Having the ability to add estimated time for task completion would be great, and must have tool for planning out the projects (how many man hours they could take, and when they would be completed). Also you can plan out accordingly your month, week, day…and complete your agenda for coming days.
This would be a great tool to get a general prospective on what is your time budget and what is your want/wish/must do time requirements. You could modify or drop some of the less important tasks just because you don’t have the time for them and there are other more important tasks.
Time is like money (perhaps more important) so we know how much we have in our time bank account, but we don’t see the time prices of the tasks we plan to do. So by seeing the time price we would decide better what is more important and desirable, and turn down what is less important. This future will turn ASANA from a collection of infinite tasks listings into a structured project budgeting, planning and realization through seeing the availability and desirability clearly. Its like Balance sheet and Profit and Loss statement for our tasks.
I got inspired by this TED talk on people overwhelmed by infinite tasks that may be not so important: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity: David Allen at TEDxClaremontColleges
On the other hand another user requested timer on tasks, by having this future also we would be able to see how accurate the estimations where and make adjustments for the future estimations.
@Ion_Mura You make some very good suggestions. Their are a variety of approaches to this all the way from using time integrations Asana Apps and Integrations • Asana to custom fields in the premium addition. Asana has a very good Advanced Search engine that allows many Favorite reports for the query of data. They also of course have a CSV file export feature that I hired a programmer to make a conversion report for Windows users and donated it to the community. I put a couple custom fields for time in it to be a very basic time tool. CSV To Asana Simple List Generator- My Gift To Community - #32 by James_Carl I have communicated a little with Asana about how powerful of report writer could be made out of their existing Advanced Search and the CSV export. I had a programmer write the export converter from Upworks and it was very inexpensive. So in conclusion, the ideas you are expressing can be done but may need a smoother integration in the future.
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I think this would be a great future addition, @Ion_Mura. A colleague of mine from a different team has been looking at Asana and asked me to talk her through it. The only sticking point for her was the ability to plan time allocation over a whole project in advance, and have that time shift as deadlines are moved. So I would add that it would also be beneficial to have dynamic due dates, so that if you changed the due date of a single task, it altered the overall project due date accordingly.
@Mark_Hudson
That’s a great point, once you can plan your projects ahead then you need to adjust them accordingly if a task is getting delayed or gets done earlier. And would be also great to apply this on your or your team member agenda, and be able to see it by day, week, month and so on that would create a dynamic schedule that can be flexible for real live situations. As a side feature there could be some kind of analytics of how accurate the estimation was.
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@James_Carl thank you for your tips, this definitely helps. By going through your links I saw that Hourstack pretty much addressed the agenda idea with time planning, and it’s really great they have integration with ASANA.I will explore it further to see if this will make up for the time tool I was looking for.
I will definitely give it a try with custom fields and export idea too. This all can be a good compromise until / if ASANA decides to make it a built in feature. Thank you.
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Yes totally agree with this! The timeline feature is great however as mentioned I would like a way to actually track time against each task. I’m using toggl for time tracking but what I would like to see is a time estimation field for each task. I’m using custom fields for this but you can’t easily add up the total time required to finish a project. Furthermore, for each member of my team I would like to put in their weekly work hours, so if they work 40 hours a week and we add time estimates to each task, this will tell us if if is even feasible for the work to be completed on time.
Thank you for sharing the amazing video - tons of useful tips and the fresh approach to productivity.
Concerning the question of time price of the task, in TMetric that integrates with Asana it is visible in task summary report.