The Best Asana Project Tracking Features You Shouldn’t Miss

Asana is an incredibly powerful project management tool. But since it’s packed with features, it’s easy to overlook some of the most useful.

Learn all about two task-tracking features you shouldn’t miss out on.

Subtasks Make Larger Tasks More Manageable

Quite often, your task is composed of several smaller ones. In such cases, you can benefit from tracking each subtask separately, to track progress more accurately. This is where Asana’s subtask feature comes into play.

Using Asana, you can create subtasks within parent tasks and add different assignees, due dates, tags, and descriptions to them. This helps you track progress on your task and keeps things organized.

Subtasks can help you identify and investigate delays, especially if your project involves several people, each with different responsibilities.

If you’ve upgraded to Asana Premium, you can view Dependencies. This feature shows which tasks are blocking your task and notifies you when those tasks are completed, speeding up the workflow.

Creating and Managing Subtasks

There are a couple of ways you can create subtasks in Asana.

If you’re starting a project from scratch, just create a task and press Tab + S to create subtasks. You can also click on the Add subtask button below the description field.

From here, create your required subtasks and give them suitable titles. Then, open each subtask and add the assignee, due date, tags, and description.

If you’re trying to organize your Asana Project, you can convert existing tasks into subtasks by opening the task card and selecting the three-dot icon > Convert to > Subtask.

Better still, you can create subtasks nested within subtasks, although you should be careful not to take this too far because it can quickly get confusing.

A Few Uses for Asana Subtasks

There are many situations where you can use subtasks to organize your work. Here are a few examples.

• Organizing Meetings: If you need to organize a meeting, some possible subtasks could be scheduling, creating an agenda, sending invites, sharing minutes, and collecting feedback.
• Creating Videos or Articles: You can break down these tasks into steps like brainstorming, writing, filming, editing, and sharing on social media.
• Developing Software: You can create Asana subtasks for requirement gathering, designing, coding, testing, and deploying.
• Creating Checklists: Whatever your job role or industry may be, you can use subtasks as detailed checklists to ensure you don’t forget anything.

Follow-Up Tasks Are Standalone Reminders

Like subtasks, follow-up tasks can streamline your work process. When you identify extra steps related to your Asana tasks, follow-up tasks remind you about them.

Follow-up tasks are independent of the main tasks, making it easier to track them and view them on your Asana board. However, a link to the original task is added to the description of the follow-up task.

Besides organizing workflow, follow-up tasks can ensure accountability when another person is responsible for following up on the main task (such as review or feedback).

Creating Follow-Up Tasks in Asana

To add a follow-up task, open any task, click the three-dot icon from the top, and select Create follow-up task. Alternatively, press Shift + Tab + F. You can also right-click any task from the List (or Calendar/Board) view and select Create follow-up task.

Asana will assign the follow-up task to you and call it “Follow up on [Original Task Name].” You can add the follow-up task to any Asana Project and populate the remaining fields.

Once you’ve created a follow-up, it works like any other Asana task. If you need to create follow-up tasks frequently, you can use Asana rules to streamline the process.

A Few Uses for Follow-Up Tasks

You can use follow-up tasks in a variety of scenarios, including these examples.

• Organizing Meetings: When you receive comments during a meeting that require action, you can create a follow-up task to remind yourself, or assign it to a team member.
• Creating Videos or Articles: Your editor might review the content or provide feedback, so creating a follow-up task can keep things tidy.
• Developing Software: You can create a follow-up to remind you to update documentation when implementing a change.

With subtasks and follow-up tasks, you can not only streamline your work but also make your Asana Projects more organized. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many creative ways you can make the most out of Asana.