Introduction:
Tasks are where the real work happens in Asana, and how you manage them determines whether your team stays productive or drowns in chaos. The difference between teams that thrive with Asana and those that struggle often comes down to task management fundamentals like proper assignment, realistic due dates, and clear priorities. You don’t need to use every feature Asana offers, but you do need to use the right ones consistently. This article breaks down the practical task management strategies that work for startups and small businesses, building on the foundational concepts in our guide on how to use asana for project management to help you get more done with less stress.
Writing Clear and Actionable Task Titles
The task title is the first thing anyone sees, and a poorly written title creates confusion before work even starts. Good task titles are specific, action-oriented, and clear enough that anyone on your team could understand what needs to happen. Bad task titles are vague, passive, or require reading the description to understand the actual work.
Compare “Website” to “Update homepage hero image with new product photo.” The first tells you nothing. The second tells you exactly what needs to happen. Start task titles with action verbs when possible: update, create, review, send, schedule, analyze. This makes the work feel concrete and achievable rather than abstract.
Task titles should be complete enough to stand alone but short enough to scan quickly in a list. Aim for somewhere between five and twelve words for most tasks. If you need more context, that’s what the task description is for. The title is the headline, not the full story.
Avoid putting metadata in task titles like priority indicators, dates, or assignee names. Asana has dedicated fields for that information, and cluttering titles with brackets and codes makes them harder to read. A title like “[HIGH] [Q1] Update website – John” is harder to scan than simply “Update homepage hero image” with proper fields filled in.
Assigning Tasks to the Right People
Every task in Asana should have one clear assignee who owns the work. This is not about blame or micromanagement, it’s about clarity. When a task has no assignee, it becomes everyone’s responsibility, which usually means it becomes no one’s responsibility. When a task has multiple assignees, accountability gets fuzzy and work falls through the cracks.
The person you assign should be the one who will actually do the work or is responsible for making sure it gets done. If a task requires input from multiple people, assign it to one person and add others as collaborators or use subtasks to break out the specific pieces each person will handle.
Reassigning tasks as work progresses is completely fine and expected. A task might start with a designer, move to a developer, then go to a marketer for launch. Each time responsibility shifts, reassign the task. This creates a clear chain of ownership throughout the task’s lifecycle.
Some teams resist assigning tasks because it feels too controlling or formal. But in practice, clear assignment reduces stress because everyone knows what they’re responsible for. There’s no wondering if someone else is handling it or if you’re stepping on toes by taking action.
Setting Realistic Due Dates
Due dates are powerful when used well and destructive when used poorly. A due date should represent when the work genuinely needs to be complete, not an arbitrary deadline that no one believes. When every task has an urgent due date that gets ignored, due dates lose all meaning and your team learns to tune them out.
Only add due dates to tasks that have actual time constraints. Not everything needs to be done by a specific date. Some tasks are important but not urgent, and it’s better to leave them without a due date than to invent a fake deadline. You can still track these tasks and make progress on them without the artificial pressure of a meaningless date.
When you do set due dates, involve the person who will do the work in determining what’s realistic. A due date imposed from above without input often leads to missed deadlines and frustration. A due date agreed upon collaboratively has much better odds of being met because the person doing the work has bought into the timeline.
Build in buffer time for complex tasks or work with dependencies. If a blog post needs to be published on Friday, the due date for the writer should be Tuesday or Wednesday to allow time for review and revisions. Tight deadlines with no slack time guarantee that any small delay derails the entire project.
Use start dates in addition to due dates for tasks that need to begin at a specific time or for projects using timeline view. The combination of start and due dates gives you a duration for the work, which helps with resource planning and spotting schedule conflicts.
Creating Effective Task Descriptions
The task description is where you provide context that doesn’t fit in the title. A good description might include background information, specific requirements or acceptance criteria, links to relevant resources, notes about dependencies, or constraints the person should know about. Think of it as a brief to help someone understand not just what to do but why and how.
For simple tasks, you might not need any description at all. “Schedule team meeting for next Tuesday” is self-explanatory. But for complex tasks like “Design new onboarding flow,” a description might include user research findings, technical constraints, brand guidelines to follow, and examples of experiences you want to emulate.
Use the description to link to external resources rather than trying to cram everything into Asana. If there’s a Google Doc with detailed requirements, link to it. If there’s a Figma design to reference, link to it. If there’s previous discussion in Slack, link to the thread. Asana should point to information, not replace every other tool you use.
Format descriptions for scannability when they’re longer than a few sentences. Use bullet points, headers, and short paragraphs. A wall of text is less likely to be read than a well-structured description that makes key information easy to find.
Update task descriptions when important information changes. An outdated description is worse than no description because it actively misleads people about what needs to happen.
Using Subtasks to Break Down Complex Work
Subtasks are tasks nested inside a parent task, and they’re perfect for breaking down complex work into manageable chunks. When a task feels too big or involves multiple distinct steps, subtasks help you think through the full scope and track progress on each piece.
A task like “Launch new product feature” might have subtasks for design mockups, frontend development, backend API, testing, documentation, and marketing announcement. Each subtask can have its own assignee, due date, and description. This granularity helps complex work feel less overwhelming and provides better visibility into progress.
The key is knowing when to use subtasks versus when to just create separate tasks in the project. Subtasks work best when the pieces are tightly coupled and genuinely part of accomplishing one larger objective. If the pieces are loosely related or could stand alone, they probably deserve to be separate tasks.
One limitation to be aware of is that subtasks don’t appear in most project views by default. They’re tucked under the parent task. This is by design to avoid clutter, but it means if someone needs to see all the work happening in a project, they need to expand parent tasks to see subtasks. For highly collaborative work where visibility matters, regular tasks might serve you better than subtasks.
You can also use subtasks for checklists within a task. If a task involves a series of small steps that one person will knock out sequentially, subtasks provide a satisfying way to check off progress without cluttering the main project with tiny tasks.
Prioritizing Work with Tags and Custom Fields
Asana gives you several ways to indicate priority, and the right approach depends on how your team thinks about prioritization. Tags are flexible labels you can add to any task. Custom fields let you create structured priority values at the project level. Both have their place.
Tags work well for broad categorization that applies across multiple projects. You might have tags for “Urgent,” “Client Request,” “Bug,” or “Quick Win” that you use consistently throughout your workspace. Tags are colorful and visual, making it easy to spot tagged tasks at a glance.
Custom fields for priority work better within a single project where you want more control and consistency. You can create a priority field with specific values like “Critical,” “High,” “Medium,” “Low” and require that every task has a priority set. This structured approach makes it easier to filter and sort by priority.
The danger with both tags and custom fields is priority inflation. When everything is high priority, nothing is. Encourage your team to be honest and selective about what truly deserves urgent attention. A useful guideline is that less than 20 percent of tasks should be high or critical priority at any given time.
Consider using a priority system that focuses on impact and urgency rather than just urgency alone. The Eisenhower matrix approach of categorizing work as urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, or neither urgent nor important can help teams make better decisions about what to tackle first.
Managing Dependencies Between Tasks
Some tasks can’t start until other tasks finish. Dependencies let you create these relationships explicitly in Asana so everyone understands the sequence and timeline view can calculate realistic schedules based on those dependencies.
To create a dependency, you mark one task as blocking another or waiting on another. If Task A must be complete before Task B can start, Task A is blocking Task B. Asana will show this relationship and warn you if the due dates don’t align with the dependency.
Dependencies are most valuable in complex projects with many interconnected pieces. A website launch might have design blocking development, development blocking QA testing, and QA blocking the launch task itself. Mapping these dependencies helps you see the critical path and understand which delays will actually push out your final deadline.
Don’t overuse dependencies for tasks that are merely related but not strictly sequential. Dependencies add complexity to your project structure, and too many can make it hard to understand what really matters. Reserve them for genuine hard dependencies where one thing must precede another.
When a blocking task is delayed, Asama will notify people responsible for the dependent tasks. This early warning system helps teams adjust plans and communicate with stakeholders before deadlines are missed.
Collaborating Through Comments and Mentions
Comments on tasks are where much of your team communication should happen instead of scattered across email, Slack, or meetings. When discussion about a task lives in the task itself, the context is preserved and anyone who needs to understand what happened can read through the history.
Use comments to ask questions, provide updates, share feedback, or make decisions about the task. Each comment creates a record and notifies relevant people so the conversation moves forward. This is especially valuable for remote or distributed teams where synchronous communication is harder.
The @ mention feature lets you bring specific people into the conversation. Type @ followed by someone’s name to notify them and draw their attention to your comment. This works for pulling in stakeholders who aren’t assigned to the task but have relevant input or information to share.
You can also @mention entire teams to notify everyone on that team about a comment. Use this sparingly for things that genuinely affect the whole team, not for routine updates that create noise.
Keep comments focused on the specific task at hand. If a discussion starts branching into broader topics or decisions that affect multiple tasks, consider moving the conversation to a project-level comment or creating a dedicated task for that discussion.
Tracking Time and Effort
Asana doesn’t have built-in time tracking, but you can track effort in ways that help with planning and resource management. Custom fields for effort estimation let you indicate whether a task is small, medium, or large. Some teams use hour estimates or story points if they’re familiar with those concepts from agile methodologies.
The value of effort tracking isn’t precision, it’s pattern recognition. Over time you’ll see that large tasks tend to take longer than expected and small tasks add up faster than you think. This helps with more realistic project planning and workload distribution.
If you need detailed time tracking for billing or productivity analysis, consider integrating Asana with a dedicated time tracking tool. Many services integrate with Asana to let you track time spent on tasks without leaving the platform.
Estimated time versus actual time can reveal useful insights about your team’s planning accuracy. If tasks consistently take twice as long as estimated, that’s a signal to adjust future estimates or break work down into smaller pieces.
Creating Recurring Tasks for Routine Work
Some work happens on a regular schedule: weekly status reports, monthly invoicing, quarterly reviews. Recurring tasks automate the creation of these repetitive tasks so you don’t have to manually recreate them each time.
When you set a task to recur, you specify the frequency: daily, weekly, monthly, or custom intervals. Each time the task is completed, Asana automatically creates the next instance with the same title, description, and assignee. The due date shifts forward based on your recurrence pattern.
Recurring tasks work beautifully for individual routines and team rituals. Marketing teams might have recurring tasks for social media posting schedules. Operations teams might use them for weekly equipment checks or monthly financial close processes. Managers might have recurring one-on-one meeting tasks with each team member.
The key is that the task truly needs to happen repeatedly with minimal variation. If the work changes significantly each time, a recurring task might not be the right tool. A project template might serve you better for work that follows a process but varies in content.
You can pause or delete recurring tasks if the routine changes or is no longer needed. Don’t let recurring tasks pile up if they’ve outlived their usefulness.
Task management in Asana becomes powerful when these practices work together. Clear titles combined with good assignment, realistic dates, proper context, and effective collaboration create a system where work flows smoothly and nothing falls through the cracks. Once you’ve got tasks under control, the next level is leveraging templates to make project setup faster and more consistent. Our guide on using asana templates to save time shows you exactly how to standardize your workflows and reduce repetitive work.
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