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How Asana works

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Whether you are working on a simple task or a complex project, Asana makes it easy to collaborate, streamline workflows, and achieve your goals. In this article, you’ll learn what's possible with Asana and understand how Asana is structured.

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What is Asana?

Asana is a comprehensive work management platform that helps teams organize, track, and manage their work from start to finish. Whether you're planning a product launch, managing creative requests, or coordinating team meetings, Asana provides the clarity, structure, and AI-powered automation your team needs to do their best work.

How Asana is organized

Asana’s structure is designed to create a seamless connection between users and the work they are responsible for. Here's an overview of how Asana is organized:

How work is organized

  1. Goals: Goals are high-level objectives that represent the overarching priorities for an organization or team. They are set within Asana Goals and provide a clear direction for the work being done.
  2. Portfolios: Portfolios are containers that group related projects together. They help track progress toward specific initiatives or objectives.
  3. Projects: Projects organize and manage work related to a specific initiative. Projects house tasks and subtasks, allowing for dividing work into manageable units and facilitating collaboration.
  4. Tasks: Tasks represent the individual action items within a project. They have due dates and can be assigned to specific team members.
  5. Subtasks: Subtasks are smaller units of work within a task, often used for breaking down more complex tasks into manageable steps.

How Asana is organized 

How people are organized

  1. Organizations are based on your company’s shared email domain and connect everybody within your company that uses Asana.
  2. Teams are functional groups in an organization that likely correspond to departments, like Marketing or Sales, or functional groups like "NYC Office."
  3. Members are users who have full access to the workspace or organization and its features.
  4. Guests have more limited access and are often invited to collaborate on specific projects or tasks.

Everything starts with a task

Creating a task may be one of the first things you do in Asana. When you create a task, you set an owner, a due date, and add collaborators so everyone knows what’s due by when. When the task is completed, you and your collaborators are notified so everyone is aware and on the same page. Learn to create a task.

My tasks is your central hub for managing the tasks you’ve been assigned. You can check status, due dates, rearrange and prioritize to ensure you're focusing on the most critical work. Explore My tasks.

Organize tasks into projects

If you have an initiative with multiple work streams and tasks, you’ll want to set up a project. Start out by organizing your work into sections, add milestones, and then track your work in one of the multiple project views Asana offers: list, calendar, Gantt chart, board, or timeline. Learn to create projects.

Collaborate with your team

Once you’ve created a task or project, you can move work forward with your teammates. Asana lets you communicate about your tasks and projects in one place, in real time  Learn these team-building features to ensure work happens seamlessly.

Comments: Every task has a comment section where you can ask or answer questions. The conversation history for a task is captured in a single thread all of your collaborators can reference.. 

@mentions: You can @mention teammates anywhere in a task and they’ll automatically be added as a collaborator and notified about your comment.

Frequently asked questions

What is Asana?

Asana is a work management platform that helps teams organize, track, and manage their work from start to finish with AI-powered automation.

How is work organized in Asana?

Work in Asana follows a hierarchy: Goals represent high-level objectives, Portfolios group related projects, Projects organize tasks for specific initiatives, and Tasks and Subtasks break down the actual work into manageable units.

What are tasks in Asana?

Tasks are individual action items that can be assigned to team members with due dates, and when completed, all collaborators receive notifications to stay aligned.

How do you collaborate on tasks in Asana?

You can collaborate by adding comments to any task and using @mentions to notify teammates, who are automatically added as collaborators and notified about your comment.

 

Additional resources

 

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An overview of how Asana works | Asana Help Center