I am really trying hard to like Asana, but I find myself still gravitating toward using excel to organize everything and just using Asana for urgent things- which isn’t really as useful.
I like being able to reorganize tasks in excel by order of due date, then reorganize them by project to add in steps and preserve the full project plan for later reference to use on future projects. With Asana, I find everything just gets done and then disappears so I can’t see the whole project plan, can’t find it afterward, nothing gets saved so we are back to scratch unless I pull from an excel or word doc.
We have a lot of ongoing projects that span over several months- so we are currently making a task that spans those months, then making subtasks with TOPIC: task as the descriptor. All details stay in the main task and nothing is recorded in subtasks or it gets lost forever. But everything still just feels incomplete and too burdensome to keep updated… then since we can’t reference a nice final project plan to reuse, what is the point of even keeping good notes?
Your need sounds a lot like mine. I was hired to take our data out of an excel sheet and into Asana. My company uses Asana with our strategic business partner. Each year we have close to 100 clients/jobs. These jobs go on for several months. The first year, we housed each client as a project within a portfolio. This was nice, but seeing the timeline/process (tasks) and notes (description) for each took a lot of clicking around.
After a few years of trial and error we decided that we like to have each fiscal year be the project. Then the client’s name is the task. Then as you said, we preface subtasks with the client’s ticker symbol (for example, ASAN: review meeting).
To keep this organized, we use a LOT of custom fields and we sort the list & board views in sections of our process (Proposed, Signed SOW, Design, Build, Print Prep, Complete) . I have also built out many different project views/layout options for the one project. I have one for each of our creative directors that sort by jobs assigned to them and have the custom fields in the order of importance to them. I have one for a specific date in our process and one for the scope field. Group, sort, and filter are key in these views. And for the creative directors, they rarely have need to look at any other view.
The only problem is that the calendar view isn’t the best for this. Calendar shows the due date for the task (the end date for the client/job, in my case) but not for the subtasks which (for us) is the process of the individual job. To get around this I use template tasks. In the template task I have subtasks linked to another project; a calendar. So our team relies on two projects, one for the client information and one for the calendar. It’s not a big deal for them, but for me it was lot of double checking that everything was linked early on. Now that it’s set up and I found all my initial mistakes, it’s pretty seamless.
We’ve found that this gives us the best way to see a lot of information quickly. I hope this was helpful! Reach out if there is anything I can do to help.
Perhaps there’s something about your Asana setup that can be improved to make your life easier!
I do have some questions - you mention that you use tasks to handle projects. Why is that? Would you consider using projects to handle projects? And group them into Portfolios to create dashboards of how those are progressing?
You can even turn existing tasks into projects. In this case, subtasks will become tasks, so all your work will be consolidated into one layer. This article explains how to do this.
You also mention that things “disappear” and nothing gets saved. I would love to understand the context here. Do you have filters that filter out completed tasks? If so, removing that filter can resolve that problem.
Perhaps you can share some screenshots in a direct message to show your Asana setup vs how you would like it to be displayed, and we can work on some solutions?
I have a small team and we work on 10-12 projects/operation streams at a time, so having that many Asana projects is not reasonable. If that is the only way to get a project history though, I would consider doing it for the larger projects.
When I say things disappear I mean once they are completed they are checked off and enter the abyss. When the project is complete, I have no historical notes to refer to in the future, no idea of when things actually were completed. I see import options here: https://help.asana.com/s/article/preparing-data-for-csv-import?language=en_US but then what is the point- if I am going to make an excel sheet that is detailed, then if I add to it directly in Asana during the project then none of those changes are recorded anywhere. Is there a way to download a history of how the project actually went?
I am sure this is user error, since Asana is so widely used, but I have watched at least 8 hours of PD and videos on using asana and I still can’t get it to work for me in the way I need to I must be missing something.
Furthermore, we pay for a team account under for asana Starter, but I don’t even think I have access to all of the functionality so I can’t manage portfolios.
