Asana’s changes in the past two years to how you can view projects and portfolios can really make a difference in how you work with project tabs.
The aim of this article is to provide you with all the options you have to modify how you view your tabs.
Index
- Custom columns
- Newly added tasks adopt the values of the filter you’ve set for your view
- Adding an emoji in front of a tab name replaces the Asana icon
- Use subgroups in List view
- Use multi-sort
- Group by due date
- Most of this also works in Portfolios!
- Sort and set visibility with the Options menu
- Don’t forget to save your view
- Wrapping up
Mostly, we’ll be talking about what’s behind these buttons here:
Custom columns
You can use single select fields or Assignee as columns.
- Changing a column changes the values.
- Great to have a tab for easy assigning incoming work.
- Using single select fields allows you to easily sync columns across projects.
This was to be the central piece of my article, but since I started writing this, @Richard_Sather made a great guide for this. This is why I won’t go in-depth here, and I’d highly recommend you to check it out: https://forum.asana.com/t/forget-about-sections-group-like-a-pro/997638
You snooze, you lose, I guess.
…But wait, there’s more!
Newly added tasks adopt the values of the filter you’ve set for your view
Let’s say you’ve grouped your board view by the status field:
And you’ve filtered so you only see tasks assigned to you.
Now, adding a task to a column not only gives the task the status field value for that column, but it also assigns the task to you!
And this works for all views for all filters you have applied.
Adding an emoji in front of a tab name replaces the Asana icon
I love emojis to improve scanability.
Renaming tabs to start with an emoji replaces Asana’s default icon:
Here are a couple of ideas for (often filtered) tabs I like to use:
Overdue
Waiting
Dashboard
Complete
Use subgroups in List view
Sometimes you want to see how things are categorised just by looking at groupings.
Now you can add a second layer to groups by adding a sub-group:
Drag & drop works here as well. But you can’t drag something to groups that are not visible. Show empty groups might provide a solution.
It might clutter your view though, so maybe not do this with fields that have many values.
Use multi-sort
Use multi-sort to arrange your tasks by multiple criteria.
In this case it first sorts by due date, and then sorts all the tasks with the same due date by nr. of likes.
Group by due date
One of the most useful groups I think is to group by due date.
I especially like to use it in My tasks.
This means you can say goodbye to any rules to keep tasks in the right section!
Most of this also works in Portfolios!
Exceptions:
- Use columns because there is no board view.
- You can’t rename existing tabs, but new tabs should work.
Also, Portfolios bring other interesting options to group by:
Sort and set visibility with the Options menu
Organise what you want to show or hide in this menu and use it to change the order of how these elements appear.
Don’t forget to save your view
When modifying your views, you might want to save often, as switching tabs without saving reverts the tab to the previous state.
The Save view button will appear as soon as you’ve made changes you can save to a tab.
This will set the view for the next time you or someone else opens this tab.
Clicking the small button to the right side of Save view gives you a couple more options:
Wrapping up
Well that’s all I have for you today. I hope it’s going to help you design your tabs well.
I’d love to hear if you’ve learned something, or get feedback to what I should add or change.
Jan-Rienk Hemminga - Asana Expert @ Improving Every Day