When to Use Asana Project Templates (and When Not To)

Asana supplies a vast library of all-purpose project templates in about a dozen categories that you can access in-app to help you create a new project or just browse freely at:

These pre-packaged templates are best for beginners because they’re generally clear and simple and even include instructions.

More advanced users can benefit by quickly canvassing them for ideas, best practices, and to make sure that their own approaches are not missing anything.

Yet these templates can run out of steam. They’re typically rudimentary and are only implement single-project solutions as opposed to powerful solutions that require two or more linked projects.

And they tend to be a bit formulaic. For example, many use a High|Medium|Low built-in Asana Priority custom field. I discourage clients from using such a field, which is usually not necessary or requires too much effort to maintain–I try to minimize the number of custom fields at the task level to have to value initially and keep updated for all tasks. I prefer to use either priority order of tasks in list view, Due dates, an Urgent? dropdown custom field with a single option of a checkmark (:heavy_check_mark: ), or another approach.

But I do appreciate and employ browsing the template gallery for ideas and to make sure I’m not missing something in my own custom projects, but I rarely use these templates themselves for actual projects. Creating your own custom projects will deliver better results, and takes little extra time in most cases.

Looking forward to hearing alternate views (and ducking for cover!),

Larry

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I do agree, even me, founder of templana.com, I never use someone else’s template for things other than inspiration! :slight_smile:

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I love the templates, but I wish they would add more nonprofit templates, with things like volunteers, donors, partners, what nonprofits do, I know they have a great fundraiser one, but we need more in terms of in line with our industry! But I love all that Asana does with templates!

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I wish I could select my preferred start and end date when using a task template instead of having everything be ‘calculated’. I am building out workloads for my company and have to change practically everything in the template date wise every single time. I also think it would make sense to let task templates have a date range, instead of another countdown feature.

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