I’m a consultant and often have more than one client at a time, so I use Asana to keep my own tasks organized and separated by project/client. It’s great when a client uses Asana and I can assign tasks to colleagues, but not everyone does. And since my placement with a client is temporary, I’m not really in a position to demand platform adoption.
So it would be incredibly useful to be able to assign a task to a non-user. That way, even if I have to contact them separately outside of Asana, I would at least have my own record of who I have assigned tasks to. It also would allow me to continue using Asana for all my tasks for all clients. As it stands, it’s difficult to track assignees for only some projects/tasks, or to track tasks in separate places for Asana users and non-Asana users, and I’m considering just using an Excel spreadsheet or something.
You can use a trick of many email systems (Gmail, others) that I wrote about here:
You’d need to create an Asana account for each one, but you’d manage them all and all their notifications (if you set those up) will go to your email.
That allows you to use the Asana Assignee feature which is best. Other workarounds not requiring this “hack” won’t use the Assignee field so they’re not as good, but you could use Asana Tags or Custom Fields instead.
Hope that helps,
Larry
Depending on what plan you have you could use customized fields that are set as a text field. You could then just Type in the person you are assigning the task to. So you wouldn’t be doing it under the default assign field but a new one you created that you can type what ever you wish. If you are on the free plan, and can’t create customized fields, there is a preset field for most projects called Tags. You could add this field to the project and you can type in the assignee into the field.
@brandonhatton, If using a Custom Field, I’d recommend type Dropdown to constrain the choices and avoid the potential for misspellings/duplicates. Dropdowns also offer grouping in the Sort menu.