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.

Vote here!

In fact, you can vote every 24 hours until voting closes on January 29. So feel free to vote early and often. Next time you log into Asana, you can use this link to create a repeating task that will remind you to vote daily:

Asana’s up against Dropbox, which has been around for much longer and has orders of magnitude more users than our upstart (and has a great product :-). But with your help and the power of repeating tasks, maybe we can be #1!

In addition to the normal schedules like daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly, you can also choose “periodically” for tasks that should repeat based on the last time the task was completed.

For example, I like to send the team a summary of customer feedback every week. I can set the due date to Monday, and have it repeat 7 days after completion. If I have a busy week and don’t write the summary until Thursday, when I mark it complete it will create the next task for next Thursday. This is really nice because my tasks don’t get crowded close together, and get scheduled for just when I want them.

This summer, some people headed out of town on vacation, and our team started to fall out of sync. I myself took long vacations to Berlin and Burning Man and spent more time than usual on my own personal development: at the climbing gym, in yoga sessions, in meditation, with a lifecoach, chasing a girl. I was growing in all kinds of ways valuable for the longterm, but it was out of balance with being productive in the now. My personal contribution level was low: relative to my teammates, my historical output, and most especially my capacity. But this was a team issue. It seemed like many of our projects were slipping.

Dustin and Justin set a line in the sand. We’re shipping. November 2, no matter what the product looks like. The team was immediately on board. Well-rested, confident, and ready to manifest our goals, it was time for all that personal growth to pay off for the team. In the six weeks that followed we finished two hugely crucial projects: an entire re-imagining of our look and feel, and a brand new mobile experience. How?

We worked harder. Every weeknight, scotch at 11. Every weekend, meals and kittens.

We worked smarter. We did a better job of asking ourselves “Does this have to get done?” for anything that wasn’t essential to launch, and an even better job of “Let me help you do that!” for everybody else’s tasks that were essential.

We worked together. Our internal use of Asana shined brighter than ever before, as we could literally see every single crucial task assigned and on-track. Priority headings especially were crucial in always being able to see what the next set of tasks to do in a project was. Keeping the projects organized also meant that people could figure out what needed to get done in areas outside their “official” responsibilities: Jackie (our PM) started grabbing coding tasks tagged as “css” or “easy”. Everything was so smooth, we started to wonder: when is that crucial task that we forgot about going to bite us? Never.

We celebrated. We thought we would spend the launch swatting bugs and preventing outages in epic, rotating on-call shifts. Nope. We spent the afternoon of launch day playing twister and revelling in our Twitter stream, and got a good night’s sleep.

Some of the tasks from our "Open Launch" Project

As the confetti settled, issues did emerge — data modelling edge cases here, scary AWS graphs there — and we went back to work. But the love kept coming on Twitter, our NPS stayed higher than ever before, and the verdict is in. Asana is here, and it’s awesome.

So what’s next?

More Contexts. Asana is great at work, but it’s also great for a lot of other things. We want to make it easier to plan a vacation with your friends or a dinner party with your spouse.

Smarter System. There’s cost to every bit of friction in entering a task, whether its “water the plants” or “do that code review”, and that friction ends up meaning data is missing from the system. We want to add ways to automate interacting with Asana so that you can tell us to create these tasks for you.

Richer Relationships. Asana feels as simple as a TODO list, but under the hood it’s much more than that. That balance of both power and simplicity is what makes Asana special, and we’re going to keep giving you more and more ways to organize your data without charging you in extra clicks or denser interfaces.

Bigger Teams. Everyday we get more companies asking to go beyond the 30 user cap for a workspace in Asana, but so far we’ve been hesitant to do so. We want to make sure provide the same highest-bar quality of experience as we offer for small teams. In particular, we want to ensure that, regardless of how much data you enter into the system, Asana will always be fast.

I want to close out with an image of one of my favorite parts of last episode. This is the dialog we put up for our beta customers when we turned on Asana for everyone, to thank them for enabling us to put our heart and soul into our absolute best effort to contribute to humanity. It’s this kind of personal touch that makes Asana special to me.

♥,
Jack

A thank you to our users

Sincere gratitude to Erin, Justin, Dustin, Greg, and Kris for reading and improving drafts of this post.

We’re excited your first day has finally arrived! Here’s your desk – it’s the sit-stand kind. Right now we put you next to your onboarding buddy, but in a couple weeks you’ll probably be working with different people on a specific project and you’ll all wheel your desks together somewhere in the office. You may also want to check the calendar for upcoming events. For example, we have yoga a few times a week. If you’re interested, bring some comfy clothes — we’ve got mats and other props. Remember that +1s are invited to almost all events so be sure to let your lover or your best friend know.

Your machine and workstation should be configured the way you wanted. You should already have a copy of the codebase along with the software that our engineers typically use; though if you’d like to customize your set-up further, feel free to do so. Otherwise, take some time to look around the code with your buddy…

Now that you’ve spent some time with the codebase, let’s get you something more specific to work on. Open a browser and log in to app.asana.com. We tagged a bunch of tasks that we think you might want to work on today. Some of them are bugs and others might be feature ideas. These feature ideas often begin as simple suggestions one of us puts in the Product Opportunities project. From there, the ideas get discussed, then get agreed upon and designed. You’re encouraged to read the tasks’ comment threads which contains all that history.

Wow, is it noon already? It’s almost time for check-in, short stand-up meetings we have on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Everyone in the company participates, so you should take a minute or two to reflect about what you’ve been doing this morning. Most of us also review our completed tasks in Asana to remember all the things we’ve recently finished. We share what we’ve been working on since the last check-in and what we plan to work on next – it takes maybe 15 minutes, total. This is a nice chance to hear about the other projects and to figure out if you can help unblock anyone. Don’t worry, by the next check-in you’ll be surprised at how much you have to say.

At 12:30, it’s lunch time! If you have any specific dietary requests you’ll see that Donnie or Kim has placed a name tag next to your plate, otherwise grab a seat anywhere you like. Lunchtime discussions are varied and often entertaining; people frequently use lunch to talk about different aspects of the product, technology, and business – and occasionally, cute kitten videos. Since we’re small, we all eat together; this is another opportunity to keep up to date on what is happening outside your team.

Now that you’ve finished lunch and have explored the vast reaches of our chocolate selection, let’s see if we can get some code committed! Open up that task that you picked earlier, and grab your buddy. Your buddy is there to help you keep moving quickly until you feel comfortable on your own. In fact, this is your buddy’s top priority; and for at least the first week we encourage you to do a lot of pair programming.

Once the two of you have finished coding – and written a unit test – it’s time to make your first commit. Our automated test-and-release pipeline means that your code will start being used internally in about 20 minutes, and will go live within a day. The pipeline has four safeguards against bad code going live: you, automated tests, code reviews and dogfooding; and in the rare case that serious bugs get through, we can roll back to an old revision right away. There are countless benefits of releasing on a fast cycle — some are obvious and some are subtle — but it’s a core part of our development culture.

Now that you’ve made your first commit, you should spend part of the afternoon looking at some of the notes and projects from our recent roadmap week. We have these once every four months, where the entire company collaborates in subcommittees to discuss plans for the upcoming few months. Some subcommittees are engineering specific, like “performance” or “scalability”, some are product oriented, like “mobile” or “redesign”, and others relate to how the company is run, like “recruiting” or “marketing”. These topics change as needed and you are encouraged to involve yourself in whatever parts of planning you find interesting. Don’t feel pressured to be on too many subcommittees — we’ll have a round of presentations near the end, where we incorporate more feedback.

We plan at these intervals so we stay in sync, and can execute effectively and smoothly. Between roadmap weeks, we split our time into three week periods: two weeks of working with a small team on a specific project and one week of catching up on everything else. A lot of the requirements for each project will already have been identified during roadmap week, but it’s up to you and the rest of your team to decide the full set of tasks to be completed. For the non-project work you won’t have a set team, but you can grab anyone as needed to help you with whatever you’re doing.

At the end of the day, Asana is about helping people accomplish the work they want to do, and realize their potential. It’s as true for us here, as it is for our friends, family, and all the teams who use Asana in their effort to create art, cure disease, or build the next great company. We feel strongly that the best way we can contribute to the world is to help others contribute to the world.

And look, it’s getting close to 7pm – wonder what Donnie’s made for dinner?

–Many thanks to Avital Oliver and S. Alex Smith, my delightful co-authors.

In the past, we’ve recommended using copy & paste to recreate the same tasks in each new project. Now, we’re happy to announce a much richer solution: Duplicate project.

Duplicating a project allows you to make a copy of any of your projects, and to choose which of the details are copied over. You can choose to just copy over the names of the task, or go as rich as copying over all the notes, assignees, tags, followers, projects and due dates.

For example, lets say you host a weekly event, and each week a different team of people coordinate the event. You can go to the project from last week’s event, choose Duplicate project from the menu at the top-right of the center pane, and create a copy that has the same tasks, notes and tags, but not the same assignees or followers.

Or, lets say you’re preparing for several teams to demonstrate their project on the same day. You could set up one template with all of the preparation steps and due dates, and then create a copy for each team.

Duplicating a project is easy – just select “Duplicate project” from the project menu to the right of the project name in the center pane, name the new project, choose which details to copy over, and then click “Create New Project”. Currently, you can only duplicate projects with fifty or fewer tasks.

Let us know how you’re using Duplicate project at feedback@asana.com!

Now you can sync your Asana tasks with due dates to a calendar like Google Calendar, Apple iCal, and Microsoft Outlook.

To start viewing your tasks in a calendar, click on the menu to the right of the project name or your Assigned task view in the middle pane and select “Sync to Calendar”. Then, you can click the webcal link or Google Calendar button. Incomplete tasks with due dates will appear on your calendar.

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

Asana is a modern web application that keeps teams in sync, a shared task list where everyone can capture, organize, track, and communicate what they are working on in service of their common goal. Rather than trying to stay organized through the tedious grind of emails and meetings, teams using Asana can move faster and do more — or even take on bigger and more interesting goals.

We began our private beta a year ago, and today thousands of people in hundreds of organizations are relying on Asana to organize their teams and their tasks, and to do some truly great things. They range from software start-ups to vaccine researchers, electric car manufacturers, political campaigns, sports agencies, and film producers. They’ve told us that Asana helps them spend more time doing the work that matters, instead of tracking down loose ends and doing ‘work about work’.

Emerald Therapeutics, a biotech company, is a perfect example. Says CEO Brian Frezza: “Asana allowed us to eliminate the endless meetings and prowling of the office/lab necessary to be up on everything that had spun out of control and was monopolizing our time. I’d estimate conservatively that our management time has dropped down to about 25% of our expenditure thanks to Asana, which lets us keep everyone’s vectors aligned while still allowing us to be full time contributors to the science.”

How Asana Works:

Asana re-imagines the way we work together by putting the fundamental unit of productivity – the task – at the center. Breaking down ambitious goals into small pieces, assigning ownership of those tasks, and tracking them to completion is how things get built, from software to skyscrapers. With Asana, you can:

• - capture everything your team is planning and doing in one place. When tasks and the conversations about them are collected together, instead of spread around emails, documents, whiteboards, and notebooks, they become the shared, trusted, collective memory for your organization.
• - keep your team in sync on the priorities, and what everyone is working on. When you have a single shared view of a project’s priorities, along with an accurate view into what each person is working on and when, everyone on the team knows exactly what matters, and what work remains between here and the goal.
• - get the right information at the right time. Follow tasks, and you’ll receive emails as their status evolves. Search, and you’ll see the full activity feed of all the discussions and changes to a task over its history. Now, it’s easy to stay on top of the details — without asking people to forward you a bunch of email threads.

Some of our customers have said they’ve tried many different tools to make their teams more productive, but Asana is the only one that’s actually stuck. They typically identify these key differences in the Asana approach:

It’s ridiculously fast. Thanks to our in-house “Luna” technology, Asana is as responsive and lightweight as a text editor. Plus, by obsessively minimizing the number of clicks required to get things done, along with powerful keyboard shortcuts, Asana lets you manage your most important information with ease.

It’s versatile. Asana is one tool for many uses – from simple to-do lists, to complex projects, and more. It doesn’t force a single workflow, so you can mold it to your own processes and style.

It’s for the individual, too. Asana is the place to organize your own task list. In doing so, you automatically communicate what you’re prioritizing and everything you’ve done. By being the tool that individuals are using day in and day out, the team as a whole can trust it as the source of truth. We think Asana becomes the best group productivity tool by also being the best personal productivity tool.

Lastly, Asana is free. Asana is and will remain free for teams with up to 30 members, and you can use Asana with as many of these teams as you want.

Asana continues to be a labor of love for us, and we think you’ll love using it. We look forward to hearing what you think — and seeing what it helps you create.

When I walk through a beautiful building, the first thing I experience is the emotional effect of the finished product: a sense of grandeur, or a feeling warmth. But my appreciation grows deeper when I consider how the building was made, to look at every brick or every bolt placed one by one by a person, and then to imagine the architects and designers, who must have thought and debated and iterated on each piece, from the largest design decisions to the smallest details. It’s humbling to stand there, physically held by the fruit of their collective labor.

Lao-Tzu observed that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But the journey is the million steps that follow, and the experience that emerges along the way. That’s how great things are built as well: from skyscrapers to software, from cinema to cities, greatness happens one step at a time. These steps are the “tasks”, the atomic units of work, the building blocks of all effort.

Breaking down ambitious goals into small pieces, assigning ownership of those tasks, and tracking them to completion is how creation happens. The tasks may be complex, interdependent, and involve passionate conversation among many contributors. Their coordination is crucial to the success of a project’s vision.

Everyone knows this and yet, astoundingly, most teams don’t yet have a unified, trusted record of what they have to do. There are project management apps galore, and “enterprise-grade collaboration platforms” are big business, but none of them are good enough at addressing teams’ real-life needs; almost no one’s using them to drive hour-to-hour work (even when they’re paying for them).

Some companies have felt the need for a centralized internal task list so acutely that they’ve built them in-house: Apple has their legendary Radar system, Facebook their collaborative “Tasks” tracker that Dustin and I had the privilege of helping to design and prototype. But in general, good tools for staying in sync just haven’t been built and made available to the world. Teams are getting by on a hodge-podge of email, spreadsheets, physical notebooks, and untracked verbal commitments. And the important conversations and files about those tasks are spread out, disconnected, and out of context.

We see this as the fundamental challenge to the rising productivity of teams. Working together in concert more smoothly not only helps us move more quickly; it changes the nature of what we can undertake. When we have the confidence that we can orchestrate the group effort required to realize them, we dare bigger dreams.