With Workload, you gain visibility into work happening across projects in a single view and can easily reassign or reschedule tasks as business needs change. Now with effort, you can set a weight to your tasks—such as hours or points—based on any numerical custom field in Asana to better understand exactly how much work everyone has on their plates.
Every team is unique and has homegrown ways of working together. This is why we built flexible features into Workload so you can seamlessly choose the best way to measure effort and capacity—whether it’s hours, points, or any other value that makes sense to your team. You can use any custom field in your teams library to measure effort. Here are a few examples:
Effort based on hours : If you’re leading a creative team, you know that not all creative requests are created equal. But how do you determine the scope of creative work for one task versus another? Add effort based on hours to your tasks to give you and your team a better sense of how big or small a project really is. For instance, a 15-page e-book might take 40 design hours, while an article image only takes 4 hours of effort.
Effort based on points: For product teams that delegate work based on points, Workload lets you see at a glance how many points have been taken on by team members. You can also see unscheduled tasks and assign them to individuals who have more capacity.
Learn more about how to use Workload in our Guide or Blog. Let us know how your team is using Workload!
Very excited to test this feature out. At first glance, it looks to be fairly comprehensive, which is great! Are there any plans to allow users to set effort/capacity on the progress tab burndown chart?
Hey @Eric_Ressler – thanks for the reply! I want to make sure I understand what you mean. Is this the progress tab within the portfolio, adding effort/capacity as a sorting option, or something different that you’re referring to?
Hi @Kimberlea I’m referring to the “insights” burn down chart within the single project view (see attached screenshot).
Right now, this doesn’t take into account effort or capacity, it’s just a task-based burndown chart which isn’t very helpful since all tasks are not equal. Since the Asana team seems to be working on tracking effort, this is a logical place to improve in the same way you’ve been working on improving the workload functionality.
Ah, got it! Thanks for clarifying. I believe our product team has this in the plan, but I’ll make sure this feedback gets back to them. Thank you so much!
Hi @Kimberlea, will this feature be integrated in My tasks further on? Would make personal scheduling easier I think…
I have also wondered about capacity. As a manager stuck in manny meetings, I have a need of seeing my capacity in Asana based on meetingfree time so that I dont get overbooked. Is this something on your roadmap?
Hey @JohanW, sorry for the delay. I wanted to hop straight to our product team and see if this is on their radar. This is really great feedback. We are currently exploring how to improve My Tasks to see a more realistic view of your day that accounts for both meetings and tasks, as well as how effort and capacity can be shown in different ways across Asana. We do not have any timelines for when this work will be implemented but helpful to hear this is something that would work well for you.
So glad that My Tasks improvements is on the horizon. It´s the core of Asana and the ability to see not only tasks but other activities would be a great leap forward.
+1 on the request for effort-based burnup charts. That would drastically improve the usefulness of the charts. Right now, it does not give an accurate picture of progress unless all tasks are the same size (which they never are).
Hey @Jennifer7! If you added an effort field to all of your projects in your portfolio, you will need to go to each project to remove the custom field.
After adding effort, you can easily switch to view by task count, or add a different effort field to measure workload by.
Can someone share a screenshot of what it looks like to add workload to an individual task?
All of the screenshots for this only show the Portfolio high-level view, but I’m curious how my users would add workload to their individual tasks before I decide if I want to upgrade to get this feature.
Do you mean for a user to add an effort indication to a task? If so, effort is just a numeric custom field that you’ve told Asana is the custom field it should use to register effort. If you’ve worked with custom fields, it’s just like adding a value to any other custom field on a task. It can be done in the task list view if that custom field is showing as a column, or in a task’s detail pane. You can see a screenshot of both of those options here:
Yes, I think that helps. So we create a custom field, let’s say one called “hours,” and then my users enter a numerical value for their tasks. Then on the project level we just tell it which custom field should be mapped to the workload?
Hi @Kimberlea can you let me know if there are any plans to rollout hours effort custom fields into subtasks - which would feed into the capacity of someones availability?
@Kimberlea If we multi-home a task, is 100% of the effort put against both projects when looking at the workload view? ie. if both multi-homed projects are in a single portfolio and we go to workload, is that person shown as working on that task x 2?
