Asana tips: Mastering project and Guest permissions

Did you know you can control who sees what information in Asana? Permissions in Asana let you control which information is public or private, who can access tasks and projects, and—if you’re an Asana admin—who is a member of your Asana Organization. Whether you’re an individual contributor, a team lead, or an Asana admin, here are some tips to help you master permissions in Asana.

Asana permissions for individual contributors

Individual contributors working in Asana have full control of whether their information is private or public to their Organization. Private means something is shared with you and anyone you’ve added as a collaborator. You can check to see if a task is private based on the banner at the top of the task.

💡Tip: Tasks created within a private project will only be visible to collaborators on that project. If you add a collaborator to a task within a private project, the collaborator will have access to that task and any of its subtasks—but not any of the other tasks in the project.

Alternatively, you can set tasks to Public, which means everyone in your Organization or Team has visibility into that work. Making work publicly accessible inherently makes you feel more accountable to your team. When you can see how your work fits in with your team’s objectives and the company’s goals, you’ll feel more empowered—it’s the opposite of micromanagement.

How team leads can manage permissions with Asana

For team leads creating and managing projects, it’s important to know who has access to your information. Sometimes the best strategy is to keep a project Public to prevent information silos that get in the way of high-impact work. Other times, you may want to keep information between a select group of people. In these cases you can set your Asana projects to Private or Comment-only.

💡Tip: Comment-only projects are a great hybrid approach. In a comment-only project, anyone has access to view the content—similar to a public project—but can’t make any changes to the tasks. Learn more about comment-only projects.

You can also add Guests to any task, project, or Team in Asana. Guests are people who you’ve invited to your Asana Organization that don’t share your email domain (e.g. @abc.com). When you invite a Guest to Asana, they have access to the tasks, projects, or Teams, you’ve shared with them—but they can’t access any tasks, projects, or Teams that haven’t been shared with them.

Invited Guests also don’t contribute toward your Organization’s overall Membership count. They can access the information they need when you need them to, but you maintain control over what that information is. Learn more about adding and managing Guests in Asana.

The Asana Admin Console

The Admin Console gives team admins insight into how your organization is using Asana, who is a member, which apps are connected to your Asana instance, and more.

If you’re an Asana admin, you can access the Admin Console by clicking on your photo on the upper right-hand corner and navigating to the Admin Console. From there, select between the different tabs, like Insights, Members, Teams, Billing, etc.

Not only does the Admin Console make it easy for you to manage your team’s Asana Organization—from the console, you can also view the impact Asana is having on your organization. In the Insights tab, you have clear insight into engagement metrics, active teams, active users, and more.

From the Members tab, you can see how many members and Guests you have in your Asana Organization as well as how many seats you have available. If you need to add members, grant admin access, or deprovision a member, you can easily do so.

💡Tip: Don’t worry about losing tasks if you deprovision a member. All of the deprovisioned members’ tasks will be added to a private project, so you can reassign work and make sure tasks stay on track.

See a detailed walkthrough of the Admin Console in our guide.

Take control of your permissions with Asana

Asana makes it easy for individual contributors, team leads, and admins to control who’s accessing and viewing your information. See permissions in action by logging in to Asana today.