Hello Asana Community,
Is there a way to add time tracking in units of days or weeks instead of just hours? Some of our projects span several days or even weeks, and tracking time in hours feels cumbersome and doesn’t provide an accurate representation of our efforts.
Additionally, I’m curious if Asana offers a feature that allows users to see the time difference between the actual time spent on tasks and the estimated time.
Does anyone else in the community share these needs? And if so, has there been any discussion or consideration by the Asana team to introduce such functionality in future updates?
I appreciate any insights or suggestions on these matters.
Thank you!
Hi @Cansu_Yunga - a couple thoughts that may help:
LARGE TIME SPAN TASKS:
Regarding tracking work that spans days or weeks, I find that my clients sometimes accidentally think of “labor time” (represented as hours of effort) as the same as “turnaround time” (represented as a date range, including start date and due date). For example, a task may take 20 hours of effort (labor time, measured with estimated time/actual time fields), but may need 10 days for completion (represented with start date and due date).
NOTE: If you truly have tasks that are taking days or weeks of effort (meaning a single task requires 50 hours or 200 hours of work for example), I’d strongly suggest you consider making that task a project and then breaking it into several tasks that represent smaller chunks of work.
TIME DIFFERENCE:
Regarding your question about time difference, you can do that very easily with a formula field.
Create a formula field and use Estimated minus Actual to get an time difference (obviously if this value is negative, it means it took more time than estimated – but feel free to reverse the formula).
Hello @Bryan_TeamKickstart
Thank you for your answer! However, I was actually looking for functionality that allows users to view the history of task due date changes or provides an indicator to show when a due date has been extended from the estimated due date to the actual due date. Is this possible on Asana?
Having access to task history or a visual indicator of date extensions would greatly enhance our ability to track project progress accurately and understand the reasons behind any delays. It would also be super-beneficial for reporting.
Hi @Cansu_Yunga , I’m not sure this is entirely what you are looking for, but for what it’s worth, one way of visually seeing slippage on due dates, i.e. compare changes in start/end dates over time, is by using the Gantt view (add it to your project from the 
icon along the end of your tabs, usually after Messages, Files).
Then in the Gantt options select the Show baseline and set a date to see what the project looked like back then, compared to now.
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