I am trying to analyze my Teams time spent on individual tasks. We work on about 50 projects a year and there are other “projects” opened for tasks outside contracted projects, if that makes sense.
From my research, I can only export time tracking manually by individual project which seems unnecessary. Also, if a user creates a task and does not assign it to a project, the time tracking… disappears?
Anyone else find a better way to do this? I am thinking of setting up a rule so that anytime a task is completed, it goes into this dumping ground of a project so I only have to export once. But this feels like it should be an out of the box thing.
Hey @apollack you’re not missing anything. Exporting one project at a time is the normal way, but there’s a shortcut.
Use Advanced Search. Click the search bar, then Advanced search at the botton. Set your filters, and when the results show up, click the little arrow next to the results header and pick Export to CSV. It grabs every task that matches, no matter what project it’s in. All 50 projects, one file, Save the search so you can just run it again next month.
That gives you the total time per task, not each timer session. If you need the session detail, Asana has a script for that here: Asana Help Center
About the time going missing: it’s still there, you just can’t see it. If a task isn’t in a project, anything that reports by project skips over it.
One thing about your rule idea. Rules only work on tasks that are already in a project, so it won’t catch the loose ones. A single catch-all project that people actually use will do more.
I am not looking to run a time tracking analysis on one task across 50 projects. I am looking to analysis all tasks across 50 projects.
Additionally, agreed on the loose tasks, but you can add a field for “project” and add the loose task to the project each time you add a loose task to get it in there. I also do not like it because it is not clear what client it is for.
I really feel like overrall time tracking analysis should be a feature in Asana
Hey!
Advanced search does exactly what you’re asking. It isn’t one task at a time. You set the filter to your workspace, leave the project filter empty, and it returns every task across all 50 projects in one list. Then export that once.
The catch is what comes back. You get total Actual time per task, and you’ll want the project name on each row for client attribution. If the column dont come out the way you need, the API script is the version that does: it walks every project, pulls every task, and gives you one row pr time entry with the projects attached. That’s a single file you can pivot by client.
On the loose tasks, a “project” custom field would work, but you’re right that it’s manual and it breaks the moment someone forgets.
And agreed on the last point. There’s no built-in overall time analysis across a workspace, which is the actual gap here. Worth posting in Product Feedback so it can collect votes.