Asana is an amazing tool 
.
But it doesn’t, and won’t, do it all. That’s why sometimes you need to improve it yourself. There are a lot of possibilities: web-based tools, reactive or passive automations, AppComponents…
Let’s clarify the possibilities and share a few examples!
Note: all of those will require a developer. At iDO, we can help.
Web-based tools
To put it simply, as a user, you visit a webpage, login with your Asana account, and the website does something for you.
Our service templana.com or our iDO tools on minimalist-work.com are great examples: you can list your Asana tags or Custom fields by visiting the website.
AppComponents
Asana recently introduced a new way to embed tools within Asana directly, called AppComponents. There are 3 types of AppComponents: modal form, widget and rule actions.
For example, because Asana is missing some actions in rules, iDO is building a custom set of rules action (ex: “change the due date to next Monday”). This is an example of AppComponent (rule action).
We are also working on a widget displayed on tasks, to show which of our tools a client used: the data is pulled by the widget itself, reading tasks in our Asana account. This is an example of a AppComponent (widget). Other examples are the Zoom or Jira widgets on tasks.
And last but not least, iDO is building a way to send emails from Asana with a button “Send email” on tasks, which when clicked opens a form to edit a pre-defined email: this is a great example of a AppComponents (modal form). Remember the name of this tool: “Nestor”, as you will soon hear about it. 
Reactive and passive automations
Both web-based tools and AppComponents are visual tools: you can see an interface and click buttons. But thanks to the API, you can also build automations running automatically without any button to click. There are two types of automations: reactive and passive.
A reactive automation (my own wording) is a code that will be called when something is happening in Asana. This is done thanks to something called webhooks: your code can register to changes in Asana, for example new tasks added to a project, and then execute something when it gets triggered. It only runs when an event is happening, but it requires to always listen, and can be triggered hundreds of times a day. A good example is our chatGPT bot https://forum.asana.com/t/chatgpt-finally-available-within-asana/288769: when the bot is mentioned in a comment, it answers within seconds.
A passive automation (again, my own wording) is a code that runs regularly, and reads-writes in Asana. A good example is our automation to compute custom fields: every 15 minutes, our code go through the dozens of formulas across all our clients, and updates what has to be updated. It runs all day every day, day and night, and doesn’t do any update most of the time.
I hope with this walkthrough you have a better idea of the possibilities to improve Asana!
Bastien, Asana Expert
iDO (Asana Partner: Services & Licenses)
with the latest Gmail action and Outlook action, and their abilities to use Variables, we felt like it wasn’t a priority anymore. But we can discuss giving you access to the beta