Getting Started with Goals in Asana
Goals in Asana are great for orienting ourselves around clear objectives. By focusing on what we want to accomplish and setting clear metrics, we begin to communicate expectations with greater transparency across teams.
Let’s explore some best practices for Goals in Asana.
The Details
Asana Goals are based on the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) system, are time-based, and work best using the SMART framework.
Asana Goals integrate across projects, portfolios, and reporting. This connects our day-to-day work our intended outcomes.
Asana Goals can be transparent (when shared openly) or private (when needed).
Sub-goals help us break down our biggest aspirations into more achievable and actionable targets — often for teams and individuals; and/or multiple metrics.
Defining Meaningful Goals
We recommend creating and refining goals using the S.M.A.R.T. methodology — Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Specific – Goals should be clear and legible. This is our Objective (Goal naming, description, nesting goals).
Measurable – Metrics should be meaningful and trackable. This is our Key Result (Number, percentage, and currency),
Attainable – Goals should be achievable and fair, but challenging.
Relevant – Goals must relate to and inspire work. (Connect parent/sub-goals, group with teams, link resources)
Time-bound – Determine a realistic timeline to measure progress. (FY25, 25Q1, etc.)
Structuring Goals Well
Great goals help focus align teams while communicating expectations and progress. To create focus we must breakdown our objectives into complimentary metrics — using multiple measures to define progress toward our goal.
In Asana, we can leverage “sub-goals” to define those metrics (like number of customers/donors, or revenue/donations). These two complimentary measures are our key results that support a “parent goal” of Developing a healthy revenue stream (our objective). Together, these goals create an OKR.
This approach helps us avoid over-optimizing for a single metric.
Example 1 – Working toward objectives
A for-profit might create the goal: Achieve $1m revenue this year. The nonprofit version might be: Raise $1m from Major Donors this year. Both versions are S.M.A.R.T., but they’re not enough to effectively align a whole organization.
It’s helpful to ask: Why are we doing this? What do we really care about here?
In the case of the for-profit company, the answer might be to cultivate a healthy customer base. For the nonprofit it would be to cultivate a healthy donor base. These are great objectives around which can align our team. Next, we should break this objective into trackable metrics (key results).
The health of our organization (in both examples) is about how we pay our bills (money) and our resilience over time (customer base needed) . These complimentary metrics can tell us a lot more about our progress than any single metric would on its own.
For-profit: Cultivate a healthy customer base 2025
Exceed $1m Revenue 2025
50 New Customers 2025
75 Repeat Customers 2025
Nonprofit: Cultivate a healthy donor base 2025
Total Donations of $1 million 2025
1,000 New Donors 2025
4,000 Repeat Donors 2025
In both of these examples, we created a parent goal to be our objective – something that is broad and healthy for the organization.
We then created sub-goals to track our progress, our key results, using different kinds of metrics. An organization that gets all its money from a single source is less healthy than one with diversified sources of funding. So we’re tracking total dollars, but also measuring on another dimension – the sources of that money. Even better, we are tracking new customers/donors separately from those who have bought/donated in the past.
Together, these sub-goals now carry a lot of information and context as we work toward our objective. Asana can automatically update our parent goals based on the progress of the contributing sub-goals, ensuring our progress is always relative to our timeline.
Example 2 – Working toward change
An organization might set a goal to Reduce X metric by Y percent. On the surface, this looks like a clear S.M.A.R.T. goal, but it could be improved. Percentages are much harder to imagine than whole numbers, especially when discussing the absence of something.
To keep goals relatable and actionable, we should define change-based goals using real measures. We must clearly define the X and Y values specifically, rather than as percentages, by looking at the current state of our metric and then defining the end-state we want to reach. The difference (or delta) becomes our goal who’s progress is calculated automatically by Asana.
Reduce Customer/Donor Acquisition Costs by 10% in 2025
Looking at the previous state of this goal (FY24), we found that Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) was $100/customer. Therefore, a 10% reduction in 2025 equals a CAC of $90/customer. Thus, our goal’s starting value is $100 and our target value is $90. This creates a 10% range in which our progress will be measured. If we were to update our goal status to show our current CAC is $95, we would be 50% through our goal of reducing CAC by 10%.
Naming Goals Clearly
Goals in Asana can be [at]mentioned and therefore used in sentences, so they should be clear and conversational. Including the time period ensures that similar/repeat goals can be differentiated from each other over time. Use the description of a goal to give more context rather than using long titles. We’ve included a resource below.
Naming Convention (Simple) — [verb] + [noun] + [date]
Especially if you’re just getting started, use clear verbs that direct action toward goals, followed by the object of the goal, and an concise time stamp.
Raise $2.5 million 2025
Exceed NPS Score of 90 25Q3
Naming Convention (Advanced) — [dept] + [noun] + [date]
If you have a lot of similar goals spread across a fairly complex hierarchy of goals, then organize first by department, team, or program, followed by the object and time period. For super advanced teams, you can even drop the metric from the title.
DEV $2.5 million 2025
SERV NPS Score 22Q3
Resource: Goal Description Template
You can copy and paste the content below into the description area of an Asana goal. These prompts will help ensure every goal is as clear as possible, while allowing you to keep your Goal title concise.
🏆 Goal
Define the goal in one or two sentences. This can help keep your goal name short and sweet.
📙 Context / Problem / Challenge
Describe and link to other resources if applicable.
📘 Solution(s)
Describe some tactics.
📗 Definition of Success
Clarify what success means to us.
📊 Metrics
Note important variables to consider:
Variable A
Past Metric B
Current Metric C
Resource: Goal Creation Checklist
Create Goal / Sub-Goal –
Name – [verb] + [noun] + [date]
Owner – Like a project, each goal can only have one owner
Company or Team – Pick the appropriate team or company level (Goals/Subgoals can be in any combination)
Time Period – Select the end date of goal, not start date; define additional custom date if needed
Privacy – Leave as public unless there is truly sensitive information (better for reporting)
Parent Goal – Select, if applicable
Update method – Manual for sub-goals, automatic for parent goals (usually)
Target Value – Set to number, currency, or percentage
Edit Progress Settings
Update Num of Decimals (if applicable)
Remind Me cadence (if your goal)
Assign/Update Owner
Assign/Update Team
Copy/Paste Goal Description Template (above); fill out
Link References (projects/portfolios)
Share – Comment-only where applicable
Asana Limitations:
We’ve identified a few current limitations to Asana’s goals. These do change from time to time.
Max 100 subgoals
Max 4 parent goals
Max 10 sub-projects (for automatic rollups)
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