Ideas and brainstorms

In Asana, tasks can represent to-dos and things you want to remember, so not every task needs to be actionable. When it comes to brainstorming, Asana can serve as a digital whiteboard, allowing you to contribute ideas, vote on, and sort them into various groupings.

How to create a brainstorm board in Asana

To get started quickly, try our brainstorming template.

If you prefer to build your own brainstorm project from scratch, or want general best practices for Asana projects get started with these steps.

Tips for running a brainstorm with Asana

Though the ideas you generate have no bounds, these tips can help you keep them organized.

1. Allow anyone to contribute ideas by adding them as a project member

Whether you’re doing a guided brainstorm all in one room, or adding ideas asynchronously throughout the week, make sure everybody has access to the brainstorm project. To add project members, click the circles next to the project title and type in the names of any teammates you want to invite.

2. Keep ideas organized

Good ideas can get lost if they aren’t organized in a meaningful way. In addition to project sections or columns, you can use custom fields to sort and organize ideas by as many categories as you want.

3. See your team’s favorite ideas by liking tasks

If you need to narrow down your ideas or declare a “winner,” have teammates vote on their favorites by clicking the thumbs-up within a task. Then, sort your project by likes to see which are the most liked. This can help you gauge favorites and see the top ideas.

4. Still using a whiteboard or sticky notes? Let Asana mobile help you get them into Asana

Even here at Asana we still use sticky notes and real whiteboards to help us visualize and nail down our ideas. But once they’re down on paper, it’s important to get them back into Asana so we can action or reference them long after they’ve been wiped away. To do so, you can take a photo and use proofing to add comments to the image.

5. Keep ideas actionable by assigning them out

If you’re ready to turn an idea into action, simply assign it to the proper teammate, or add it to a request project to get it prioritized by the team you need the work from. Now your ideas can transform into solutions and results instead of lying dormant in a doc to be forgotten.

6. Gather inspiration and ideas across the web with our Chrome Extension

As you browse the web and get inspo or ideas, you can easily turn them into Asana tasks to share with your team. To add links to Asana quickly, use the Asana Chrome Extension. Include more details in the task description so there’s more context about what you found interesting or noteworthy to share.

You can also organize “interesting articles” into its own project for anyone to browse or reference, rather than strictly keeping them to a brainstorm project.