Editor’s note: We’ve made some updates since this post was published. You can now see project end dates in Calendar view and sync your Google calendar to Asana.Today, we’re excited to launch Calendars in Asana. Built automatically from your team’s tasks and projects, Calendars give you views of your work over time, to help your team see what’s next and how it all fits together.
Visualizing the tasks and milestones that make up your goals increases clarity and confidence in your plans. Everyone on your team will spend less time in email, catching up on threads of updates and questions about whether you’re on track.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been testing Calendars with several companies. They tell us that Calendars have increased clarity around what matters most: reaching their goals. Birchbox, the innovative discovery commerce platform, is one of those teams.
Asana’s Calendars have helped us visualize the work ahead, assess our team’s workload, and deliver projects on time,” says Bene Cipolla, director of editorial operations at Birchbox. “We can look out across the next few months or simply drill down into this week to make sure we’re on track to complete our goals.
Using Calendars
Our challenge was to build a calendar that’s powerful and compelling, while still being simple and beautiful.
To start, we’ve made Calendars one-click away for the common cross-sections of your work. There are Calendars for every Team, for every Project, and for your own Tasks – right where you would expect them.
And you can go much further than that: any search result can be viewed as a Calendar, letting you create Calendars instantly, from anything in Asana. For example, creating a Calendar of just the incomplete tasks in either “Q1 Goals” or “Marketing Projects”, takes only a few seconds. You can then save that custom calendar as one of your Favorites, and even rename it to something familiar like “Editorial Calendar”. (Need an example? See how Autodesk uses calendars for their content). The URL for that custom view is shareable, so you can send your Calendar as a “live report” to anyone on your team.
Because Calendars are views on top of the Asana work graph, they’re always up-to-date. Changes to a task or due date made by a teammate are reflected immediately in your Calendars. Drag and drop a task to a new date, or click on it to change the assignee or add a comment. Everyone else will see your changes right away.
Teamwork can be complicated – but our goal is to make it simple. We think the clarity you get from Calendars in Asana is another step in that direction. Let us know if you agree.
