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Different types of tasks

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Tasks are the building blocks of work in Asana, helping you break down projects into manageable pieces with clear owners and due dates. Understanding the different types of tasks available can help you organize work more effectively and choose the right approach for your team's needs.

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Tasks

Tasks represent individual action items, deliverables, or milestones that need completion to reach your overall goals. 

Key features of tasks:

  • Each task can only have one assignee (the person responsible for the work)
  • Multiple collaborators can comment and receive notifications
  • Tasks can include due dates, descriptions, attachments, and custom fields
  • Tasks can be added to multiple projects without duplication

Subtasks

Subtasks help you break complex work into smaller, more manageable pieces. They're perfect when multiple people need to contribute to a larger task or when work involves several sequential steps.

Use subtasks when you need to track the smaller steps that contribute to a larger goal, but use separate tasks when each item represents a distinct deliverable.

Milestones

Milestones mark significant moments in your project timeline and help you track whether you're meeting important deadlines. You can create a milestone or turn existing tasks into milestones.

Examples of milestones include:

  • Hitting a revenue target
  • Confirming an event site
  • Completing significant pieces of work that unblock the next phase of a project

Mark a task as a milestone



Milestones will appear as diamond-shaped icons.

Approvals

Approval tasks streamline review processes by allowing stakeholders to approve, reject, or request changes with a single click. This task type is perfect for content reviews, budget approvals, or any workflow requiring sign-off.

You can turn any task or subtask into an approval by clicking the three dot icon, and selecting Mark as Approval. This is a way of quickly receiving feedback on a task that needs approval. Approvers can easily see what’s needed and can “Approve”, “Request changes”, or “Reject” a task.

As the requester, you’ll receive inbox notifications when action is taken on the task.

Follow-up tasks

A follow-up task is a standalone task created from an existing Asana task. It can be a reminder to follow up on the original task later. Unlike subtasks, the follow-up task has no affiliation with the parent task. You can create a follow-up task from any task or subtask.

To create a follow-up task:

  1. Open the task you wish to follow up on
  2. Click on the three dot icon
  3. Select Create follow-up task

This creates a new task with the following default characteristics, all of which you can edit:

  • A default name of “Follow up on [original task name]”
  • Assigned to you by default and shows in your My Tasks
  • A description containing a hyperlink back to the original task

Example use cases:

  • A user has created a task that captures the minutes from a customer meeting. You create a follow up task to review the minutes or take action on one of the points.
  • Your manager shares key information in the team meeting agenda task. You need to communicate this information to your team. Create a follow up task to remind yourself about this.

Dependencies

The completion of certain tasks may depend on other work being finished first. Task dependencies help you define the order in which tasks should be completed by creating relationships between them. When one task depends on another, Asana automatically notifies assignees when they're unblocked and ready to start. With task dependencies, you can mark a task as “blocking” or “blocked by” another task.

Multi-homing

Multi-homing is adding the same task to multiple projects in Asana. Every change made to the task, such as comments, attachments, changes to due dates, etc., will be reflected across all projects, eliminating the need to update the task in each project individually.

Multi-homing avoids duplication by centralizing work; keeping various teams in the loop without providing individual updates.

How to multi-home tasks

multihoming

From the task details pane:

  1. Navigate to the Projects field, click Add to projects and type the project name
  2. Or click the three dot icon and select Add to another project

Using task templates

Task templates make it easy to standardize tasks in your project and quickly set up the same tasks repeatedly without starting from scratch. You can convert existing tasks into templates or create new ones to save time. Follow these step-by-step instructions to create task templates.

Tips on using task templates

  • Use "template" or "duplicate me" in the task title to quickly find them when searching and to ensure nobody accidentally modifies it
  • Converting a task to a template closes the original task
  • Duplicate the task by clicking the three dot icon in the top right corner of the task, then selecting Duplicate task

Additional resources

 

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Different Types of Tasks in Asana