Introducing Timeline: See how your project plan fits together

These days, most of us have to manage projects as part of our jobs, even if we’re not professional project managers. And projects are hard to coordinate, especially on a tight schedule.

The first step is creating a plan and visualizing your path to success. Today that often means designing makeshift Gantt charts in slides or spreadsheets. But these take a ton of time to format and quickly get out of date since they aren’t connected to your underlying work.

It’s time for a tool that actually helps you map out your project and hit your deadlines. Which is why we’re excited to announce the release of Timeline, a beautiful, living view of how all the pieces of your project fit together.

With Timeline, teams finally have a way to map out their project plans, share those plans to get buy-in, and adjust the plan as needed to keep work on track and reach their goals. And, because Timeline is directly tied to your work in Asana, it stays up-to-date as work progresses.

Plan and execute projects with confidence

Teams are doing amazing things with Timeline. Common Sense Media is a nonprofit organization that provides parents, teachers, and policymakers with advice and insight to help kids thrive in a world full of media and technology. Supported by more than 150 team members, its content reaches over 90 million people a year and its curriculum is used in 50% of US public schools. Common Sense is planning its largest marketing campaign of the year with Timeline.

“Timeline takes our complex plan and lays it out in a visual way, without any additional work. It shows my team, and the rest of our organization, how everything fits together,” says Grace Jordan, Senior Brand Marketing Manager. “Plus it stays up to date, so I don’t have to spend my time updating PowerPoints or drawing new plans on whiteboards whenever something changes. With Timeline, our team is more dynamic, and we’re more confident that our plan will be a success.”

Timeline takes our complex plan and lays it out in a visual way, without any additional work. It shows my team, and the rest of our organization, how everything fits together.”

Some projects have a lot of moving pieces and deadlines with very little wiggle room. By viewing these projects in Timeline, you can easily see how your work maps out over time, which tasks have timing or dependency conflicts, and how you’re pacing toward your goal. Timeline works especially well for time-sensitive or deadline-driven work.

Here are a few examples of how Timeline can help keep your projects on track:

• Use Timeline to create product launch plans that can be easily adjusted as development gets underway and keep teams in sync.

• Map out how each piece of your marketing campaign fits together with Timeline, so you can feel confident it will launch on time.

• Visualize your event plans in Timeline to spot timing conflicts before they happen so your event goes off without a hitch.

How to use Timeline

With Timeline, there’s no need to create project timelines from scratch again. Now, every project in Asana has a built-in Timeline view so you can map out your plan. Simply click on the Timeline tab to see your project schedule:

Once you’re in your Timeline, you can adjust dates by dragging and dropping tasks to fit your schedule. Then set date ranges for unscheduled tasks by dragging them from the unscheduled section onto your Timeline. Then, shorten, lengthen, or move your task’s due range to fit your schedule.

As work gets underway and plans change, making updates on Timeline to keep work on track is easy. Select the tasks you’d like to change and drag them on your Timeline to push their due dates back (or move them forward) to keep your team on track. Plus, if your changes create dependency conflicts, you’ll be able to see them directly on your Timeline so you can stop problems before they start.

Have more questions about how to use Timeline? Check out the Guide.

Timeline is just the beginning

Timeline is our most recent step in helping teams make the most of their time, but it’s not the last! Our co-founder, Justin Rosenstein, is sharing an exclusive first look at our multi-year vision for the future of work and what we have on our product roadmap. Watch this video to see what we have in store for you.

With Timeline, we’re able to set ambitious goals and create a plan that we know will actually work, so we can make them happen.”

Hit your deadlines, every time

There are 70 million people in the world with Autism and 85% of them live in developing countries. The Global Autism Project is a non-profit that works with partners all over the globe to help create a world where people with autism have access to services that enable them to reach their potential. The Global Autism Project uses Timeline to help onboard new partners.

“Onboarding a new partner is a lot of work, and we have six that we’re adding this year. Timeline gives us an easy way to map out our onboarding plans, from our initial visit, where we select our partners, all the way through to our alumni visit, when we go back after a program has been implemented,” says Founder and CEO, Molly Ola Pinney. “With Timeline, we’re able to set ambitious goals and create a plan that we know will actually work, so we can make them happen.”

With Timeline, you no longer have to worry about how all the work fits together or if timing conflicts will derail your schedule. Now, when you set an aggressive deadline, Timeline will help you stay on track from start to finish so you feel confident your team can deliver on time.

If you’re using Asana Premium, you can start planning and executing your projects with  Timeline today. If you’re using Asana Free, you can get Timeline and more by upgrading to Asana Premium. If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of Premium, contact our sales team.