Organization vs Workspace Profiles

English Forum Tips and Tricks
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I have been going around and around trying to figure out how to best create connections between my work and personal accounts in Asana… I’d like to avoid completely merging them because I prefer not to login with my work credentials from my personal device. But I think I’m missing something when it comes to profiles within organizations vs teams vs workspaces.

My work account has 3 profiles – One for the organization, one for the department, and one for my team. My team is the only one using Asana, and, I think, the only one with a Premium account. This is the profile I’m using daily for work and I’d like to be able to link tasks with my personal account. But I can’t tag my personal account to tasks, or create a shared project without adding it to the team’s workspace, and if I tag my work account from my personal, the task gets assigned to a different (profile) that I’m not using, causing my work to be in 3 places instead of 2.

Ideally, I’d have 2 main “my tasks” sections – One for my personal account, and one for the profile attached to my team – I could toggle between them and/or collaborate on tasks easily. What would be the best route to achieve this (or something close?) I’ve experimented with several different ways that haven’t worked and resulted in more confusion (and more workspaces I now can’t delete.) Is merging accounts the only way?

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Hi @Lia_Sparks , this sounds very confusing indeed… :thinking:

This setup sounds very strange - could you elaborate on this? When you mean profiles, you mean paid seats? And then you have several Workspaces but also an Organisation?

May I ask what is your use case for this?
Note, that your My Tasks in either org is completely personal to you. You can add tasks to your My Tasks in your Work profile without anyone else having access to them, unless you share your entire My Tasks with another work colleague or add them as a collaborator. If you still do not feel comfortable with this, then I suggest keep your personal tasks in your personal asana profile.

The simplest way is to have one Work profile and one Personal profile. You can link both of these within your Asana account so that both orgs/workspaces appear when you click on your profile picture in the upper right corner - so you can easily switch between the two.

However, they will never be linked and you will be able to log into your Asana account using either your personal or work email. You can follow these instructions in the guide and these here to see how you can merge your profiles into one Asana account.

If you have any issues or unsure, you can always contact Asana’s support team

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Hi Richard,
I’m confused as to whether these are workspaces or… I believe only the team has paid seats. If the org or department have the paid seats, I can’t see it like I can for the team.
When I look at the dropdown from my profile pic on the top right I see:
Asanaverse (with a yellow dot next to it)
Space created by me (also yellow dot)
department.organization.com (no dot)
My Workspace (no dot - not sure if i created this one or not)
organization.com (no dot - this is how my login email ends)
Team’s workspace (yellow dot)

I don’t understand if one is primary or how it’s determined which space an assignment or @mention goes when I tag from my personal account. I do understand that the tags within my team page stay within the team workspace.

The use would be to be on my home to do list and easily tag the work profile - for instance, last night I remembered something I needed to add to my booking software (not connected to my phone) putting that on my personal account and tagging my work account so it showed up when I get on my computer in the morning would have been great.

Maybe the simple question is: Do I have a primary account that owns the workspaces, or are they completely separate (other than being logged in with the same email?) I can understand the benefits to the separation in some cases, but for me, it seems really counter-intuitive that there isn’t a master “My Tasks” section.

It sounds like merging the profiles is my best option, but I’m hesitant til I understand what I’m missing here. I tried it once and it didn’t work how I had hoped, then I unlinked them and had to recreate the personal with all my tasks gone… I think I was confused whether I was merging with department.organization.com or organization.com… but If I can login with my personal credentials from my phone it’s not so objectionable. Would it be possible to do a practice run by merging with a different email? would I be able to remove it and then merge with my main email?

I feel like there is some fairly simple explanation for a part of this function that I’m not grasping… if I just knew how to ask it right :frowning:

I appreciate you taking the time to talk through this with me – If you can understand what I’m missing based on my explanation, please elaborate. I’m the “Abassador” for my team, so I’m trying to learn and use as many features as I can so I can answer any questions that come up from the team as we migrate more of our work over. This is just a big bump that is driving me nuts! I don’t think the problem of “it’s not functioning how I’d prefer” is as big as the problem of “I just don’t understand and I should be able to.”

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Hi @Lia_Sparks , sorry for the delay getting back to you!

So regarding the yellow dots on each org/workspace from your profile drop down; those simply show you that you have notifications in your relevant Inboxes.

Since you have all these listed under your profile, that means they are already connected under your Asana account; you have one Asana account which you can log in to using any of the email addresses that you have associated to each of these orgs/workspaces.

You can see a list of all your Organizations and Workspace in your ‘My Settings’ > ‘Account’ tab. So you can see which name corresponds to which type.

However, in order to work out which of your emails is connected to which org/workspace, the best way I can think of is to go to your ‘My Settings’ > ‘Profile’ tab, and below your name and job title you will see the email address. If you repeat this by going into each workspace/org one-by-one you can work out which ones are personal, work, trials or anything else you created. If you make a note of all these in a list, you can work out which is which (work/personal etc) and which space you actually use/need. If you do NOT need one of these spaces, then carefully(!) choose remove me from organization in the More menu.

As you may already know, in each org/workspace from your list, you have a unique Profile (photo, name, job title etc) as well as a unique My Tasks and Inbox. So for example, to add a task to your personal My Tasks, you will have to switch to the relevant org/workspace, which should also be available on your phone app too, by tapping on the ‘Account’ icon, lower right of your screen. Btw, this is another way you can quickly see all your profiles and the email address connected to each space!

Finally, in order to manage all your my tasks into a ‘Master My tasks’ list, have a look at this thread where you can vote and read up on some workarounds, including a 3rd party integration, Unito.

More on adding/removing emails is also available in the Asana Guide which is a great source for learning, as well as the online courses in the Asana Academy.

On top of all that, there are people like myself; Asana Partners provide consulting services to people and teams to get them up and running fast with Asana, helping their teams or entire organisations strategically adopt Asana and assist with the onboarding process, setting up key workflows and answering pretty much anything along the way! If you are interested, feel free to send me a personal message (via my profile picture) or reach out to any of the other great Asana Partners in this forum or in the Asana Partners Directory.

Hope this helps! :wink:

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Thanks Richard. For now, I’ve made myself a 1:1 project for my personal and work accounts which at least allowed me to jot down some late-night thoughts about a work project from my personal account and have them accessible on my professional workspace this morning. It’s not the ideal that I was looking for, because I’ve only been able to add this project to my organization’s workspace (it appears I can’t add the project to my team workspace without my personal account taking up a seat on my team’s workspace) but I’m still browsing the thread you linked to learn more.
I see that I’m far from the only person wishing for a ‘master task’ section to connect multiple workspaces so add me to the list of those recommending Asana to include this feature in the future!
Thanks again,
Lia

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I am trying to figure out how to do this. I own a small business and have an organization account with my work email. I also have a personal workspace with my personal email. I’d like to be able to toggle between the two online and mobile. But currently I’m having to log out and in, which isn’t good. Any advice?

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Hi @Lizzie_Harrigan , did you follow the instructions here which I posted above?

You basically log into either one of your spaces and then click ‘Add new email’ under My Settings > Email forwarding to add the email you use to log into your other space. This process will merge your two spaces under one Asana account which you can log in using either one of your emails but with a single password.

Let me know if you have any issues :wink:

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Hi Richard, if I follow this process to merge the two spaces but happen to switch companies at some point, how hard is it to “unmerge” or do I risk losing my personal information at that point? Thanks for the help!

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Hi @Peyton_Holland , welcome to the forum :wave:

Good question! If you leave a company, then you will likely be deprovisioned by the Asana admin. If they forget to do so, you could also remove yourself from an organization (Settings>Account>Remove me from… in the lower right corner) or remove the email associated with your Asana account (Settings>Email forwarding>Remove email… in the lower right corner).

Either way, once deprovisioned or removed, you will no longer have access to any data that was related to your profile within that company’s Asana space. That would include personal tasks in My Tasks of your company’s Asana space, which note, could be visible to a Super Admin after you have been deprovisioned (removed from their space), so remember to ‘clean up’ before you go! (you can also export your My tasks as a CSV and import them into another personal space).

Is that the ‘personal information’ you were referring to?

You can also get in touch with Asana support if you ever have trouble unmerging accounts.