Asana

Time Tracking for Asana 

Delivery and project management teams have moved to asynchronous collaboration tools like Asana to improve productivity across projects. However, when projects are delayed, you want to know which activities created unnecessary work. 

In Timely, you can track the time spent on Asana projects and tasks, and use this information to estimate the duration of projects or to bill your time accurately to clients. You’ll need the time tracking Asana integration for this purpose, which is available on all plans.

However, Asana is most likely not the only project management tool in your tech stack. You’re also using JIRA and Basecamp for software and development, and Clickup for marketing. As different teams work on different tools, project managers find themselves spending hours updating and setting up the same projects across all technologies. We’ve also made it possible for you to reduce the time drain associated with project setup with a sync-only integration for Asana, which is available on Premium and Unlimited plans.

In this article we’ll give you an overview of what you can track and and what you can sync with our Asana integrations and the business benefits of having both set up in your Timely workspace.

Can Asana track time? 

Yes, it can, but it’s a new feature and very clunky. Manual start-stop timers and no intelligence behind it.

But that’s not a bad thing. Asana is the gold standard when it comes to project management. They’re experts in helping teams collaborate cross-functionally and asynchronously. What their software excels at will enable you and your team to stay on track with deliverable work. Whether it’s billable or not.

As it stands project managers are expected to spend around 10-20% of their time on their project management tools… this time soon adds up and understanding how they can optimize their time is paramount to running effective projects.

How can you track project management time in Asana? 

The time tracking integration is available on all plans. The time spent on Asana projects appears on your private Memory timeline inside Timely throughout the day. Each Asana activity — or “memory” — will detail all the tasks you completed, as well as the time you completed them. If you complete multiple tasks within 10 minutes, they will be combined into one Memory. 

Tracking task completion on Asana helps managers estimate projects more accurately.  Accurate estimates are a requirement for reliable project planning and predicting future profitability. 

What can you sync with an Asana sync integration (Coming Soon)

The Asana sync integration (available only on Premium and Unlimited plans) creates an automatic flow of information, replicating the projects created, deleted, and updated between Asana and Timely.

Whenever you create a project in Asana, it will be pushed to your Timely workspace. Similarly, all users associated with a project in Asana will be granted project access in Timely. If you have a paying Tasks subscription, all tasks in Asana will be synced with Timely Tasks. However, you’ll only be able to track work capacity against tasks in Timely.

What are the benefits of tracking time in Asana

Improve project estimations

• Under-estimating project timelines creates unexpected costs for your business and will impact team workload
• Repeated under-estimation will lead to delays and missed deadlines
• PMs who understand how long it takes to plan and manage projects are in a better position to manage the team delivering more effectively
• Combined with other tools such as Trello, Todoist and MS Teams, the Asana integration builds a rounded picture of active time spent on planning and completing projects

Profitability

Better data delivers better operational efficiency, which delivers more profits. If you're a business which charges by the hour, accurate forecasting of capacity and delivery will let you know exactly how much time you have available to deliver the work.

Further, juggling billable vs non-billable work becomes a breeze and you're able to segment the time into separate buckets in Timely, allowing for full transparency.

Once you’ve established delivery capacities within the team, you’ll then be able to keep your clients fully informed and up to date increasing their happiness with your business.

Optimize how you deliver projects 

Project management is different from project delivery. Asana is designed for project management - it helps you plan, brief, and assign deliverables. Timely adds the project control dimension - by helping you stay on top of time, people resources, and cost constraints.

Used together, Timely and Asana cover all of your needs for delivering projects on time and on budget. They’re the perfect pair. That’s why we created a sync integration between the two. When you keep projects, tasks, and project collaborators in sync, the time spent on work is automatically tracked in Timely against the right Asana items.  

A complete automation loop is formed, freeing up the time you would have spent on admin and systems management. 

Who can make the most of the two Asana time tracking and sync integrations?

• Companies that bill by the hour

• Digital agencies, consultants, accountants

• Remote teams
• Project management consultants

• Project delivery managers, Operations managers, project management managers