Asana scheduling for teams

The Asana scheduling app is, in our humble opinion, the project scheduling tool to rule them all. It’s one of the most powerful tools on the market for scheduling tasks, managing projects, and collaborating with your team. Yes, it’s a bold statement, but shortly, you’ll see why we think Asana project scheduling tools are superior to the major competitors.

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The benefits of scheduling in Asana

To us, the benefits of using Asana as your team and project management tool couldn't be clearer.

Other calendar tools like Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar are great for simple task management, but they weren't created to optimize your workflow to help you stay efficient. All these calendars do is remind you of due dates.

You already know that scheduling and project management isn't as simple as setting a due date, dusting off your hands, and calling it a day. There are usually tasks and subtasks (and sub-sub tasks) involved.

You could go the old-school route and create folders in your email inbox to try to keep up with all the information coming in, or manually input all the little due dates into your online calendar. But what happens when you get stuck and need to collaborate with your team members? Bottlenecks can arise, information slips through the cracks, key messages get lost in a flurry of email threads — you get the point.

Asana is your one-stop project management shop to create a dedicated team workspace, automate your workflows, collaborate with your team members in real-time, and see all project plans in an easy-to-read format. (It truly has a sophisticated use case.) If you're still hanging on to the idea of having a calendar view, too, like you’re used to — don't worry, Asana's got that too.

How Asana makes it easy to plan out your workflow

No matter if you’re working with a small team, it’s just you, or you have some serious stakeholders invested in your business, Asana can help streamline your workflow with ease. 

Below are five of the many amazing features that this scheduling software has to make your online workspace simple to set up and follow:

1. Templates

Asana has ready-made templates you can choose from to make it quick and easy to set up new workspaces and track specific projects. From there, you can customize these templates so they fit your specific needs. Trello, a similar platform that often gets pitted against Asana, also has templates, but we find the templates on Asana to be much more intuitive to use because of the easy-to-read list vs Kajabi board view you see in Trello. Some examples of templates available to Premium accounts are Company Goals & Milestones, Event Planning, Product Launches, Editorial Calendar, and more.

2. Custom fields

Custom fields are fantastic because they let you add custom details your team might need to know about within each task. For example, if you manage a marketing team and you need to differentiate between your due dates and publication dates, you can custom create these fields right in Asana.

3. Status updates

We are huge fans of the transparency that comes with using Asana and real-time status updates. You can get notifications for the exact moment each assignee changes their status update for a task, allowing you to keep track of how your team’s work is moving along.

4. Various project views

Within each Asana project you create (more on that in the next section), you can easily keep up with all your tasks with the view you like best — list view, calendar view, portfolio view, timeline view, and board view.

5. Collaboration between team members

Of course, we had to include this benefit since this is a blog post all about team spaces within Asana! Collaboration with your team in one space makes it super clear where each team member is in a project, so there’s less miscommunication and waiting around for updates. Plus, since you can communicate with your team in real-time, this can result in fewer meetings and more time for Focus Time and increased productivity.

There are so many more benefits, and if you’d like to read a more in-depth review of all of Asana’s features, check out this blog post, How to Use Asana for Project Management.

Setting up your Asana for task, project, and team scheduling

We don’t blame you if you’re getting excited to set up Asana right now for your team — it’s an incredible tool! So we won’t make you wait any longer and we’ll dive right into how you can set up your team’s Asana for an optimized, streamlined workflow.

Even better? It won’t take you more than just a few minutes. Before you know it, you’ll be scheduling in Asana like a true scheduling extraordinaire.

Step 1: Sign up for a free Asana account

OK, yes, this seems like an obvious first step, but we want to point out one caveat that business owners sometimes miss: Make sure to sign up with your business or company email so that it’s easy to link up all your accounts (more on that in the integrations section below).

Step 2: Create a team in Asana

Once you’ve created an account, you’ll arrive at the home page. To create a team, you’ll want to navigate to the orange plus (+) sign in the upper right-hand corner. Click “Team.”

From there, you can name your new Asana Team’s space, invite team members, and voilà, you’ve created your Asana Team!

Step 3: Create a new project

Once you’ve created your team, you can create projects, assign due dates to team members, and set up your preferred workflow. The process is similar to creating an Asana Team.

Simply navigate to the orange plus (+) sign in the upper right-hand corner, click “Project” and select “Blank Project.” Once there, a window will pop up where you can name your new project, select the Asana Team you want to share this project with, what you want your default view to be (we recommend list view), and the privacy settings of your project (make sure to make it public to the Asana Team you’ve shared it with).

Step 4: Set up your Asana Team schedule

After you create an Asana Project, you’ll see a blank workspace. This is your opportunity to start scheduling in Asana and customize the space to fit the types of project plans you have with your team. We recommend creating Sections to represent each step of the workflow and optimize your workspace. Under Sections, you can create tasks and subtasks within those sections, set start dates and due dates, designate assignees, write notes, attach files, and more!

Stay on top of all your Asana tasks with automation

Automation is one of the best reasons to use Asana. Yep, we just said that. Even though the intuitive UI of Asana’s scheduling software and the ability to create team spaces are undoubtedly significant perks, you still wouldn’t be able to maximize your efficiency and productivity without their automation functionalities. Automation is what truly helps you streamline your team’s work.

By using Rules, you can automate routine tasks, so your team doesn't have to do the manual work to create repeat tasks. For example, if you have a marketing campaign that requires weekly social media posts, you can create a Rule for Asana to auto-populate those tasks. You can choose from one of Asana's pre-set Rules or create your own!

There are also other projects and processes you can set in place to reduce all the busywork that comes with setting up workflows.

Asana integrations: the savior for productivity and the end to distractions

It's hard not to end up with a bunch of business tools scattered all over the place. Though we're all about finding ways to bring more simplicity into your life, we also know that depending on your work, you probably have to use several different tools for your project management needs. This is where integrations can come in handy.

Integrations make it easier to keep track of all the tools you have because they can all connect after you set up the permissions. Not to mention that it can mitigate the danger of getting distracted when logging into different apps because your notifications will be in one place. Here are just some of the integrations Asana can handle:

• Toggl for time tracking
• Zoom for webinars and meetings
• Microsoft teams for a truly robust team management app
• Zapier for thousands of other integrations
• Instagantt for Gantt charts, seeing milestones and new projects or new tasks in a timeline, and dependencies lines
• Salesforce for a five-star customer-buying journey
• Clockwise for ultimate productivity
  

…and so much more.

Pricing for Asana plans

Asana’s plans are quite simple, and they make it easy to choose a plan that’s perfect for your team. Their free, Basic plan is perfect for individuals just getting started or who only need to keep track of their own tasks. The next tier, Premium, is $10.99 to $13.49, depending on if you pay annually or monthly. This plan is great for teams that need to collaborate and create project plans with ease and flexibility. Lastly, you can subscribe to their Business plan, which is $24.99 annually or $30.49 monthly. As Asana puts it, this plan is great for “teams and companies that need to manage work across initiatives.” 

Going forward

Is the Asana scheduling resource the best in the game? We’ll let you decide. At the very least, we hope this post covered what you needed to know about working with your team, scheduling projects and tasks, and how you can streamline everything in Asana! We truly believe in the power of Asana’s scheduling software, and we know that you’ll find a lot of benefits with its automation, integrations, and functionalities.