When to use (and not use) 'Projects' in Asana

A common mistake users make with Asana is setting up more projects than are necessary. This can make it harder to find your work and see everything you have going on. I much prefer keeping everything simple and more minimal.

Firstly, I recommend thinking of projects in three different ways:

1. Actual projects - These are the actual projects you're working on. They're typically temporary and have a finite lifespan. e.g. events, clients, product launches.
2. Evergreen projects - These are areas of work you need to manage e.g. Admin work.
3. Project projects - These are projects used to manage different processes e.g. sales CRM, support tickets.

You should set up a project if you need a lot of space to plan out the work and if you need to take advantage of features like the timeline, forms and custom fields. But for smaller, mini-projects, you could create these as tasks (with subtasks) and add these to an evergreen project.

[dothedamnwork]

I'm just getting started with Asana and, naturally, watching a lot of videos on it. This one was right on time to help me understand how I can use projects and tasks. I appreciate you putting this out.

[SkyCharter]

Absolutely perfect intro to Asana projects. Now I have incentive to use Asana for more projects than just "Podcast." Thanks!!

[TheBikeFather]

I have a web design agency, and I'm coming from Trello. I used to have multiple boards for each project + an additional board called Project Tracker, where I would just list all the projects to see where we are: to-do, progress, pending, complete, etc... But this would feel a bit disjointed. So now that I'm transitioning back to Asana, I think I will take your advice on setting up clients projects as Tasks instead and that will allow me to connect these 2 pieces together. Basically have a main project Board style, with the traditional boards like In progress, pending, complete, etc.. and then each task will be a website that we build. The websites we build only take a few weeks, so I don't need all the extra bells and whistles that an actual project gives me. Quite excited about this.

[DaveLopezHB]

Great tip, Paul. I have lots of small "projects" that could easily be sub-tasks within large projects. Thanks!

[AustinCrawford-orkq]

Hey Paul great video! My company just recently got started with Asana and I can already tell we will run into an issue with overcrowding sooner rather than later. Two biggest issues is a lot of daily tasks are going unnoticed because they aren't necessarily associated with a project that we have set up.

The other issue is I am not sure what reporting function to provide to the executive team between admin console level reporting, dashboards, and portfolios. I like the idea of consolidating smaller work into task/subtask and using a "department" style project to contain them all, but then I run into the issue of subtasks not attaching themselves to the project by default and getting unrecognized in portfolio workload views.

[DrewHanna-qjgv]

Great video. Would love to see a follow-up going deeper into the use of managing external emails through Asana. Example would be would be an email from a vendor that requires a quick internal review and which generates a reply. Asana has to be more useful than forwarding an email losing track of it.

[bhartirajput]

Really love your videos- super helpful

[LJRebhan]

This is fantastic information. Clear and concise. I have started numerous Asana (how-to) videos and quickly find myself popping out after a few minutes, as it didn't address my needs. This is the first one I watched from beginning to end! I did like AND subscribe ;-) Would you please let me know the following...Am I able to use Asana to manage onboarding new clients, assign those clients to different team members and then see in a calendar view, (all) the numerous clients we're currently onboarding and have some indication as to which client(s) is assigned to each team member?

[florblume]

Hi Paul! Thanks for creating such great videos. It's helping me so much setting up processes for my team. Quick question: I notice there is no possibility to create sections within the task, is maybe something that Asana has discontinued? When I click TAB+N, nothings comes up. However I am able to see sections for task templates that were already built-in in the templates library? Any idea how to fix this?

[AlejandroChavarria-EVG]

do you have any videos highlighting when to use teams vs when to use projects?

[NatalieCarter-lfrj]

Hi Paul this is great i have a conference coming up & i want to sort the timeline can i have one prjects called Events & then the specific conference inside of that & also have many others or only 1 per project? If it is just 1 project i find there will be too many projects on the side

[LifeMax]

Thank you the videos. Go to setting up our Asana. I want to use this program to track jobsites with multiple permits. Should I set up a Project called Jobsites then set up a task for each individual permit? Then under the permit set up subtasks with the checklists of items pending to obtain each permit? What do you suggest?

[verytalljim]

Can you clarify- should every task be assigned to a "project" (even if it's a non-project like your "Admin & Accounting")? What's the disadvantage of having "orphan" tasks that are not in a project at all? What's the best practice here?

[farheenkawchali]

How to get that underline in subsection, example like planning ?

[TheBikeFather]

great video. Do you actually use Asana for the Sales CRM, instead of something like Pipedrive, OR was this just an example that is possible?

[harumianahi]

Hi Paul, love your work, thank you for your videos! I was testing multi level nested portfolio system in Asana but am running into issues with the final reporting piece. Any suggestions?

[triciahagerty]

Great videos Paul! My question as a complete newbie considering this app: Are the tasks linked? If you are in a project and there are subtasks and tasks, can you click on the task and assign it? Can you click on it and it will go back to your My Tasks board?

[Bontelucci]

Hi Paul, Thank you for the video! I am wondering if a "New Product Launch" should be broken in to different projects under a team? I followed a different video that showed how to implement a scrum style management into Asana (Backlog, Stories, To Do, In Progress etc) but it had all the Tasks in one project. My issue is they aren't organized in to pieces of the project (eg. Dashboard Design or Member Area), rather Tasks are associated with each single "Story", but the stories aren't related to a phase. Looking at your example, where each phase "Planning" "Research" etc is a different board possibly makes more sense to my brain. Any thoughts?

[HandsOnRealEstate]

If I have multiple businesses, can I make each business a project ?

[AayushGupta-pn]

How to track status of multiple projects within a team in one view ?