How do people manage one-off tasks in asana?

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Imagine the scenario: you have all your projects perfectly set up, and you feel like an Asana-Jedi as tasks from a dozen different projects and portfolios flow effortlessly into your “My Tasks” view and you never NEVER miss a deadline… then someone says “Would you mind getting a leaving card for Beryl?” Well of course you love Beryl (everyone does) and you’d be very happy to find the perfect leaving card for her… but where do you put the task?! It doesn’t exactly fit in with your beautifully organised “Global engagement strategy” project (timeline view with every dependency lovingly mapped out), or the highly efficient “Social asset design workflow” project (board view of course, with NSA-levels of AI automation). You could set up a “Staff farewells project” and add it as a task there, but that seems a little overkill. There must be way to do it without having to resort to (shock-horror) POST-IT NOTES!

Then the boss asks if you could send her the strategic plan from 5 years ago (there’s a stock-photo of someone in it that looks the spitting image of her personal trainer and she wants to show her!)

Of course there are multiple ways to manage these kinds of one-off, non-project tasks, but I’m curious to see the ingenious ways Asana forumites tackle them.

p.s. Beryl says the people with the most efficient and streamlined solutions are invited for cake in the staff room on Friday…

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I created a project just for one-off projects for this. It is a kanban board that is labeled, “Queue”, “In Progress” “Approval” and “Complete” – it’s not perfect but it at least sends me reminders to follow up on these one-off tasks.

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I put them in My Tasks. Sometimes those are one-off tasks, sometimes they become mini-projects.

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First, @Marc_Thompson, under no authority I’m awarding you Best-Written-Post-as-Engaging-Short-Story prize for 2025!

I generally handle these in My Tasks in one of my existing sections there (see my Tips and Tricks > Forum Leaders tips Your Simple (or Advanced) Strategy for Asana’s My Tasks). If you prefer, you could create a One Offs section there too.

Or create a One Offs project if you like to have a task always in a project. A project like this is perfectly legit!

Thanks,

Larry

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We have projects for everything. Every “function” (marketing, sales, ops, finance, hr) has at least:

  • a weekly meeting project (agenda of the meeting)
  • an idea project (ideas ^^)
  • an Inbox project (things to do)
  • a toolbox (to store knowledge and decisions)

I almost never leave a task outside of a project