These days, when the internet has gradually become overloaded with incredible stuff, it has become even more difficult concentrating on one’s project particularly when teams are involved.

Breaking up a project into small constituent tasks is a good idea, but only if there’s a neat solution available which can manage the mundane activities of tracking timeliness, status, tags, attachments, etc., in one easy to use interface. And that’s exactly what today’s free service asana.com aims to achieve.

Named after Yoga practice, the site is aimed at providing simplicity in creating and managing to-do lists and can be useful for personal purposes, working on projects with classmates, or on a combined homework, etc.

The registration is free and login starts with a video tutorial which is short, but effectively puts across the functionality and site’s structure. Start with creating a workspace which can be different for different purposes for which Asana can be used. Some pre-defined workspaces include school, non-profit, personal, team, etc., which can be used to manage different teams at the same time.

Workspace wizard is launched automatically the first time and can be accessed later using the left side panel using the drop-down at the bottom. Under workspaces, there are projects within which tasks can be added. Like workspaces, projects can be added from the left side panel along with adding members through an email invitation to join Asana — much like social networking invites. Adding tasks under a defined project is as easy as entering text in a notepad or a word processor.

Tasks can be grouped under custom-defined priorities and can be dragged easily from one priority to another or can be marked as complete using a check box. All this activity takes place in the centre pane, which works quite efficiently even over slow connections thanks to the snappy interface which is expected in a user-friendly and modern task manager.

Expanding a task using a right-arrow that appears when mouse is hovered over a task reveals task detail pane. Here’s were most of the productive work takes place as task notes can be entered and tasks can be assigned to an existing member or to anyone who is not defined as a project member yet. Other details such as due date, tags and attachments can be added along with some other useful features, such as adding task followers who then get regular updates as and when a task is updated. Lastly, there’s an activity feed section that shows all that’s been happening with the task such as its assignments, comments and completion, etc.

Asana has very tight email integration as well. New tasks can be created by sending email to Asana email address from predefined email addresses and daily project summary can be received as well. Same is the case with task assignees who can respond to the assigned tasks without having to log in. This ensures that Asana is not used as just another tracking tool for some fancy management theory implementation about work and productivity management, but rather it remains open and customisable. Given the keyboard friendly responsive user-interface and feature rich functionality, Asana has found many a uses apart from personal or team management such as recruitment and issue-tracking. Asana also makes it easy to sync due dates of tasks with Outlook calendar which again is a benefit as there’s a lot of time saved in otherwise manual effort of keeping tasks, completion cent per cent and creating calendar events manually in Outlook.

Designed from ground-up, Asana aims to be the desktop for those who want to get important things done as compared to sites such as Facebook, which has become desktop for those who want to have some idle surfing time. Interestingly, the Asana is founded by Facebook co-founder and there’s constant evolution and improvements coming up in it in the future. With options such as setting up reoccurring tasks, reminders, iPhone and Chrome apps. Etc., Asana makes sure that the work gets done.