Introduction:
Projects are the backbone of Asana, but creating them the right way makes all the difference between a tool that helps and one that adds confusion. Many teams jump in and start creating projects without thinking about structure, only to find themselves with a cluttered workspace months later. The good news is that with a few strategic decisions upfront, you can build projects that actually make your work easier. From choosing between list, board, and timeline views to deciding how granular your projects should be, this guide covers the practical steps that matter. These techniques are essential building blocks for anyone learning how to use asana for project management in their growing business.
Deciding What Deserves Its Own Project
The first question you’ll face is what actually needs to be a project in Asana. This trips up a lot of new users because the answer isn’t always obvious. A project in Asana is essentially a collection of related tasks that work toward a common goal or outcome. But that definition is broad enough to cause problems if you’re not careful.
A good guideline is that a project should represent a meaningful body of work that will take multiple tasks and possibly multiple people to complete. Launching a new website is a project. Planning your Q2 marketing campaigns is a project. Your ongoing social media posts might be a project if you manage them as a continuous workflow. Writing a single blog post is probably just a task within a larger content project.
The risk of creating too many projects is that you fragment your work across so many containers that nothing feels connected. The risk of too few projects is that you end up with massive projects containing hundreds of tasks that become impossible to navigate. Most small businesses find a sweet spot with projects that contain somewhere between 15 and 100 tasks.
Think about natural work boundaries in your business. Client engagements often make good projects. Specific campaigns or initiatives work well. Ongoing operational work like customer support or content creation can be projects too, but they need regular maintenance to avoid becoming dumping grounds for unrelated tasks.
Choosing the Right Project View
When you create a new project in Asana, you’ll choose a default view: list, board, timeline, or calendar. This choice matters more than it might seem because it influences how your team interacts with the work. You can switch between views later, but the default you choose sets expectations and habits.
List view is the classic Asana experience and works well for most projects. Tasks appear in a vertical list that you can organize into sections. This view is straightforward, requires minimal setup, and gives you a clear linear view of what needs to happen. Use list view when tasks have a natural sequence or when you want simplicity above all else.
Board view organizes tasks into columns, similar to Trello or a kanban board. This works beautifully for workflows with distinct stages like “To Do,” “In Progress,” “Review,” and “Complete.” Creative teams, development teams, and anyone managing work that moves through a process will appreciate board view. The visual nature makes it easy to spot bottlenecks when too many tasks pile up in one column.
Timeline view shows your tasks on a Gantt chart with start dates, due dates, and dependencies between tasks. This view is powerful for complex projects where timing and task relationships matter. If you’re managing a product launch with many interdependent pieces or coordinating multiple team members who need to hand off work sequentially, timeline view helps you spot conflicts and plan realistically. It requires more setup time because you need to establish dates and dependencies, so save it for projects where that investment pays off.
Calendar view displays tasks on a monthly calendar based on their due dates. This is useful for editorial calendars, event planning, or any work where seeing the distribution of tasks across time helps with planning. It’s less common as a primary project view but valuable for specific use cases.
Most teams default to list or board view for everyday projects and bring out timeline view for complex initiatives. Don’t overthink this decision because switching views later is easy, but do consider which view matches how your team naturally thinks about the work.
Structuring Projects with Sections
Sections are the dividers within your project that group related tasks together. They’re simple but powerful for keeping projects organized. In list view, sections appear as headers that break up your task list. In board view, sections become the columns.
The key to good section structure is finding the right level of granularity. Too few sections and everything blends together without useful categorization. Too many sections and you spend more time deciding where tasks go than actually doing the work.
For list view projects, consider sections that represent phases of work, categories of tasks, or assignment groups. A website redesign project might have sections like “Planning,” “Design,” “Development,” “Content,” and “Launch.” A content project might use sections for “Ideas,” “In Progress,” “Ready for Review,” and “Published.”
For board view projects, your sections represent stages in your workflow. Keep these to somewhere between three and six stages for most projects. More than six stages usually means you’re tracking too much detail in the workflow itself. Common board structures include “Backlog,” “This Week,” “In Progress,” “Done” or “To Do,” “Doing,” “Review,” “Complete.”
Section names should be clear and unambiguous so anyone on your team can quickly determine where a task belongs. Avoid clever names that only make sense to you. “Stuff to do eventually” is less helpful than “Backlog” or “Future Ideas.”
Setting Up Project Descriptions and Context
Every project in Asana has a description field that most people ignore, and that’s a mistake. The project description is prime real estate for context that helps team members understand what the project is about, what success looks like, and where to find related resources.
A solid project description includes the project’s goal or purpose, key stakeholders or owners, important dates or milestones, links to related documents or resources, and any specific guidelines about how to use this particular project. You don’t need to write a novel, but a few clear paragraphs can save your team from constant questions about project basics.
Use the description to link out to external resources like Google Docs with detailed requirements, Figma files with designs, or Slack channels for project discussion. Asana should be the hub where work is tracked, but it doesn’t need to contain everything. Linking to the right external resources keeps information in its natural home while ensuring everyone knows where to find it.
Update the project description when major things change. If the timeline shifts, update it. If the project scope expands, update it. A description that’s obviously outdated trains your team to ignore it, which defeats the purpose of having it.
Creating Custom Fields for Better Tracking
Custom fields let you add structured data to tasks within a project. They’re optional but incredibly useful once you understand how they work. A custom field might track things like priority, status, department, effort level, or any other attribute relevant to your work.
The beauty of custom fields is that they create consistency in how you categorize and filter work. Instead of having some people write “high priority” in task names and others use a red label, you create a priority custom field with defined options like High, Medium, and Low. Then you can filter or sort tasks by priority across the entire project.
Start with one or two custom fields for a project and add more only if you find yourself needing additional ways to slice the data. Common useful custom fields include priority, status beyond just complete or incomplete, assigned department or team, and effort estimate.
Custom fields work especially well in board view where you can use them for column headers instead of sections. For example, you might use a status custom field with options like “Not Started,” “In Progress,” “Blocked,” “Complete” as your board columns. This approach gives you more flexibility than basic sections.
The downside of custom fields is that they require your team to actually fill them out for tasks, which adds a bit of overhead. Make sure any custom field you add is genuinely useful for how your team works, not just data for the sake of having data.
Establishing Project Templates for Repeated Work
If you find yourself creating similar projects repeatedly, templates will save you tremendous time. A template is just a project that you’ve set up as a blueprint, complete with sections, task structure, descriptions, and even assignees if you want. When you need to start a new instance of that type of work, you create a project from the template and all the structure copies over instantly.
Common template candidates include client onboarding, content production workflows, event planning, product launches, or any repeatable process in your business. The first time you do something, create it as a regular project. The second time, if the structure is similar, consider making the first one a template and using it to create the second. By the third time, you’ll be grateful you have the template.
Templates work best when they represent a stable process. If your approach changes significantly each time, a template might create more work than it saves because you’ll spend time deleting and modifying the structure. But for processes with consistent steps, templates are one of the highest-leverage features in Asana.
You can keep templates in a dedicated “Templates” team or project within your workspace so everyone knows where to find them. Name them clearly so the purpose is obvious at a glance.
Managing Project Permissions and Privacy
Every project in Asana has privacy settings that control who can see it and contribute to it. You’ll choose whether a project is public to the workspace, visible to specific teams, or private to just the people you invite. This decision affects collaboration and transparency, so it’s worth getting right.
The default approach for most small businesses should be to make projects public to the workspace or visible to relevant teams. This promotes transparency and allows people to discover relevant work happening across the organization. Someone in sales might stumble across a useful marketing project, or someone in product might see customer feedback that informs their roadmap.
Private projects make sense for sensitive work like HR matters, confidential client information, executive planning, or anything that genuinely needs restricted access. But resist the urge to make projects private just because they’re not directly relevant to everyone. The cost of accidental information silos is usually higher than the minor distraction of people seeing projects they’re not involved in.
Project members versus project followers is another distinction that matters. Members can edit the project structure, add tasks, and fully participate. Followers can see the project and comment but have more limited editing abilities. Use followers for stakeholders who need visibility without needing to actively manage the work.
Archiving and Maintaining Project Hygiene
Projects don’t last forever, and knowing when to archive completed projects keeps your workspace clean and navigable. Once a project is truly complete with no ongoing tasks or value, archive it. Archived projects are hidden from your main project list but remain searchable if you ever need to reference them.
The challenge is that many projects never feel completely done. There’s always one more task someone could add or a reason to keep it around just in case. A helpful rule is to archive projects when they’ve been inactive for 30 days and the primary goal has been achieved. You can always unarchive if needed, but keeping active views clear of finished work helps everyone focus.
Create a habit of quarterly project reviews where you look at all projects in your workspace and identify candidates for archiving. This maintenance task takes an hour or two but dramatically improves the day-to-day experience of using Asana.
Some teams create an “Archive” section within their project lists to mark projects as done without fully archiving them. This can work but often just kicks the problem down the road. If a project is truly complete, archiving it is usually the right move.
Projects are where your team’s work lives in Asana, and taking time to create them thoughtfully pays off in reduced confusion and better collaboration. With well-structured projects in place, the next step is filling them with tasks that actually get done. For detailed strategies on managing those tasks effectively, read our article on asana task management tips that help small teams stay productive without micromanagement.
About the Author
