Asana vs IRC

Asana has fantastic mechanisms for dealing with team collaboration. Not only can tasks be assigned to team members, but Asana lets users follow tasks and use hyperlinks to refer to team members within a task.

The Asana task workflow within a project is broken down into "Today," "Upcoming," and "Later." The tasks themselves have the status of either done or not done. There is also a subtask feature to group tasks together. Tasks can be assigned to other team members and are stored in the "Inbox" view for processing. This replaces email for some team communication.

Teams can have private (only visible to project members) and public (visible to anyone in the team) projects. Each member can also have their own personal projects.

Tasks can be viewed in list and calendar views. It's possible to display only the tasks assigned to the user or tasks organized by project or team. Single tasks can exist in multiple projects. Lists of tasks can be divided into sections and organized in many different ways – tasks that still have to be done, tasks that have been completed, by due date, by assignee, by popularity, etc.

Expanding a task will allow adding things like subtasks, tags, and attachments, as well as comments. Users can also subscribe to a task via RSS from this view. There's a separate view specifically for attachments.

Search lets you find what you’re looking for quickly.

The tagging system enables project managers to easily filter tasks.

There are many videos, tutorials, and reference documents to help you get up and running.

Asana provides a list view and a Kanban view which can be selected if a new project is created.

Keyboard shortcuts all involve the Tab key, so it is unlikely that they will interfere with shortcuts that have already been established.

It's possible to have tasks appear in a Slack channel.

The IRC protocol is public and open, it is mature and stable, and has been implemented in numerous projects. This means that it can be used freely, for both open-source and commercial projects.

IRC offers choice. Choice in clients (mobile, desktop, web), in scripts those clients run, in servers and features those servers have. You can even set up your own server.

Compared to other common solutions, IRC can be ignored when you are occupied doing something else. Most clients don't pester you with sounds or distracting visuals.

Every notable IRC client supports mentions - notifying you when your name is mentioned in the chat. The mentions in IRC are comparably better than Discord. Mentions used in Discord are easily abused; this doesn't happen in IRC. If someone's talking about you, you get a notification in IRC. This doesn't happen in something like Discord.

IRC has been around since 1988, so there is a ton of existing software to work with it. Everything from clients, to chat bots, to bouncers is already built.

You can choose your favorite server for an IRC network.

No need to sign up for access, confirm your e-mail address. Just choose a nickname and you're done.

IRC is user friendly if you use something like hexchat or kiwi webchat.

Direct Client-to-Client allows users to share files in a similar way to torrenting.

Twitter hashtags came from IRC channel names.