Hi everyone,
In your experiences, how do you manage weekly reports in your projects ?
I manage a team who works on long term projects. That’s why I create new objectives and tasks everymonday but also need to have the results every friday, to know if we accomplished them or not.
So now, I have no choice but to create a new project each monday so I don’t loose the weekly results. But there surely is a better solution. Would some help me with this please ?
Thanks !
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This is what I can imagine with your scenario:
In this, I present you 3 possible solutions.
- A task representing each week, and have the goals / objectives as subtasks. Asana has provided a way to expand the top level task and see its subtasks. (See section Weekly Planning)
- If you need the goals to be displayed in one list, have them all multi-homed to the same project (See section Objectives / Goals)
- Or you can simply use a custom field to identify which week it belongs to. (See Planning Week column) Tip: if you use a drop-down custom field, you can sort using that column and the list will be displayed in sections, where each section represents a value from the drop-down list.
I normally do options 1 and 2 for daily and weekly meetings. All action items identified in each meeting rest inside their respective meeting task, and then multi-homed to the main project so we have a list of all action items. This is also so I can mark the meeting tasks as complete, but retain the pending action items visible.
I hope this helps!
Len
Thank you for your answer !
But, the fact is that we have a lot of tasks. For example, in your configuration, Week 1 would have more than 60 subtasks, which would be difficult to handle at some point.
Plus, it doesn’t help for the question of the dashboard view. What do you think ?
I must say, that’s a looooot of tasks. I wasn’t expecting that many. And yes, you’re right, having a task with 60 subtasks would mean that it’s better converted into its own project.
May I know what exactly is the pain point here? I feel like you have no choice but to continue using a project each week.
- Templates - if the tasks are almost the same each week, it will be more efficient to use templates. It will save your time creating new projects.
- Portfolios - you can group projects into logical groups (i.e. per month, per quarter, per year) in portfolios to see progress/updates/results in the projects better.
I guess if you could provide more details into what you’re tracking, how you want to see the updates/results, the community can advise you much better. 
Some companies completely forbid subtasks :).
60 subtasks is way too much in my opinion. Usually, people use subtasks, rather than having a project, because they are afraid of having too many projects, which is usually not an issue
Hello Bastien and LenSantos,
Thanks again for helping me investigating, it is really appreciated ! I think the both of you are right, subtasks are not an option, and templates/portfolios clearly help.
I could surely give more details of course as asked…
So, we are a copywriter team. At the beginning of the project (that can last up to 2 months), we have a list of topics, for example 150. Each of them is meant to turn into an article. So every week, depending on the workload and people available, we have an objective : for example, 30 articles to write. So with this 30 articles, I create 30 tasks as it is shared throughout the team and can be assigned to one or the other. Then at the end of the week I want to know how many out of 30 we have done, and then go to the next week but without 1) losing the result of this specific week and 2) while keeping in mind that it is part of a greater project of 150 articles, that will end up at some point. My will is also to have all the info available on the dashboard for each week (who wrote more, how many tasks aren’t finished, etc.). I don’t know if I am very clear, but the pain points are :
- If each week is a project, I will have a crazy number of projects at some point
- Each week (project) is treated independently and not in the whole
- Each Monday I have the feeling of starting from 0
But still, I just wanted to know if I was missing an awesome hidden feature… but if it is not the case, I will just continue as I did so far
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You are very much welcome
And yes these details actually help in visualizing the use case.
I have two (2) proposals.
- Continue working as you do
- Use only 1 project for each of your internal projects, but segregate the tasks per week (either by using sections or custom fields). Then do the reporting externally through Excel, as it is more powerful in terms of reporting and charting, and in my opinion, it caters to your needs better.
To create an Excel file connected to your Asana project:
- Click Export to Google Sheets
you will be presented with something like this:
- Get the https link (the one inside the double quotes)
- In Excel, go to Data and click From Web.
- Paste the URL and press OK
Or, if you use Google Sheets, just export directly. No need to use the steps above.
Then you can start using Pivot Tables and more complex Charts catered to your needs. And the good thing here is, you simply just refresh the data to get the latest updates. Another advantage is, you can have a global Excel reporting file (each sheet representing a project). It’s easier to see everything in one place. 
Note: this is not completely real-time. An update has to be at least 5 - 10 mins old before it is retrieved by the API. But for weekly reports, it is most definitely useful.
Note2: if you need to perform some data transformations, you can do so with the help of the query editor in Excel.
Len
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