Asana is a great tool for the people who want to develop and maintain long-term projects. We’ve known that for years and we’ve been building it for over 10 years. We are proud of what we have built, but we want to build it even better.
The question is…
How can we make this tool even better?
We’re going to take a look at some of the tools that already exist to make Asana more efficient, more reliable, and more useful for our users.
Automating Asana with IFTTT
Asana has been around for a long time and is a great application to help teams work together more efficiently. However, there are many features that Asana lacks (or at least can’t add on top of). There are ways to fix this, but it would be nice if you could use Asana to automate.
Here’s one way to do it: asana-to-IFTTT. It lets you create recipes of sorts that can take in an Asana issue and turn it into something you can use in IFTTT (or any other platform). For instance, let’s say that you have a bug report related to handling file uploads. You could use this service to turn it into an IFTTT recipe that triggers when the user clicks on your app, so the issue gets fixed right away.
The creator of this service is Mike Price, who has since left asana to pursue other things (though he still contributes via his blog). He is still involved with it and has posted some code samples over the years. While there are plenty of other uses for this service (such as using it to automate messages or admin tasks), I wanted to share what I find most useful:
Automating Asana with Zapier
Asana is one of the most widely used tools to manage your team and projects, so it’s no surprise that there are a lot of automated processes that run on that platform. Here are 6 ways to automate Asana with Zapier.
Asana is a tool that allows you to build out lot of automation in your team and projects. Use it with the following applications:
Zapier (to automatically create reports)
Mailgun (to automate newsletter delivery)
SignalR (to automatically change icon color for clients)
Weave (to automate tasks like creating labels for files)
Transmit (to automate sending emails from your phone/tablet).
Automating Asana with Automate.io
Automate.io is a web app I wrote just for this purpose. It can automate tasks in Asana in many ways, and it can also be used as a stand-alone stream to send email messages, text messages or voice notifications. Here are 6 of them:
Asana’s web interface has a lot of features and is designed to be easy to use. The following 6 automation methods make Asana even easier to use right now:
- (Plugins) If you have chrome installed, you can install the Automate.io plugin and it will automatically enable the above automation methods (in addition to many others). Automate.io is part of Google Chrome and can be downloaded from here .
- (Router) If you have firefox installed, you can download the Firewall Addon for Firefox and then add it to your router and if it’s enabled, it will automatically enable all these automation methods by default as well as many others you might want to try out. It’s available from here .
- (Emoji) If you have Emoji installed on your phone, you can add your own emoji using this website . These emoji are very special in that they show how much useful information each emoji might convey — but they do not convey much text information at all at this point in time! As we mentioned earlier, there are still workarounds for sending texts or email messages with so little text information on an iOS phone or tablet due to the lack of speech recognition capabilities; but these emoji definitely complement what we already have 🙂
- (Voice) If you have an Apple Watch or iPhone or iPad that supports Siri voice commands, you can use Siri directly from within Asana with just these three commands: Note that these commands only work when your device is connected to Wi-Fi through which Siri connects automatically via Bluetooth; so if your phone’s battery drains too quickly when using those commands, turn off Bluetooth before using them 🙂
- (Text) Using any text editor like TextMate on Mac OS X , Windows XP / 7 / 8 , Linux , Mac OS X 10 .6 / 10 .7 / 11 etc., create a file called “command_to_run” where the first line should contain something like: \president_of_asana *(hold down ‘ctrl’ while typing – “asana” should open up an application window that looks
- Automating Asana with Microsoft Flow
Asana is a wonderful product, but as amazing as it’s been in the past, there’s always room for improvement. That was how I felt when I first discovered Microsoft Flow. It is an incredibly powerful tool that can help you to develop better habits, make better decisions, and bring structure to any type of workflow.
But what if you don’t have time to spend on learning new tools? What if you already have a busy schedule? What if you already use Asana or another product in your organization? You can still use it — just use Flow instead!
You can automate Asana by following these 6 steps:
1) Create an account
2) Create an Asana workflow (you will need to create one before using Flow)
3) Open the workflow template of your choice — any template will do (I’ve used the one provided by General Assembly for this post).
4) Click “Add Task” and select “Create task” from the drop down menu. The default task type is “Linked To”.
5) Choose from several options such as: People, Projects or Events. Once you’ve picked your action types, click “Add To Task Flow”. 6) After adding a task to flow (or creating a new one), click on Add Tasks… on the top right corner of the workflow page. 7) Select all of your tasks Click on the “+” button at the top right corner of each task until either all tasks are added or none are left (you can add more than 3 tasks at once). If there are any errors or gaps in your flow, they will be automatically filled in with a red border around them. Note: You may also choose All Tasks instead of individual ones if you prefer. 8) Finish completing your workflows and then close them! 9) Go back and start again! You can now create new flows whenever you want — just click New on the top right corner of each flow to create one! 10) If you want to see what flows look like when executed, go back and click the link that pops up when you hover over them (the link will open up a new page in Asana with information about each flow). If multiple flows share similar information about their workflow, that information will be shared across all flows too. 11 ) Finally, you can manage all existing flows from within Flow by clicking on Manage > Manage All UIs And Behav
Automating Asana with Google Apps Script
Asana is a great tool to streamline your workflows and it’s a wake-up call that many not realize how awesome this tool is. Often, people use it to organize tasks, but what they don’t realize is that Asana can be used for more than just organizing them. It can be used as a platform for automation.
Google Apps Script has been around for awhile now and Asana itself has been using Google Cloud Functions for a long time too (though in my opinion it’s still not as good as the native Asana app). I know some people are still confused about it, though:
With Google Apps Script, you basically have three things at your disposal: The Asana web service (the one you use to manage your tasks). The Google Cloud Object model (the one you use to manage your data). And the Google Cloud Functions (which is basically an RPC service that allows you to talk to the cloud).
Conclusion
Asana is a project management platform, but it’s not an organization management system. It is a great tool for small groups of people to work on projects collaboratively, but it’s by no means a complete solution.
