When it comes to using a new workplace product, both small startups and large corporations have something in common: change can be hard. While many teams adopt Asana after a quick introduction, some teams—especially larger teams—take more time to adapt to a new way of communicating.

Whether you’re a business owner who’s decided to implement Asana company-wide or you’re someone who wants to get coworkers to use Asana, we have multiple resources at the Help Center to help get your team on board.

We also recognize that you might want more in-depth guidance for onboarding team members. So, we’ve outlined a comprehensive list of best practices and tips for adopting Asana.

Read Getting Your Team Started on Asana, invite team members to your Workspace, and start getting things done faster than ever before.

We think Asana has been this well received because it connects with the yearning in all of us to achieve our goals and actualize our dreams. In this way, Asana is just a small piece of something much bigger. We are all contributors to the biggest and most important project of them all: defining, shaping, and realize our collective future. We built Asana because we feel strongly that the best way we can contribute to the world is to help others contribute to the world.

Asana is helping teams with important missions be faster, focused, and more efficient. It’s done this because we’ve stayed true to our core design principles: Asana is fast, flexible, and powerful. As Foursquare’s Noah Weiss says, “Speed was the killer feature that got everyone on board. Since Foursquare moved over to Asana, everyone — engineer, designer, bizdev, and in between — has two websites perpetually open: their inbox and Asana.”

To date, people have created 10 million Tasks in Asana. Even more excitingly, they’ve already completed 4 million of them. Teams consistently tell us that Asana is the first productivity product that has stuck — and, indeed, 75% of the people who have adopted Asana are still using it. Harrison Shoff explains why he loves using it at Airbnb: “Asana feels like I’m working with a low-friction, smart piece of paper.”

Asana for larger teams

Since our launch last November, many small teams using Asana at larger companies have spread the word to other departments in their organization, until their colleagues benefitting from Asana number in the hundreds. They’re now eager to collaborate in groups larger than 30, and in many cases to roll Asana out to their entire company, providing the unified collaboration space for their business.

So starting today, we are making Asana available to teams larger than 30 through Premium Workspaces. Any team can upgrade their existing Workspace to a Premium Workspace, which offers:

• More Workspace members – upgrade to a higher tier of members, starting at just $300/month for up to 50 teammates. Tiers of 75, 100, or more members are also available.
• Project-level Permissions – share private Projects with a small group within your Workspace, so exactly the right people see the Projects they need to see.
• Priority Support – questions and issues from customers in Premium Workspacess get a faster response from our outstanding support team.

Of course, the same Asana that has been available since we launched will continue to be free, continue to offer unlimited Tasks, Projects, and attachments for up to 30 members, and continue to improve every week. This launch is about enabling even larger teams to accomplish their shared goals and coordinate their collective action with less effort. Teams under 30 can also upgrade to a Premium Workspace to enjoy the benefits of Project-level Permissions and Priority Support for just $100/month.

Asana has always been a labor of love for us, and we think you’ll love using it. We look forward to hearing what you think about Premium Workspaces — and seeing what they help you create.

The Asana API lets you build a variety of applications and scripts to integrate Asana with your business systems, show Asana data in other contexts, and create tasks from various locations.

Here are some examples of the things you can build:

• Source Control Integration to mark a Task as complete and add a link to the code submission as a comment when submitting code.
• A desktop app that shows the Tasks assigned to you
• A dashboard page that shows a visual representation of complete and incomplete Tasks in a project

The API is available for free to everyone with an Asana account. To get started:

1. Get your API key.
2. Paste this curl command into your console, to test that you can retrieve your user info:
   export API_KEY=your-key ; curl -u $API_KEY: https://app.asana.com/api/1.0/users/me

You can find more details in our API documentation. There, you’ll see some example applications, including a Chrome Extension that lets you select text on any web page and quickly create an Asana Task.

If you have questions about the API, please ask them on Stack Overflow. We will be monitoring the site for questions and answering them promptly.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed feedback and waited patiently for the API to become available. We can’t wait to see what you create.

For more information, please visit our developer site: http://developer.asana.com

As Greg explains, it’s a fantastic time to be a web developer, and we’re looking for awesome engineers to help us write the next generation of collaborative software. Interested? Read the full article here and send us a message at jobs@asana.com.

So when we recently learned that not only do some of our users like unicorns, but others have never even seen a unicorn, our creative engine kicked into action. This could be a highly leveraged opportunity to both motivate our users and give them a very special reward for using our product. Of course, we couldn’t just give everyone unicorns (which are very, very rare) without knowing the consequences. So in true Asana fashion, we decided we’d have to run an experiment.

To test this opportunity, we engineered our product to randomly deliver a flying unicorn, riding on a rainbow laced with an encouraging message, upon completion of a task. It didn’t show up for every completed task, but just once in a while. Then we’d see if our unicorn-spotting users got more productive.

Now, the introduction of a rainbow-surfing unicorn reward raises many questions regarding user productivity. For example, what is the optimal number of colors for the rainbow to have? Is it important that the creature is, in fact, a unicorn? Does the tone or content of the messages make a difference?

Since we like to learn things quickly, we have already prepared experiments to answer these questions as well. We look forward to comparing yesterday’s results with those for users who see a three-color-rainbow-surfing narwhal that quotes the Dalai Lama. Yes, narwhals also have horns. We have to control for something!

So far, the unicorn has been so well-received that there is already talk internally of moving towards a single-horned UI with a rainbow color scheme. We’ll look at the data to figure out just how many colors it should have.

Also, happy April Fool’s Day! We hope you enjoyed it.

Asana is much more than a simple task and project management tool; it can also be used for specific internal functions, like bug tracking and applicant tracking. Since our launch, we’ve received a lot of positive feedback from teams and businesses that rely on Asana as a lightweight tool for customer relationship management (CRM).

When using Asana for CRM, customers become the Task or Project (or, as one of our users explained, customers can even become a Tag). Teams are able to keep a record of every interaction–from generating leads to maintaining relationships with loyal customers–in the notes and comments section.

Watch the video below to learn more.

The Date view has a few nifty features. When one of your tasks is running behind, it’s likely that many of them are. In the Date view, you can select multiple tasks and then use CMD+down to add a day to all of the due dates. This makes it easy to adjust schedules and keep the relative timings.

Another new feature of the Date view is that completed Tasks show up next to incomplete Tasks, so you can see your Tasks as a timeline. Once you’re done looking at completed Tasks, you can archive them to hide them.

Date sorting doesn’t interfere with Priority sorting, so you can switch between both views, depending on how you want to look at a Project. And with great power comes great responsibility – please make sure to communicate with the other people on the project so that you all agree to use priority or dates for ordering.

Here’s how it works:

• Adding Guests
  To add a guest to a Project, click the “Share” button at the top of the Project and type their email address where it says “Add a person.” Then select “Only this Project (Guest).” The guest will get access only to that specific Project, not the whole Workspace.
• Guest Account Capabilities
  Guests can add, edit, assign, and follow Tasks in the Project, but they can’t delete the Project. Guests can also add other guests to the Project – so if you’re working with an external team, you can invite just one person from that team and they’ll be able to invite their colleagues.
• Collaborating with Guests
  When you use Guest Accounts, you can keep all of your company’s Tasks in one Workspace – no need to create a separate Workspace just to work with someone new.

  For example, if you work at an advertising agency, you can create one Project for each client. You’ll see all your clients in one place, but when a client logs into Asana, they’ll see only the Project you shared with them. Now you and the client can collaborate on tasks together, and have a shared understanding of your project’s status in real-time.

Collaboration is the heart of Asana, and Guest Accounts are just the latest development in our ongoing work to help you share exactly what you want with exactly the right people. By keeping you in control of your data, Asana enables you to collaborate seamlessly with everyone you work with — inside and outside your company.

Interested in the more advanced privacy controls we’ll be launching soon? Click “Make Private” in the Share dialog, and then click “Notify me when Asana Premium is Available.”

Allowing Tasks to be in multiple Projects means a team has access to multiple views of the same piece of work, and each team member can organize Tasks without losing collective view of discussions, history, ownership, or other information.

We built this feature into the fabric of Asana because viewing information from multiple perspectives is essential for collaborative task management, especially in a world where people have their own work and organizational styles. It saves time, improves collaboration, and lets people organize work in a way that makes sense to them.

Let’s discuss a few concrete examples:

Focus on the Work That Matters
The nature of Asana means you can have fewer meetings, but it also helps make your meetings faster, more efficient, and more focused on the important decisions.

For some teams, preparing for a meeting means copying and pasting notes from scattered email threads, last-minute additions, and offline discussion of action items. Perhaps the finalized agenda is projected on a screen during the meeting, or maybe each individual team member views it privately on their own computer.

Whatever the process might be, it usually involves an unnecessary amount of time. But with Asana, you can create a Project for your agenda, and then add items to the agenda from previously created Tasks. In the agenda the Tasks are sorted by the order you’ll discuss them, but in the original Project they retain their priority order.

The ability to include Tasks in multiple Projects also means that items can quickly be added to agendas during a meeting. And, as your team discusses a Task, you can click on it to pull up the notes and conversation; any decisions you make can be recorded directly in the notes. You can also assign the Task and include it in the relevant Project immediately — there are no follow-up emails or meeting summaries needed.

When everyone is on the same page from a project’s beginning to end, you can spend less time doing busy work and more time on the issues that matter.

Effortless Cross-Team Prioritization
When two teams work together, you’ll sometimes find Tasks that don’t fall entirely under the scope of one team or the other. But eventually the work has to get done, and with Asana you can track which Tasks are complete without miscommunication.

For example, both the Sales and Marketing teams might want an update to the pricing page on their company’s website, but only one team needs to make the change. In Asana, you can put the Task in both the Sales Project and the Marketing Project, letting each team prioritize according to their schedule.

When one team starts working on it, the other team will be able to track the assignment’s progress so that they don’t accidentally duplicate the effort.

The Right View for Each Team Member
On big projects that involve multiple teams, each team might need to view a Project from their own point of view.

For example, if you’re remodeling an office building, the design team might think of the plans on a room by room basis, while the contractor thinks of the plans in the order they’ll be worked on. In Asana, you can create a Project for each team and put the remodeling Tasks in both Projects. Since the Tasks are the same, you’ll have one single shared history between the teams, and communication won’t get lost in the hand off.

An added benefit to allowing Tasks to be in more than one Project is that you get more freedom and flexibility; you don’t have to adapt to one method of organizing work. You can take the Tasks assigned to you from a shared Project, add them to a new, individual Project, and re-categorize them in your own way.

Do you have other examples of putting tasks into multiple projects? Share your best practices with the Asana community!

While it’s great to keep all of your tasks in one place, it doesn’t always make sense to have all of the notifications go to one email address. Many of our customers have asked to use multiple email addresses with one account. And if you have more than one workspace, you might want to set one as the default to choose where new tasks go.

Now we’re introducing two new features to make Asana work great in all of the parts of your life: Multiple email addresses and Choosing the default workspace for emailed tasks.

You can access both these features from the Account Settings dialog by clicking on your name in the lower left of Asana.

From the Email Notifications tab you can add new email addresses (verify them by clicking on the email link), and then for each workspace you can choose where notifications get sent, and whether you get the daily summary email.

From the Email Dropbox tab you can choose a default Workspace for each of your email addresses. When you send an email to x@mail.asana.com , it will put it into your assigned tasks list in the Workspace you chose.

We’d love to know what you think! Let us know at feedback@asana.com.