Asana, the popular team task management tool (reviewed in the recent 2012 task management tools market report), gained a distinctive feature during a recent company hackathon: the heart.

Jack Stahl, Asana ♥: Share Gratitude And Enthusiasm with Your Team

Today, we’re launching Hearts in Asana, a great way to express enthusiasm, offer agreement and share gratitude with your teammates. Here are a few ways to ♥ tasks, comments and attachments effectively with your team.

One of the great advantages of productivity technology is that it enables people to work without having to meet in person. However, eliminating these face-to-face interactions can dampen your team’s ability to appreciate each others’ work. People can start to treat each other like robots rather than humans.

With Hearts, it couldn’t be easier to connect as a team. When someone completes a task, just click ♥. The person who completed the task will receive an Inbox message letting him or her know how much you appreciate the hard work.

Hearting (or ‘liking’) is a simple social gesture widely implemented in many open social tools. But it is a lightweight means to pass along a confirmation of achievement, or voting in favor of something.  Here is an Asana task list in some defined project. Obviously you can get a sense of the group’s feeling of the relative importance of the various tasks: these are various bugs needing to be handled.

The passing along of social gestures can create trust, in a manner exactly equivalent to a pat on the back or a smile of support. The same chemicals are released, and the recipient of the gesture registers a greater degree of commitment to the person sending the signal. It’s brain chemistry, and one of the great findings of modern cognitive science.

In a post yesterday (see Checking off our to-dos makes us happy, and others, too), I discussed the Meade Effect, where the sense of making progress against goals was strongly correlated with happiness and the sense that time is ‘flying’. I am certain that the use of the heart in the task management context — with teams patting each other on the back for accomplishing goals — will get the full benefit of the Meade effect.