Smart fields: Better organize and launch your projects with auto-generated custom fields

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Sometimes when starting out a new project, it can feel a bit overwhelming: what’s the best way to organize the project? What’s the right information to capture and track?

Now with Asana Intelligence’s Smart fields feature, Asana can help you with this process by examining the project and recommending a relevant set of custom fields to add to the project.

You can then review these suggestions and choose which of the recommended fields you want to keep, and Asana will automatically add them to the project.

And, even better: not only can Asana add the recommended fields, you can also have it fill in appropriate values for those fields on the project’s tasks, helping you eliminate the manual process of filling in custom fields on multiple tasks to get a project started. Instead let Asana do the work for you!

Let’s take an example. I created a set of tasks in an Asana project to implement and track a marketing campaign. I then opened the project’s Customize panel, clicked “Recommend fields”:

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and here’s the result:

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As you can see, based on its analysis Asana is recommending these 6 custom fields.

I can uncheck any fields that I don’t want to include, then I can click either “Add” just to add the fields to the project, or “Add and fill” to add the fields and have Asana fill in appropriate values for the each of the fields in my project’s tasks.

Using Smart fields, I can save time and start off with a well-organized project!

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Thanks for sharing :slight_smile: is this using library fields?

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Great question. Love this feature but the risk is more custom fields to manage and cleanup.

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Hi @Bastien_Siebman, at this time it’s just fields local to the project. But I’m sure it’s something for us to consider for future iterations.

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Great question, @Bastien_Siebman, I should have mentioned that in my post.

If I can clarify a bit… I think what @Juliet_Ren is referring to is whether the new fields get added to the global custom fields library or not.

Actually I think there are two questions wrapped in yours, Bastien:

  1. Do the recommended fields include global library fields?
  2. Do new fields that are created from the recommendations get added to the global library?

Taking the second question first, I think that’s what Juliet answered, and as she said, in my testing the answer was “no” - newly created fields are not added to the global library.

Taking the first question, the answer in my testing is “yes”. More specifically what I found:

  • The recommendation engine does look at the global fields library and if it finds a relevant field there, it uses that global field. It indicates global fields in its recommendations via a globe icon; if you look at my screenshot above, you’ll see that “Region of Request” is a global library field.
  • In the case of single- or multi-select fields, I’m not 100% sure but I think it looks at the field name only, not the values. In my testing, when I added a global field called “Project Size”, the recommendation used that field regardless of whether its values matched its recommendation of “Small, Medium, Large” or whether I added a few additional values of “Teeny Tiny” and “Ginormous”.
  • It does seem to be case-sensitive. To test, I added a library field called “Campaign theme” (note the lowercase “t”); the recommendations still proposed to add a new field called “Campaign Theme”. Then I renamed my global field to “Campaign Theme” (uppercase “T”) and the recommendation proposed to use that global field.

@Juliet_Ren please feel free to correct any of my conclusions above that are wrong!

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