The best Asana integrations for productivity

Asana is a project management tool that helps you plan, organize, and monitor your projects from beginning to end. What makes it different from other project management software is its level of adaptability for whatever industry you’re in. You can use it for all types of workflows like new-hire onboarding, product launches, marketing campaigns, and more. We  also love Asana for the way it straddles both simplicity and functionality. 

Not to mention Asana’s ability to integrate with an impressive number of third-party tools — our focus today. In this article, you’ll learn about some of Asana’s best integrations to help boost productivity and save time and effort.

What is Asana?

If you’re new to using Asana, check out this article for a comprehensive look at its features, how to get started using it for project management, and pricing. Otherwise, here are some of Asana’s features in a nutshell:

• Track and visualize your project with different types of views (board view, list view, timeline view, calendar view, and dashboards)
• Break down complex projects into tasks and subtasks
• Hit the ground running on your projects with ready-made templates
• Generate reporting easily (i.e. for stakeholders) using Portfolios
• Tailor the platform for your needs with custom fields

But first, why integrate?

These days, most of us have our work scattered across several tools: Gmail, Slack, Google Calendar, Asana...the list goes on. Getting things done may require a dozen different tools, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. There’s a way that every Asana user can simplify their workflow without saying goodbye to their favorite tools — and it's through Asana integrations. We’ve rounded up our top picks in the productivity category, carefully considering the following:

• Popularity: Do many people already use (and love) this third-party app?
• Accessibility: Is this third-party app/integration free or affordable?
• Value: Will users get a lot out of this Asana integration?
• Flexibility: Can this integration be adapted for any industry? 
  

In other words, we did all of the careful consideration so that you wouldn’t have to! Now let’s get started.

Clockwise

Clockwise is a smart calendar assistant that works on top of Google Calendar to save you time and mental bandwidth by scheduling according to your preferences, carving out Focus Time in your schedule, and automatically resolve meeting conflicts for you and your team members. It’s the solution to all of your scheduling pains. With Asana, Clockwise, and Google Calendar you can bring together three of your favorite tools!

What it does:

• Makes it easy for you to time-block your calendar by scheduling Asana tasks as Google Calendar events
• Allows you to specify your preferences for how you’d like Clockwise to treat the event, for example:

• While you’re in Asana, you can specify the duration of your time-block/event
• Choose from one of Clockwise’s suggestions for optimal times
• Tell Clockwise to make your time blocks flexible, which allows Clockwise to reschedule them to preserve Focus Time or resolve meeting conflicts
• Specify the privacy of the event (i.e. if you’d like the details to be made public to whoever else shares the calendar with you)

Slack

You can’t have team productivity without communication, which is why we’re counting Slack as one of the best productivity tools for Asana. On its own, Slack is a messaging platform that removes barriers to communication and increases transparency among teams and companies. Slack is on a mission to help people like you spend less time in your inbox and in unnecessary meetings by giving you a well-thought out platform to communicate in real-time. 

And with Asana for Slack, you can make your favorite project management platform and your favorite communication platform work hand-in-hand. 

What it does:

• Reduces the need for manual status updates by sending you Slack notifications whenever someone creates a new task or makes changes to existing tasks. You can also get notifications for completed tasks.
• Lets you create Asana tasks and take action on tasks (assign, comment, mark as complete, etc.) without leaving Slack
• Makes it possible to view Asana tasks, Asana projects, Milestones, Portfolios, and more within Slack
  

(Bonus: Clockwise makes it super easy to integrate Slack with Google Calendar as well.)

Gmail

As much as we love Slack, it’d be wrong to say that email is kaput. Most, perhaps all, of us use email on the daily. And if your team and/or company uses Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), then you’ll definitely want the Asana for Gmail add-on. 

What it does:

• The Asana for Gmail add-on lets you create new Asana tasks from Gmail. Plus, anytime you create an Asana task using Gmail, it links to the original email, so that you get the full context behind the task.
• The add-on also makes it possible to reference Asana tasks while you’re in Gmail. This comes in handy if you’re writing an email and you need to plug in some important information about an Asana task.
• Allows you to comment on or complete a task without leaving Gmail.

Trello

If you’re a visual person, then you’ll love using Trello to lay out your to-do lists on visual, Kanban-like boards. Though their platform is flexible enough to adapt for all sorts of use cases. Trello is great for task management and/or lightweight project management. If you and your team work with Trello and Asana, take advantage of the integration to streamline your workflow, so that you’re not constantly juggling between the two. 

How it works:

• Unito’s two-way integration for Trello and Asana automatically syncs data between the two tools
• Sync custom fields, comments, tasks, and more
• Another way to transfer data from Trello to Asana is to use a CSV Importer by exporting your CSV file from Trello and uploading it onto Asana

Toggl

A downside to using Asana, which so many users point out in their reviews, is that there’s no built-in feature for time tracking. The good news is that it isn’t a deal breaker, especially with amazing time tracking apps like Toggl that integrate well with Asana.

What it does:

• Transfers Asana projects and users to Toggl, so that you don’t have to manually update your Toggl account
• Lets you track time without ever leaving Asana with the Toggl Button Chrome extension
• Provides other helpful features like idle detection (notifies you when you’ve stopped working but forgot to turn off your timer), Pomodoro time tracking, and more
  

Just note that this is a one-way integration that supports data transfer from Asana to Toggl. If you’re looking for a way to transfer data from Toggl to Asana, we have the solution for you. It’s called Zapier, which is our next favorite Asana integration for productivity.

Zapier

You can think of Zapier as the integration for your integrations. By downloading Zapier, you open the door for over 4,000 integrations with Asana. Zapier lets you build custom workflows between your favorite tools.

How it works:

• Just choose two tools that you’d like to connect. Let’s take Asana and Google Sheets, for example.
• In your Zapier dashboard, select a trigger and an action. Taking our Asana and Google Sheets example, maybe you want Zapier to create a row in Google Sheets every time a new task is created in Asana. In this case, your trigger is the creation of a new task; your action is the creation of a new Google Sheets row. 
• Done! You’ve now learned how to automate actions through connecting two different apps and sharing data, allowing them to “talk” to each other. Zapier calls these custom workflows “Zaps.”

Integrations for file storage

Even before the rise of remote teams, many teams stored their important files in the cloud. Asana is also compatible with a number of file storage apps like Google Drive and Dropbox, which you can use to attach files to their relevant tasks in Asana. 

Can’t find what you’re looking for?

Asana is compatible with a huge range of tools and apps that cover everything from customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Salesforce to IT development tools like Jira. If you want to take a look at their integration offerings that go beyond productivity tools, take a look at their full library here. And if then, you still can’t find what you’re looking for, you can even build your own API.

Going forward

Connect Asana to your favorite tools to save you time, stay organized, and reduce stress. Why spend your time switching between windows and manually inputting data more than once? By syncing your tools up, you free up loads of time — not to mention mental space to focus on whatever is most important to you.

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Next, read on to find out how to integrate Asana with Outlook. And what are The Best Asana AI Tools for Productivity.