I’d you have a premium Asana subscription and rules in place in Asana to ensure tasks stay in their correct sections then yeah zzbots works for 2 way sync.
Also we helped ZZBOTS develop a way to ensure only tasks with a certain custom field drop-down are synced.
Zzbots support has been good/responsive. MUCH better than Asana.
PRO TIP: Ensure you have enough bot power. Subscribe to more for that month if it gets close to running out. if it runs out, synching will stop and getting it to restart takes a day to 2 days.
Asana, are there any updates on when we can expect a proper, two-way sync between Google Calendar and Asana? It’s honestly a bit ridiculous that this is still even a question that’s being asked.
The lack of a proper two-way sync is really making Asana quite difficult to use for many of us. Please don’t reply that there are external tools to achieve this - they’re expensive to use on top of Asana’s already-expensive platform, and to be honest, this should be a basic feature.
Nearly every other project/task management system out there offers this as standard, and you seem to be dragging your heels and making it seem like it’s incredibly difficult to do.
Have been using Asana for the past year and missed this feature. While I like Asana, this is a must-have feature for me to be the most productive. Tried a third party integration but they wanted to charge me more than Asana was charging me just to be able to sync tasks to calendar. So, now I’ve been testing out Monday.com for this. So far it’s working pretty well. I’m able to create tasks on Monday and then view the tasks on my calendar. If I need to reschedule a task, I can just reschedule it on my calendar app and the task will update on Monday accordingly. There’s also a native time-tracker, which is nice, since I use a separate time-tracker app while doing my tasks and I usually have to spend time telling the time tracker app what I’m working on. If I don’t run into any major issues with this setup over the next month I’ll probably stick to it and cancel the Asana subscription.
Can anyone share a resource that supports a live 2-way sync between Asana and Outlook? I’ve seen a couple third party tools for syncing Asana & Google calendar, but none for Outlook…why is that?
This forces having to use both Asana and a calendar application if people at your company use this method of scheduling on certain days/weeks of the month, which is many of them
What REALLY bothers me about this is that between this issue and Recurring Tasks on certain day/week of month not the actual day not being addressed, Asana has basically forced some percentage of it’s users to either manually adjust what day tasks fall on to match their shared calendar’s task on a certain day/week of the month (awful) or change how they schedule meetings to using a strict date, which for a project management software is pretty laughable. Can you imagine going to a business partner and asking if you can change a recurring meeting or report that gets sent out to a day, and if they did ask why, either having to lie or say that your project management software can’t do it?
Solving this issue would technical solve both as being able to sync with a calendar that has those features, I would assume, would necessitate having that functionality in Asana . At the very least, solving the other issue (Recurring Tasks on certain day/week of month not the actual day) would give Asana the ability to ask “Why don’t you just move your entire team’s scheduling into Asana?”. A bit of a poorer argument, but definitely within the mindset of trying always get closer to an “everything app”, which is pretty inline with what plenty of companies try to do. Instead, neither. This weird, awful, situation, that has a combined 1516 votes (granted there’s probably overlap) making this the second most requested feature behind assigning tasks to multiple people, a request Asana has said they will not fulfill. Meaning this is the highest request type of feature.
So on looking I actually couldn’t find explicit mention of it, and believe I might be remembering a meeting I had with an Asana employee awhile back on a discovery meeting where they stated that it’s not going to change. Which is to say I don’t really have anything from staff that would support my claim that they have explicitly said they will never do it.
However, I will say that it is implicit that they never will. It’s a philosophy choice of theirs since the start - Why one assignee?. Notice at the very bottom left that’s an Asana publishing company. If you go to this thread Assign multiple assignees on one task and look for the posts from the employees they will state “they don’t see this feature coming any time soon” for multiple years in a row.
Apologies that I might have made a stronger statement that what I could back up with what Asana as posted online. Again though, short of having an explicit announcement, it’s been an extremely consistent view of theirs to state their reason is based on their core philosophy, and they have never hinted (that I could find when looking at this) that they plan to change that philosophy.
@anon70643459, This thread is titled “Real time, two ways Calendar integration” but I just want to clarify re your prior post in this thread that you’re not talking about the calendar integraation, right? You’re instead only talking about the question of Asana ever allowing multiple assignees, right? Could you consider editing your post to make it more clear so others are not confused?
Sorry for a late reply here. What I’m trying to get across here is that -
The most highly voted request goes against Asana’s stated philosophy, meaning that imo it’s extremely unlikely it will be implemented as requested, if ever in anyway past it’s already implemented duplicate requests and assign functionality.
It makes sense that this or the other request is may actually be more popular than it may seem by itself, possibly one of the most requests features. There has to be a non-zero amount of people who only want a calendar integration for the ability to schedule on things like the third Monday, but have no voted the explicit request for it and instead voted on this one.
I’ll say it is a bit of a long winded point to make, but I do think it’s valid.
To note, I do say that while there is overlap between the two requests, they are different, and I’m not trying to argue they should be merged or anything like that. Just that it should taken into consideration that there is a non-zero amount of people who probably don’t care which request is implemented and just found one of the feature requests before the other and felt it was close enough. There isn’t another two requests with hundreds of votes like this, so it’s hard to compare this to anything else.
My argument wasn’t that it does, sorry for any confusion there. The ability to assign multiple people to a single task does go against their philosophy. You can read about that at the article I linked to. This request is the top request though by votes, by quite a bit too.
If you take that request out though under the assumption that Asana won’t go against their philosophy, and assume that most people would be okay with having either this request or this one - Recurring Tasks on certain day/week of month not the actual day, it’s literally the most popular request by votes, by quite a bit. It’s hard to show that now since I’ve filtered by uncompleted requests and they have in-fact committed to completing the other request/
I imagine that since Asana is doing the other request, this one will very likely never be completed, although that is entirely speculation. This is because, again, I think most people want a way to achieve this, and having a 2 way sync is one of those ways. The other is native functionality that Asana is now providing. Since they have a way now, I imagine that people will care less about this request (I personally don’t care all that much now, for example) and that Asana will ask people why don’t they just invite people into their instance instead of relying on a 3rd party service like google calendar.
Hi Zane, thanks for your explanation, I appreciate it
The reason why people (me included) always want to 2way sync with calendar is this: Asana is tool for management projects, not for management time. This we’re doing in calendar.
In any moment you havent all things in Asana. But you have to all things plan in time. In calendar. Tasks from Asana. Holidays. Vacations. Strategic meetings. When someone invite me on anything, he/she invite me in calendar not in Asana. We plan our time in calendar. Thant’s we need 2way sync.
Assign the date to asana task is useless when I cant see if it’s colliding in any other work duty (meeting etc). With 2 way sync, I can roughly plan my tasks to days in My Tasks section in Asana and in calendar I can drag and drop them to the blocks where I want to complete them.
Calendar is the place where all events (invitations, tasks) interflow and where we want to organize them. Now I can see Asana tasks in calendar but cant organize them. That’s way 2way sync is needed.
I definitely do see those as reasons, and I actually mention in my first post for this awhile ago that this feature request would probably be a tad more functional for me for some of those reasons you mention - Real time, two ways Calendar integration - #360 by Zane_Bartlett.
My point in that message was mostly just to say it seemed unacceptable that one of these requests were not fulfilled, and it’s likely there is a lot of overlap in what people want between these feature requests, making both a higher priority than what they may appear alone. Since one has been fulfilled though (at least in the process of being fulfilled as of this message), the argument is no longer true. So now, there are only the reasons you mention being needed. Which again isn’t to say they aren’t valid reasons.
I n my more request message, I was just stating the opposite is now true, this request may not be as popular as it appears since some of the functionality that may have driven people to upvote it is now natively supported. I would still like to have the request fulfilled though, it’s just not as urgent to me now.
I’ve been using https://www.projectprocs.com/ for the calendar integration, which allows me to show things at specific times, my team to view against my calendar and add tasks to a calendar that then sync back to Asana. Not perfect, but works fairly well for the 2-way calendar sync.
There are a few previous posts about zzBots as a solution. With the Asana to Google Calendar 2-Way Sync, your bots will stay in sync and up to date in realtime. The bots are already setup, you will just need to connect your account follow a few steps when installing.
There are 2 different syncs, one is for Asana Premium and Asana Regular (Free). The difference is Asana free version doesn’t allow syncing the start date.
