New: Save time and steps with Automation

If you manage a team, then you know how powerful it is to have clearly-defined and repeatable work processes. Great processes empower teams to work together effortlessly and ensure work moves forward when and how it should. But truly effective processes are hard to come by. Many team leads struggle to either define or scale work processes for even the most routine workflows, like work requests and team handoff. And their teams are feeling the pinch.

According to Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index, an annual in-depth study of the modern workplace commissioned by Asana, 83% of global knowledge workers feel they aren’t as efficient as they could be because they don’t have the right processes in place. This group spends an average of 4.5 hours or 10% of their work week on repetitive manual tasks, and as a result 8 in 10 feel overworked or close to burn out.

To solve these challenges, we’re excited to announce Automation—a powerful new suite of features built to automatically keep your team’s work processes humming in the background so you can focus on the work that matters.

More time saving, less time wasting

As part of the Automation roll out, we’re introducing Rules. Rules automates the manual work associated with task intake, routing, and agile workflows. Once a rule is running, your team will never have to waste time on that step again. Just set it, forget it, and let Asana take care of the rest. As an example, you can auto-assign teammates to new tasks based on the custom field status (e.g. type of work) or based on the parent project. See more use cases on the Asana blog.

Before Automation, we were doing more than 400 manual steps every week. With Rules, we’ve automated the majority of our steps like assigning new tasks, adding specific followers, and reassigning ownership based on custom field values. This not only saves a significant amount of time and effort, but also ensures work is following a consistent process.”

With rules, we’re able to automate task assignments and status changes in our IT request project to save time and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.”

Adding Rules to a project is simple. Either select a ready-to-go option from the Rules gallery or use the custom Rules builder to design your own. Whichever you choose, you can feel confident that your team is automatically following all the right steps in your process. Learn more about Rules.

But it doesn’t end there. We’ve also made improvements to custom templates and task dependencies to help you save time when setting and changing workback schedules.

• Custom Templates: Now when you create a custom template, such as for an event plan or campaign launch checklist, you can bake in a complete workback schedule to go with it. This way, when you set a due date for either the first or last project task, the rest of the task dates will populate automatically.

• Task Dependencies (coming soon): Now when plans change, Asana will automatically resolve any schedule conflicts between dependent tasks.

Learn more about date shifting for custom templates and task dependencies.

Get started with Automation

If you’re an Asana Premium, Business, or Enterprise customer you can start saving time and steps with Rules and shifting due dates in custom templates today. Asana Business and Enterprise users also have access to Asana’s custom rules builder, which includes more than 70 action and trigger combinations to support even the most specialized workflows. Sign up for a free Asana Business trial to get started with Automation now.