🔗 Introducing Reference custom fields!

[Emily_Roman]

Hi Asana Community!

I’m excited to announce we are launching Reference custom fields! A new way to easily connect and reference tasks, projects, portfolios, and goals directly within your custom fields.

This highly requested feature allows you to:

• Reduce duplication: Connect objects across the Asana work graph instead of manually recreating information
• Streamline workflows: Keep all related information accessible in one place
• Link related work: Easily reference tasks, projects, portfolios, and goals in a custom field

Coming in fast follows: support for rules, advanced search, AI intake of Reference custom fields, forms, charts/reporting, support converting single and multi-select custom fields to Reference custom fields, sorting, filtering, group-by, bulk actions and mobile

Ready to get started? Reference custom fields are rolling out now! Look for the new “Reference link” field type when adding custom fields to your projects.

We’d love to hear how you plan to use Reference custom fields in your workflows! Share your thoughts and questions in the comments below

This feature is available to all customers on Starter, Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise+ plans.

[Laura_Screnci]

Can’t wait to hear more about this! Would the upcoming rules allow projects in different portfolios to “speak” to each other?

A big issue I’ve found with my own workflows when PMing new physical product launches is that each team has their own project for each product and you have to manually go to the projects for updates. E.g. When the product development team updates a product to “shipped” would love if it could automatically notify or update a custom field in the marketing/creative project for that product to alert us we’re near a launch/ship date and need to expedite materials.

[Esteban_Giannini]

A big update, great job on this! I’m glad we can now reference all objects, even multiple at the same time. I’m also looking forward to the upcoming releases, which sound like they’ll take the platform to a whole new level of customization and power. If I could request one extra thing, it would be the ability to select a project or portfolio to reference tasks or projects from. This would make it much easier to avoid searching through a sea of tasks and projects, while also creating clear links between them.

[Richard_Sather]

Really excited to see this feature finally being introduced.
It’s a great start but I’m honestly really looking forward to the fast-follows mentioned…

@Emily_Roman

support converting single and multi-select custom fields to Reference custom fields

This sounds the most exciting one of them all!

Hoping that will address the below request; the main difference being the ability to referencing a specific project or portfolio (just like @Esteban_Giannini just mentioned above) and presenting their contents (tasks/projects) in a dropdown list, instead of a ‘pool’ of searchable objects, similar to how dependencies or tags work.

Reference fields: set specific list of tasks or projects as dropdown options with two-way referencing (relational back-linking / lookup)

PS: In Sept 2025, Reference fields were launched with the ability to reference from a ‘pool’ of objects (tasks, projects, portfolios & goals) across a workspace, similar to how you search for tags or dependencies. This original post was envisioning a different execution; instead, being able to set specific content of the Reference field and presenting it as either a single-select or multi-select options, and with two-way relational back-linking (similar to how dependencies work as ‘Blocked by’ a…

But unlike dependencies, my initial tests of the Reference field, conclude that they do not back-reference one task to another. With dependencies, when you make task A ‘Blocking’ task B, then when you open Task B, you will see it is ‘Blocked by’ task A, automatically - that is what I refer to as back-linking. Unfortunately, the new Reference field doesn’t do that - it is currently one-way linking which, in my view, is an initial shortcoming of this MVP.

[Kim_Caloca-Madden2]

I NEED THIS FIELD ASAP!!! #jokingnotjoking is there a way to get fasttracked for roll out?

[Carsten_Pfitzner]

interesting, will we be also able to share infos from the customfiels in a public link?

[Bobby_McGivney]

Exciting news!

I don’t see it in my account yet. I tried logging out, clearing cookies, dusting off the ole desktop app - no luck.

Are there any tricks to accessing this feature sooner than later, or is it just a waiting game?

Hopefully it’s a quick rollout!

[FreshyJon]

Same as others. Not showing for us. Is there a typical ETA or rollout duration (days, weeks, etc.) for features?

[Alex_Calinov]

It’s been a week since the original post. and still no access to this new feature. How long will it take to roll out this update?

[Paloma_GOMEZ_GARCIA]

When will this new feature be available? I have no access to this new feature

[Anna_Jos]

Im seeing this available in our Asana organization! Would love to learn from others ways your teams might use. Anyone care to share how they might use this new feature? Thanks!!

[Jay_Hester]

I’m super excited for this one. I don’t see it in my account yet, but can’t wait to put these into my workflows.

[Katarzyna_Karcz]

I’ve just tested the solution, and I have a few points:

1. Is it possible to enable export information from this field to csv?
2. Is it possible in rules to add such automatization which will automatically update the same custom field (from library) in related tasks?
3. Is it possible to add option to select in automatization to paste in the comment not task name but for example task id of indicated in this reference field task?

[lpb]

Welcome, @Katarzyna_Karcz,

Perhaps your #2 is covered by this in the OP?:

@Emily_Roman

Coming in fast follows: support for rules, advanced search, AI intake of Reference custom fields, forms, charts/reporting, support converting single and multi-select custom fields to Reference custom fields, sorting, filtering, group-by, bulk actions and mobile

For your other requests, I think your best bet would be to add each as an individual English Forum > Product Feedback topic and remember to vote for each.

Thanks,

Larry

[Paloma_GOMEZ_GARCIA]

Hi! I’ve tested the Reference Custom Fields and identified some key areas for improvement that would significantly enhance usability and cross-project collaboration:

• Currently, users cannot see the name of a referenced project unless they have access to it. This limits contextual awareness and makes it difficult to understand task dependencies or relationships across projects—especially in environments where strict access controls are necessary.

• Additionally, it is not possible to group tasks by Reference Custom Fields. Enabling this functionality would greatly improve organization, reporting, and the ability to manage cross-project work efficiently.

Addressing these limitations is important because it would allow teams to collaborate more effectively and maintain visibility across projects, all while preserving data security and respecting access permissions.

Hope you take this feedback into account and to see these improvements in the future! Thank you a lot

[Matthew_Hall]

This sounds like it could be a real game changer for segmenting internal work discussion / data into another private related task, which external clients/collaborators can not see.

The real power will come from how the integration with Rules is done.

We’d want to do things like:

1. Something happens on Task A → Create a new Task B in another project using the same title and other data, set the custom reference field in Task A to be the new Task B, and Task B reference should be Task B.
2. Stuff happens on Task B → Update Task A (which is referenced)

[Melanie.J]

But unlike dependencies, my initial tests of the Reference field, conclude that they do not back-reference one task to another. With dependencies, when you make task A ‘Blocking’ task B, then when you open Task B, you will see it is ‘Blocked by’ task A, automatically - that is what I refer to as back-linking. Unfortunately, the new Reference field doesn’t do that - it is currently one-way linking which, in my view, is an initial shortcoming of this MVP.

I agree with this observation – having back-referencing like with dependencies would make the Reference field much more useful. Do you know if bidirectional linking is something that’s planned?

[Richard_Sather]

Hi @Melanie.J , I don’t work for Asana (just a volunteer forum leader) so no, I don’t know unfortunately, but I hope it will be on their short-term roadmap!

Make sure to vote for this:

Reference fields: set specific list of tasks or projects as dropdown options with two-way referencing (relational back-linking / lookup)

PS: In Sept 2025, Reference fields were launched with the ability to reference from a ‘pool’ of objects (tasks, projects, portfolios & goals) across a workspace, similar to how you search for tags or dependencies. This original post was envisioning a different execution; instead, being able to set specific content of the Reference field and presenting it as either a single-select or multi-select options, and with two-way relational back-linking (similar to how dependencies work as ‘Blocked by’ a…

[Bastien_Siebman]

I have used them already and quite happy with this new field type!

[Paul_Congdon]

Great feature! I can see this being particularly useful in forms: "Lookup Fields" in Forms with Reference Fields