Help w/ time tracking / monitoring workload

Hi there!
I am trying to self-serve and find answers on Asana’s support pages but not getting anywhere. I want my team to learn how to create templates for approximate time it takes to complete common tasks (almost a “rate card” situation). As CMO, it is critical that I have visibility to their workloads and the time function helps to illustrate this. For example, if my photographer has a stack of 20 tasks due in one week, and all take 3 hours, then he is overbudget on time for the week. How do I see this view?
My team has struggled to refine / use / consistently implement this.
Any tips?

Hi there, are you on Premium or Business account?

If you are on Business account you can use the Workload feature. Unfortunately you need to go through Portfolios to work (don’t ask why, no one knows)

  1. Create your projects
  2. Create a custom field where you will track workload for each task
  3. Add all projects in a Portfolio
  4. Go to the Portfolio / Workload
  5. Set up the maximum workload per person in the portfolio
  6. Then as you assign tasks to each person and you populate the field in the project - in the Portfolio you will see if they are over limit, how much they have left, etc.

Some things to consider
If you have a task which needs 5 hours but you are ok for it to be finished over 5 days, Asana will calculate 1 hour per day as workload and thus will show each day 7 hours free (assuming 8 hour workday)
We personally tried and not use it at the moment as it is mostly useless when things become more complex, you need to manually add each project to the portfolio, etc.
You can see https://minimalist-work.com/ by @Bastien_Siebman which provides some automation in that respect.

If you are on a premium account you only have workarounds available.
One option is to have a project where:

  1. You add a custom field hours
  2. You create a task for each person
  3. In the custom field you add their maximum time allowed
  4. Underneath you create a task for each actual task then need to do, but in the field you add the time the task will take with a “-” in front
    Asana will calculate and deduct the task value from the allowance per person
    This is veeeery manual and it takes a lot of work, as you need to add new task for allowance say once per week for each person and make sure their relevant tasks show underneath.

Third option is an external tool for time tracking / workload tracking, which I must say is the best option.

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Welcome to the Asana Community Forum @anon10538426!

Just adding to what @IvanStaykov mentioned, if you are interested, you can also find more information about our Workload feature in this article:

and you can see the full list of time tracking integrations here:

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Hi there,

Try to adapt custom fields in Asana or consider integration with Everhour.

  • project = period (lets say a week)
  • section/column = employee
  • estimate = time per task for this week

1 - Use estimates in Asana

Keep adding tasks and you’ll see everyone’s weekly total. If, say, the total goes beyond the standard 40 hours, there is a high chance that the person is overbooked. The downside of this approach is that the same task can stretch over several weeks and you’d like to compare original estimate with the time spent, rather then update it weekly for capacity planning.

2 - Use Schedule feature in Everhour

Create assignments and specify who, when and for how long will work on a particular task. The app will prompt you if the planned time is beyond the capacity of the employee. In addition, in the future you will be able to analyze original estimate vs. the actual spent.