In recent years, their teams and projects became bigger in adding new people, aka resources. So we faced the necessity of paying more attention to tracking remote teams’ days off and planning more team calls during the working week.
So we found a way out of both challenges by using Google Calendar integration with Asana.
What was done:
- We have created two boards: on the of them, the task was used to document a day off/vacation or sick day (start and due dates of these tasks showing the time frames of the teammate’s absence); another board was built in a following way: one task - one team call with the subtasks as call agenda action items/notes.
- Both boards were integrated via the “Synced to calendar” feature.
- Ultimately, we could see teammates’ availability in Google Calendar (not on a day off), and schedule teams’ calls accordingly.
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Hi there! This is great info, thank you so much for sharing. We have a separate, shared Google calendar for our team that we track PTO, ProDev, etc. to keep this visible. I am curious if you use the workload feature in Asana currently? If you do, has your team found a solid way of tracking days off in Asana to help with scheduling of tasks? When scheduling tasks now, I reference our overall workload and our shared Google Calendar. It would be awesome to find a way to seamlessly integrate days away from the office in Asana and have it visible in Workload. Here is my email if it’s easier to connect directly: jennifer.scott@opensesame.com - thank you again!
@Jenny_Scott thank you for the feedback!
Unfortunately, at the moment our team doesn’t use Workloads.
@Julien_RENAUD @Arthur_BEGOU maybe we should export our PTO project as a calendar?
Hi everyone,
I want to share something I’ve been working on that solved a long-standing frustration for me with these two old-fashioned solutions.
Like many of you, I use Asana for project management and Google Calendar for scheduling. The problem? I’d start each morning looking at two separate tools, manually deciding which Asana tasks to tackle and when. And on the other hand I also had meetings, which are a must, but not a tasks. I tried every planning system out there - from elaborate Notion setups to dedicated time-blocking apps. They were either too complex to maintain or too simple to be useful.
Then I realized: the calendar already shows when I’m free and when I’m in meetings. If my tasks lived there too, I’d have one view of my entire day.
So I built a tool that does exactly this:
What it does:
- Syncs your tasks from an Asana project (or “My Tasks”) to Google Calendar as all-day events on their due date
- Smart matching: if your Asana task is “1-1 with Ann” and your calendar has “Ann / weekly sync” - it links them automatically instead of creating a duplicate
- Bidirectional: move an event to a different day on your calendar → the due date updates in Asana
- AI daily planning (optional): suggests time blocks in Calendar for unscheduled tasks based on your free time and estimated urgency/importance.
- Status emojis on calendar events: completed, high priority, backlog
- Auto-syncs every 10 minutes
Why I love using it:
- I plan my day and week in one place (calendar) instead of juggling tabs
- When I need to reschedule a task, I just drag it - doesn’t matter if I do it in Asana or Calendar, it syncs both ways
- Weekly retrospective is trivial: calendar shows tasks AND meetings, with status emojis
- Low-priority items don’t disappear - they sit on their due date as all-day events, visible but not blocking my schedule
- Calendar visibility is under control - time blocks can be private, public or by default.
Safety: It only creates/modifies events it created. Your existing calendar events and meeting invites are never touched. Your Asana tasks never deleted, only due dates can be changed.
Would love feedback from fellow Asana users. What would make this more useful for your workflow?
