Harnessing the Power of Asana Scheduling: Optimizing Efficiency and Collaboration

When it comes to project scheduling, Asana is one of the most powerful tools you can use. From small businesses to large organizations, many of today’s most successful teams use Asana for scheduling tasks, managing projects, and collaborating across teams.

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In this guide, you’ll learn how to get the most out of Asana’s scheduling superpowers. More specifically:

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• How to use Asana to schedule and manage your tasks
• How to add Asana tasks to Google Calendar
• How to use Asana to manage your time as a team

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Let’s get into it!

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Wait, isn’t Asana a project management tool — not a scheduling app?

As a work management platform, Asana’s core functionality isn’t for scheduling meetings and events, but for scheduling work.

Other calendar tools like Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar are great for simple task management. However, they aren’t designed to optimize your workflow and help you stay efficient.

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 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. Click here for an in-depth look at Asana’s different use cases.

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How Asana makes it easy to plan out your project management 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 project management 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. Some examples of templates available to Premium accounts are Company Goals & Milestones, Event Planning, Product Launches, Editorial Calendar, and more.

2. Custom fields

Customization is always a plus, but especially when it comes to your project management platform. Custom fields allow you to make Asana perfectly tailored for your team’s unique workflow. 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 track progress easily.

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, Board view, and more. 

Board view is a great option for those who find Kanban boards helpful. We especially love scheduling with Timeline view, which allows you to visualize projects on a Gantt chart.

5. Collaboration between team members

While Asana is awesome for managing your personal task list, it’s even better for team collaboration. Asana 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.

How to get started with Asana for project 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.

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Step 1: Sign up for a free Asana account

Okay, 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, schedule Asana tasks, assign them 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!

Pro tip: Don’t forget to download the mobile app for on-the-go project management!

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Asana automation: the best way to streamline task management

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.

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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:

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• Toggl for time tracking
• Clockwise for AI-powered scheduling, team calendar, and time management
• Slack for turning messages into actionable Asana tasks
• Jira Cloud for IT and development
• Unito for syncing Trello and Asana 
• 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

…and so much more.

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How much does Asana cost?

Asana goes by a freemium model, which includes four different tiers: Basic, Premium, Business, and Enterprise.

Which one’s right for your team’s needs? Let’s explore how each plan stacks up against each other — especially as it relates to scheduling.

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1. Basic

Pricing: Free

Pros:

• Unlimited tasks and projects
• Good for teams of 15 or less
• Includes List view, Board view, and Calendar view

Cons:

• Doesn’t include Timeline view

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2. Premium

Pricing: $10.99 per user, per month billed annually

Pros:

• Includes Timeline view
• Unlimited Dashboards
• Manage task dependencies
• Add start dates and times

Cons:

• Doesn’t include Portfolios, Goals, and Workload

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3. Business

Pricing: $24.99 per user, per month billed annually

Pros:

• Includes Workload, which lets you manage team’s bandwidth
• Full functionality when it comes to project management, views, and reporting

Cons:

• Lacks a few support and control features

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4. Enterprise 

Pricing: Contact sales for pricing

Still not sure of which plan to choose? Individuals or small teams, start out with Asana’s free plan. If you find that it isn’t meeting your needs, then you can trial a paid plan for free!

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Going forward

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As a project scheduling tool, Asana has everything you need: unlimited projects and tasks, due dates, different views, and more. Pair with an AI-powered meeting scheduling tool like Clockwise for the ultimate time management duo. Try Clockwise for free today!

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Read next, The Best Asana AI Tools for Productivity.