfortunately too many of us have experienced “bad” meetings, the kind that turn into a laundry list of status updates rather than a productive meeting of the minds. So what’s a team to do when the best way for them to align is to meet in real time?

Some companies are struggling to keep up with our new normal. Research from Asana reveals nearly half of employees surveyed globally said company-wide goals had been deprioritised since remote working began, with 47 per cent saying those goals have changed at least once during that time – and 60 per cent haven’t increased communication on such issues. “I think the current new normal is coping,” says Alex Hood, CPO of Asana. “The next normal is thriving.”

Read this article in French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, or Japanese If your team has a work intake process, then you know how challenging it can be to manage requests in a timely, effective, and headache-free manner. In addition to making sure you get all of the information you need to complete the request, you also want to make sure every ask gets handled in the right order, and that no task gets lost in the shuffle. Luckily, there’s a better way.

We know from research that the average knowledge worker spends 60% of their day on “work about work” like searching for information, communicating project updates, and chasing down deliverables. It’s grinding, arduous work that’s been made even harder by the challenges of remote working, but it’s also a must-do for team leads who need to stay on top of project progress and status updates. Or is it?

Do you use your My Tasks in Asana? If not, you might be missing out on one of the easiest ways to reduce work about work. Think of My Tasks as your home base. In this view, you can see all of the tasks that are assigned to you, no matter what Team or project the tasks live in. In conjunction with your Inbox, My Tasks is designed to help you focus on and complete all of your high-impact work.