The path to doing great things
Working together, your team can do great things. But when the tools you rely on to coordinate your actions and operate in unison slow you down, your collective potential is constrained.
Email, documents and the many other tools we use today to organize our teams and keep them in sync once did wonders for our productivity. But against the speed and complexity of modern work, they are no longer up to the task.
To unlock our teams' maximum potential, we need a fresh start. This is why we built Asana.
Asana is a new and better way for teams to communicate and collaborate. It's better than email because it focuses communication on tasks, not just a stream of new messages and comments. By centering the team around tasks - the work to be done - you get better organized, create accountability, and stay in sync.
We've designed Asana to be simple to learn, while remaining powerful. We wrote this guide to help you quickly master it and give you what you need to put your team on the path to doing great things, together.
Asana's interface is divided into three panes. This section will walk you through each of these, one at a time, and explain how it works.
The left pane is where you navigate to the various "views" of Asana. Use the left pane to search Asana, to select between workspaces, to select projects and to navigate to your Inbox and My Tasks list.
What you see in the left pane depends on whether you're in Workspace Overview or Single Workspace View.
In Workspace Overview, you will see a list of all the Workspaces you belong to.
Click on a Workspace name to enter Single Workspace View for that Workspace.
Read more about Workspaces in the Workspaces section of the Guide.
You can find the search box in the upper left corner of Asana.
You can use Search to find any of the following:
When you're in the Workspace Overview, search will yield results from all Workspaces. In Single Workspace View, you will only see results from the Workspace you've selected.
Search will not search for words in the notes or comments of a task.
Projects are lists of tasks. You will see the projects in your Workspace in the left pane. You can drag and drop project names to reorder them, but be aware that doing so will reorder them for everyone in the Workspace.
Projects you've marked as private to you will have an avatar+lock icon next to them.
You will see Workspace members listed by profile photo in a horizontal line in the left pane, below the My Tasks and Inbox buttons.
If you click the people icon next to the photos, a full list will appear, including Guests, who have limited access to the Workspace. Guests will have a globe icon next to their names.
If you want to see the tasks that one of your teammates has prioritized, find his or her photo in the left pane and click on it. This will load their personal My Tasks lists in the center pane and show you their public tasks. If the person has not uploaded a photo, you will see a colorful box with their initials, instead. It is not possible to change the color or their initials, though they can upload a photo or image themselves.
Tasks that are assigned to you show up in the My Tasks list.
Click on My Tasks in the left pane, and your list of assigned tasks will load in the center pane.
Once your Workspace is established and your team is active, the My Tasks list is typically your first stop in Asana each day.
Creating tasks in your My Tasks list will automatically assign them to you.
Inbox is your notification center in Asana. Use Inbox to see the latest Asana updates from your teammates. Stories you'll see in Inbox include:
You can access Inbox by clicking the rectangular icon next to the respective Workspace's My Tasks list in Workspace Overview, or the same icon next to the word Inbox in Single Workspace View.
You will not see your own activity in your own Inbox.
When you select a project or person from the left pane, you'll see the relevant list of tasks in the center pane.
The task list behaves like a text editor: each line is a task. To add a new one, just press Enter and start typing.
The center pane is where you can sort tasks by priority, due date, project or assignee, filter them by tags, and take project actions like duplicate, sync, and delete.
Your Inbox and My Tasks lists also load in the center pane.
The right pane, or task pane, is where you see the details for a task you've selected in the center pane.
You can add notes to give the task more context, add comments to discuss the task with your teammates, build a list of Subtasks, set an Assignee and due date, attach relevant files, write comments, and more.
Learn more about the functionality available in the right pane in the Tasks section of the Guide.
Asana works with the latest versions of:
Asana does not work with:
Asana is a modern web application that uses some of the newest capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Different browsers still interpret these in different ways.
These differences could potentially cause severe bugs - like data not saving, or data becoming corrupted and overwriting good data.
We test and develop for the list of compatible browsers and block access to Asana from those browsers listed as incompatible above. This is in order to protect your data.
Some of the techniques we use to make Asana fast and beautiful don't work well with browser extensions that modify the web page, such as extensions that change text into links or those that add overlays.
Here are some of the extensions that have caused issues in the past. This list is not exhaustive and these extensions won't necessarily interfere.
If Asana is behaving strangely, running slowly, or crashing, please try disabling extensions to see if that fixes the problem.
If you're using Chrome, try using an Incognito window (which does not employ your installed extensions) to use Asana.
We currently test new developments in Asana using the most popular extensions.
Download the Asana Mobile app for Android from the Google Play Store.
The Asana app for Android allows you to create, edit, and work on your tasks on the go.
The Android App does not offer offline functionality, so make sure you have a network connection when you use it. If you see the warning shown below, do not enter tasks.
Download the Asana iPhone App from the App Store.
The badge count for Asana is the sum of new messages across all of your Inboxes since you last visited each Inbox. Therefore, visiting an Inbox should decrement the badge count; visiting all Inboxes should make the count 0 and so the badge count will disappear.
Stories that are included in alerts:
The following notification types are turned on for you by default (everything else is off by default):
Change the settings above by tapping through to the Notifications Settings on your iPhone:
You can also visit the Asana Settings (different from above) to enable or disable:
Once you make a change in Asana Settings, you need to open the app for the changes to take effect.
The Asana iPhone App does not offer offline functionality, so make sure you have a network connection when you use it.
To access our mobile web app from your iOS or Android smartphone, visit app.asana.com from your mobile browser.
The mobile web app does not work for Windows Phone or Blackberry. You can always email tasks to Asana from your mobile device.
Make sure you have a network connection when creating tasks via the mobile web, as we do not offer offline functionality.
You can access Asana from your iPad through our mobile site on Safari, or through the Asana Mobile app for iPhone, though we have not optimized either experience for iPad.
The full web version of Asana is not accessible on the iPad.
Creating an Asana account is free. We'll ask for your name and email address. Once you confirm sign up, you will be able to join and create new Workspaces.
You can sign yourself up or accept an invitation to join.
Maintaining multiple accounts is not necessary, given the ability to join multiple Workspaces from one account.
To create an account for yourself:
You can choose to sign up by:
If you choose to sign up with your Google Account:
Invitations to an Asana Workspace look like this:
When you receive an invitation:
If you have trouble: