Your Essential Custom Fields

Custom Fields in Asana create opportunities to organize, communicate, report, and automate work. We’ve found that three particular fields are valuable in almost any situation. Let’s explore our recommended (essential) custom fields: Priority, Status, and Progress.

Naming Conventions

We recommend naming your fields with your [org] to communicate fields officially supported by your organization. When working on a project or template, you can search for your [org] to bring up all your team’s essential custom fields.

At The Collaborative, we shorten our org name to [collab]. For instance:

Priority [org] › Priority [collab]
Status [org] › Status [collab]
Progress [org] › Progress [collab]

Adding Custom Fields

Always search your library before adding a new custom field to use existing fields whenever possible. Creating new or duplicative fields reduces Asana’s ability to scale your team’s work through templates, rules, and reporting.

Note: Modifying a custom field in your library will change it everywhere for everyone.

Doesn’t Asana have these fields already?

How astute of you to notice. Yes, Asana already has fields for Priority, Status, and Task Progress. However, you cannot modify or remove these fields from your library, making them inflexible. That’s why we recommend creating and using our own versions. Inform your team and add these fields to your project templates to maximize adoption.

Creating Your New Custom Fields

Navigate to any project and create a new custom field following our instructions below. Make sure to check on “Add to my org’s field library” to make it accessible across all your organization’s projects and reporting.

Priority [org]

Single Select — Priority is about the relative importance of a task or body of work. Avoid the temptation to mark everything as High or Critical priority! Start tasks at Low Priority and escalate as they near or pass due dates.

Options:

Critical – Tasks that are extremely overdue and holding up others. To be completed by the end of the day, ideally.
High – Tasks that are high impact and due imminently.
Medium – Important tasks that are due soon but have some flexibility.
Low – Tasks that need to get done but can be passed over as other needs arise.

Practice: Decide as a team what each priority means to you. Make it a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)

Project Rule Examples:

If a task is overdue 3 days › Set Priority to Critical
If a task is overdue 1 day › Set Priority to High
If a task is due in 7 days › Set Priority to Medium

Status [org]

Single Select — This custom field helps us communicate the current state of a task, regardless of its priority or how much work we have done.

Options:

Hold – Do not start yet. Either a non-priority or has a dependency “blocking” progress.
Blocked – Indicates a task that is actively being blocked. This is work that should be in progress that we cannot start or complete.
Ready – This task is unblocked or queued for work.
In Progress – This task has started or is moving through a workflow.
Complete – Use this state as a rule trigger to complete a task and then clear the custom field. Do not leave tasks in the Status [org] as “Complete”. Asana’s native reporting will not use this custom field to reflect completion. *
Deferred – Use this with rules to complete the task but note the work was skipped.

Project Rule Examples:

If Task moved to Section X › Set Status to In Progress — Keep tasks accurate and projects organized automatically.
If Status set to Blocked › Add collaborators, Add a comment — Notify your team of a problem.
If Task set to Complete › Clear Status, Clear Priority, Clear Progress, Mark Complete
If Status set to Deferred › Clear Status, Clear Priority, Clear Progress, Add a comment

* Custom fields with too many entries cannot be modified later.

** Deferred work isn’t complete and may be moved to another project to do later. This ensures more accurate reporting.

Progress [org]

Single Select — This field gives you the ability to quickly communicate progress over time. Using only four options delivers clarity. For instance, 100% can be used to indicate work is essentially done but we may be waiting on a final approval.

Options:

25% – Typically used to indicate an initial pass at the work has been made, or other meaningful progress.
50% – Often used to indicate an initial inflection point has been passed, like reviewing with an approver or client/customer.
75% – Can be used to indicate significant progress on work.
100% – Can be used to indicate 99.99% completion of work, pending a final approval.

Project Rule Examples:

If Progress is 100% › Add comment

Rules for Keeping Projects and Tasks Tidy

Try these three completion rules to keep projects organized:

Task Marked Complete

A complete task no longer has priority, progress, or a status, so it’s best to clear them. Completion is handled by Asana at a system level.

Rule: If task marked Complete › Clear Status [org], Clear Priority [org], Clear Progress [org], Mark as Complete

Task Moved to Complete section (ongoing projects, triggers first rule)

Rule: If task moved to section Complete › Mark Complete

Task Status [org] set to Complete (triggers first rule)

If task Status [org] set to Complete › Mark Complete

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