Hi Everyone,
I’m Nicola, an Asana Customer Success Manager, and today I wanted to talk about how to use Custom Fields with Advanced Search so that you can create dynamic search views for your team!
Oftentimes when talking to customers I hear questions like “what else can I do with custom fields?” or “it’s great that we are using custom fields but what can we use with this data?”
I love when customers want to explore custom fields because I think when you couple custom fields with advanced search, you can either zoom out or zoom in on the work that is getting done within your organization and use that information to your advantage.
For example, let’s suppose I’m working on a deployment project where tasks need to be completed by a given date or else the project starts to fall behind.
I might want to add custom fields to this project such as: owner, status, priority, risk level.
As a project manager overseeing multiple projects at one time, I might think about how can I create a view across my projects that shows me my most important tasks.
What I can do is create an advanced search for all tasks across projects that have the custom field for high priority and high risk. This search would output all my tasks that are currently at risk and high priority. If I’m a project manager overseeing multiple projects, these are the tasks that I need to make sure get shipped on time. If I’m able to create a view that shows me these tasks, I can allocate my resources appropriately! I can then favorite the search so that it appears in my favorites area for easy navigation.
<img src=“//cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/asana/original/2X/9/9c626fa98ac7053026219d4c67f02ee053470849.png” width="600 height=“200”>
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Thanks for sharing, Nicola! Custom fields are so powerful that sometimes it can be overwhelming to even know where to start. I’ll be excited to share this with people who have questions about custom fields in the future.
Something I use quite frequently for frequent-approvers (design managers, event managers, video producers, etc.) is I generated an advanced search for each of them:
For design, it’s any tasks that have the [Custom Field Status: Reviewing] and are in the Design team. I sent that to him and told him just to favorite it in Asana or on the taskbar and click it every once in awhile. =)
For event managers, I use our [Custom Field: Final Sign-Off] with the Status field Reviewing. Then the advanced search runs for tasks anywhere that have a final sign-off of <this person’s name> and status: reviewing. This has been really helpful as our event manager doesn’t use asana as primary, only for design purposes as she’s not in our department. So she just checks in on them randomly, unless there’s an urgent/blocked item then I send it to her directly =)
For video producers, same thing as design only they’re tasks under review + on the video team.
I have a few personal ones that I use for things like time tracking/reporting for consultants, but the above are my favorite because they solved an annoyance =)
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Can we get a video demo on this? I’m interesting in adding priority tracking. Thanks for this tip @Nicola
Thanks for sharing. I’ve recently done something similar with custom fields and advanced search. I often store ideas in Asana, and I have custom fields called “Impact” and “Effort”. Each one is ranked 1-10 (low to high impact and low to high effort). I then have an advanced search set up to show me the “best ideas” that have an impact score of more than 5 and an effort score of less than 5. In other words, these are things that will have a greater impact and are easier to complete.
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