Introduction:
Templates are one of Asana’s most underused features, yet they can save your team countless hours of repetitive work. Every time you launch a new client project, run a marketing campaign, or onboard a new employee, you’re probably recreating the same tasks and structure from scratch. Templates eliminate that waste by letting you build a project framework once and reuse it forever. Whether you start with Asana’s built-in templates or create custom ones for your specific business needs, this approach brings consistency and speed to your project management. Combined with the strategies in our comprehensive resource on how to use asana for project management, templates become a powerful tool for small teams doing big things.
Understanding When Templates Make Sense
Not every project needs a template, and knowing the difference saves you from over-engineering your workflow. Templates shine when you have repeatable processes that follow roughly the same structure each time. If you’re doing something for the first or second time, just build it as a regular project and see how it goes. By the third time, patterns emerge and you can decide if a template makes sense.
Good template candidates include client onboarding sequences, content production workflows, event planning processes, product launch checklists, employee onboarding, monthly reporting cycles, or seasonal campaigns. These all share a common trait: the steps are largely predictable even though the specific details change each time.
Bad template candidates are one-off projects or work that varies significantly each time. Building a template for something that constantly changes creates more friction than it removes because you’ll spend time deleting irrelevant sections and restructuring things. Templates work best when maybe 70 percent or more of the structure stays consistent across instances.
Think about the processes in your business that make you think “here we go again” each time you start them. Those moments of repetition are where templates deliver value. If starting a new project feels like assembling it from scratch every time, that’s your signal to create a template.
Exploring Asana’s Built-in Template Library
Before you build custom templates, check what Asana already offers. The template library includes dozens of pre-built templates for common business processes across marketing, product development, operations, HR, creative production, and more. These templates represent best practices from thousands of teams and can be a great starting point.
Browse the template library by clicking the plus icon to create a new project and selecting “Use a template.” You’ll find templates for things like editorial calendars, event planning, meeting agendas, product launches, company goals, and bug tracking. Each template includes a complete project structure with sections, sample tasks, and descriptions explaining how to use it.
The value of these built-in templates isn’t that they perfectly match your workflow out of the box. They rarely will. The value is that they give you a foundation to build from and expose you to ways other teams structure similar work. You can use a template as-is, customize it heavily, or just get inspiration for your own custom template.
When you create a project from a built-in template, you’re making a copy that you can modify without affecting the original template. Feel free to experiment, delete sections that don’t apply, add your own structure, and adjust it to match your specific needs. Over time you might evolve a built-in template so much that it becomes your own custom template.
Some of the most useful built-in templates for small businesses include the project plan template for general project management, the meeting agenda template for recurring meetings, the content calendar for editorial planning, and the employee onboarding template for bringing new team members up to speed.
Creating Your First Custom Template
Building a custom template is straightforward once you understand the process. Start by creating a regular project that represents the work you want to templatize. Build it out completely with all the sections, tasks, subtasks, descriptions, and custom fields you want to include. Assign tasks to roles or leave them unassigned if that makes more sense for your workflow.
As you build the template project, think about what should be consistent across every instance versus what will change. Consistent elements go directly into the template. Variable elements might be represented as placeholder tasks or sections that you’ll customize each time you use the template.
Task descriptions in templates are especially valuable for providing instructions. Since the same people might not run this process every time, clear descriptions help anyone on your team execute the workflow correctly. Include notes about what needs to happen, common pitfalls to avoid, or where to find resources they’ll need.
Once your template project is built, convert it to an actual template by clicking the dropdown arrow next to the project name and selecting “Save as template.” Give the template a clear name and description so future you and your teammates understand when to use it. You can also specify which team should have access to the template.
Template naming matters more than you might think. A template called “Client Project” is less helpful than “Client Onboarding – Services” or “Client Project – Web Development.” The more specific your template names, the easier it is to pick the right one when you need it.
Structuring Templates for Maximum Reusability
The art of good template design is balancing specificity with flexibility. Too specific and the template only works for a narrow use case. Too generic and it doesn’t save much time because you’re customizing everything anyway. The sweet spot is a structure that handles 70 to 80 percent of the work automatically.
Start templates with sections that organize the workflow logically. For a content production template, you might have sections for ideation, research, writing, editing, design, and publishing. For a client onboarding template, sections might represent different phases like kickoff, discovery, setup, training, and launch.
Within each section, include the core tasks that happen every time. These should be written clearly enough that someone unfamiliar with the process could understand what needs to happen. Leave tasks unassigned unless specific roles always handle specific tasks in your workflow.
Consider adding a “Customize This Project” section at the top of your template with tasks that remind you what to adjust for each new instance. This might include tasks like “Update project name and due dates,” “Assign team members,” “Customize deliverables in scope,” or “Remove sections that don’t apply.” This checklist approach ensures you don’t forget important customization steps.
Use task descriptions to include instructions, links to resources, or notes about decision points. A task called “Create design mockups” might have a description that links to your brand guidelines, lists required deliverables, and notes the typical timeline for this phase of work.
Custom fields in templates let you add structure that carries over to every project created from the template. A priority field, status field, or effort estimate field in your template means every new project starts with that structure already in place.
Managing and Organizing Your Template Library
As you create multiple templates, organization becomes important. You don’t want to dig through a long unstructured list every time you need a template. Asana lets you organize templates by team, and you can create a dedicated “Templates” team to house all your organization’s templates in one place.
Within your templates team, create projects that serve as categories: Marketing Templates, Client Work Templates, Operations Templates, HR Templates. Each category project can contain links or references to the actual templates. This creates a browsable directory that makes it easy to find the right template.
Another approach is to use clear naming conventions with prefixes. All marketing templates might start with “TEMPLATE – Marketing:” followed by the specific type. All client templates might start with “TEMPLATE – Client:” and so on. This makes templates easy to identify in search results and project lists.
Document your templates with a brief guide explaining what each template is for, when to use it, and any special instructions for customization. This can live in a project description or a separate documentation project. The goal is to make templates accessible to everyone on your team, not just the person who created them.
Review your template library quarterly to identify templates that are no longer useful or need updates. Workflows evolve, and your templates should evolve with them. A template that hasn’t been used in six months might be outdated or unnecessary.
Customizing Template Projects After Creation
When you create a project from a template, you’re starting with a copy that you can freely modify. The first step is usually updating the project name to reflect the specific instance. “Client Onboarding Template” becomes “Client Onboarding – Acme Corp” or whatever makes sense.
Go through and assign tasks to the actual people who will handle them. If your template left tasks unassigned or assigned to generic roles, this is when you attach real names. Set due dates based on your specific timeline. If the template included placeholder dates or relative timing, adjust them to match your actual schedule.
Delete sections or tasks that don’t apply to this particular instance. Not every project needs every piece of the template. Maybe this client doesn’t need the training phase, or this campaign doesn’t include video content. Remove what doesn’t fit to keep the project focused.
Add tasks or sections that are unique to this instance. Templates give you the foundation, but most projects need some customization to address specific requirements or circumstances. The template saves you from building the common structure, but you’re still free to extend it.
Update task descriptions with instance-specific information. The template might have a task called “Draft proposal” with generic instructions, but you can add specific details about this client’s needs, preferences, or constraints.
Using Dynamic Template Features
Asana templates support some dynamic features that make them more powerful than static checklists. Task dependencies can be included in templates so when you create a project from the template, all the relationships between tasks carry over. This is valuable for complex workflows where certain tasks must happen in sequence.
Relative due dates let you set task due dates relative to the project start date rather than absolute dates. When you create a project from the template, Asana can automatically calculate due dates based on when the project begins. This keeps templates from becoming dated as time passes.
Forms connected to projects can be templatized so each project instance starts with a form for collecting information. This works well for intake processes or projects that start with information gathering. The form submissions become tasks in the project automatically.
Rules are another dynamic feature that templates can include. If your template has rules set up to automatically move tasks between sections, assign work, or update custom fields based on triggers, those rules carry over to new project instances. This lets you build sophisticated workflow automation directly into your templates.
Training Your Team to Use Templates Effectively
Templates only save time if your team actually uses them. This requires a small amount of training and culture building. When you create a new template, introduce it to your team with a quick walkthrough showing when to use it and how to customize it for specific instances.
Make templates the default path for starting common types of work. If someone is about to create a client project from scratch, gently redirect them to use the template instead. Over time this becomes habit and people reach for templates automatically.
Encourage team members to suggest improvements to existing templates. The people using templates daily often spot opportunities for better structure or additional tasks that should be included. Make it easy to propose changes and update templates when good suggestions come in.
Some teams designate a template owner for each template who is responsible for keeping it current and helping others use it effectively. This prevents templates from becoming stale or confusing as workflows evolve.
Celebrate the time savings that templates create. When a project that used to take an hour to set up now takes five minutes, point that out. Making the value visible encourages continued adoption.
Common Template Mistakes to Avoid
The biggest template mistake is making them too detailed and prescriptive. A template with 200 tasks that anticipates every possible scenario becomes overwhelming rather than helpful. Keep templates focused on the essential structure and let people add details as needed.
Another mistake is failing to update templates when processes change. A template that reflects how you worked six months ago might actively hurt productivity if your workflow has evolved. Treat templates as living documents that need periodic maintenance.
Creating too many templates for slightly different variations of similar work fragments your workflow. Instead of having separate templates for “Blog Post – Short,” “Blog Post – Long,” and “Blog Post – Guest Author,” consider one flexible blog post template that can be customized.
Leaving task descriptions empty or vague defeats much of the purpose of templates. If people still need to figure out what each task means and how to do it, the template isn’t saving much cognitive load.
Not testing templates before rolling them out leads to frustration. Before you introduce a new template to your team, create a test project from it and walk through the process to catch issues.
Measuring Template Impact
Track how much time templates save your team by occasionally timing how long it takes to set up a project with and without a template. The difference is often dramatic, and quantifying it helps justify the time spent creating and maintaining templates.
Monitor template usage to see which templates are valuable and which are ignored. If a template hasn’t been used in months, either it’s solving a problem you don’t have anymore or people don’t know it exists. Either way, that’s useful information.
Gather feedback from your team about template quality. Are the templates they use actually helpful or do they find themselves making the same customizations every time? Consistent customization patterns suggest opportunities to improve the template.
Look at project completion rates and timeline accuracy for templated versus non-templated projects. If templated projects tend to finish on time more often, that’s evidence of the value of standardized structure.
Templates transform Asana from a place where you track work into a system that actively makes work easier. The upfront investment in creating good templates pays dividends every single time you use them, and for small teams where time is precious, those dividends add up fast. Once you have your workflows templatized, the next step is making sure your team can actually collaborate effectively within those projects, which is where our guide on asana team collaboration comes in.
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