The basics

Tasks are the basic unit of action in Asana. Each task is a specific thing that you need to do.

Tasks can be organised into Projects, which are collections of tasks related to a specific goal, initiative or project. You’ll usually use Projects to organise your work and collaborate with others.

Projects can be organised into Portfolios, if you have a number of related projects that you want to keep together. You can access your Portfolios from the side bar pictured below. ⬇️

How to use it

Here are the key pages in Asana that you need to know about:

1️⃣ Home

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What it is: An overview of what’s happening in your Asana workspace

You generally won’t spend a lot of time on this page, as it just gives you a snapshot of what’s happening in your Asana.

It includes sections such as: My Priorities which shows your upcoming, overdue and completed tasks, Projects that you’re a member of, and People that you frequently collaborate with.

You can also customise this page, for example you can add widgets such as a private notepad.

2️⃣ My Tasks

This is probably the page that you’ll spend most of your time in - it’s essentially your to-do list for all of your Asana tasks. Here you can find all of your tasks that you’ve created for yourself, and tasks that are assigned to you in any projects, collectively in one place.

You can organise My Tasks however you’d like! Some people like to organise their tasks by Due Date to see the most immediate tasks first. You can also create custom sections to organise your tasks by different topics. As with Projects, you can view My Tasks as a List (this is the default) or a Board - again, use whichever layout best suits you and the way you like to work.

3️⃣ Inbox

Your Inbox is where you can see anything new happening in your workspace, e.g. if a new task is assigned to you, a new task is added to a project that you’re a member of, or if someone @mentions you.

You might want to give a thumbs up to a notification to show your colleagues that you’ve see. Or, you might want to create a Follow-up task if there’s something else that you need to do based on that task.

Once you’ve read and responded to a notification you should archive it to keep your inbox clear. Notifications can be easily archived with one click (or by using the keyboard shortcut ‘e’). They don’t disappear completely - you can always retrieve them from the Archive tab at the top.

Top Tips

Here are some of the things we’ve learned using Asana that might help you:

• Set up your My Tasks in a way that works for you. If you create custom sections, you can even use emojis in the headers to make it really obvious what your sections are for!
• Try and keep your My Tasks tidy and up to date. Nobody is watching your tasks so don’t feel embarrassed about tasks going overdue - the most important thing is to have an organised and usable space to work in.
• Always try to communicate too much rather than too little in Asana. Commenting on tasks allows everyone to be kept up to date on what’s happening. Even if nobody else is on the task, it can be useful to comment so you have a record of what’s happened.
• Don’t be afraid of changing up how projects are arranged. If others are involved in a project, it may be best to discuss it as a team first, but Asana is a flexible tool and you should take full advantage of that!
• If you have tasks that are duplicates or similar to each other, you can use the Merge Duplicates feature to combine the two. This is better than ‘completing’ or ‘deleting’ the new task as it allows everyone to track what’s happened.
• Similarly, you can make a task a subtask of another task using the three dot menu in the top right of a task, and selecting ‘Convert to → Subtask’.