How to use templates in Asana

Asana makes it easy for you to use and create unique templates that can serve as the foundation of your project management efforts. Jack Wallen shows you how to create and use them.

Asana is a magical place, where projects go to flourish and live efficient lives. It’s also a great service for teams looking to up their project management game. And for busy team managers, some helpful tools are hidden away that make the platform even more robust and useful.

One such tool is templates. Everyone knows what templates are and how they can help simplify the process of creation.

Let me set the scene.

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You’ve created the perfect project, filled with everything necessary to make it easy to track the process of very complicated workflows. Now, let’s say you’ve been tasked with re-creating that successful project on Asana. What do you do? Start from scratch and go through the painstaking process of adding all the necessary elements?

No, you don’t. Instead, you use a template. But you’re not limited to just the templates offered by Asana — even though the service does offer quite a few well-designed templates. Instead, you take that perfectly built project and turn it into a template.

It’s rather easy to do, and the time you save in doing so will free you up to design and build different projects.

First, I’m going to show you how to base a project on a pre-built Asana template, then I’ll show you how to convert your current project into a template you can then re-use.

How to use a pre-built template in Asana

Let’s create a new project, based on a pre-built Asana template. To do that, log into your Asana account and click the + associated with your company (Figure A).

Figure A

In the resulting popup (Figure B), click Use A Template.

Figure B

In the next window, click the top-left drop-down and select All Types (Figure C).

Figure C

From there (Figure D), you can select from a large selection of available templates.

Figure D

Once you’ve found the template you want to use, click Use Template (Figure E) and Asana will open the workspace with those specific elements at the ready.

Figure E

How to create a custom template in Asana

Before we move forward with this, know that the Custom Project feature is not available to the Free plan. To use this feature, you must upgrade to the Premium Plan.

With that said, let’s say you’ve tweaked that Standup Meeting template to perfectly fit the needs of your company. Or maybe you’ve created the perfect project from scratch and you’ve been asked to re-create it for another team. What do you do?

Open that project and make sure it’s exactly how you would want it to look as a template. Once you’re satisfied, click the downward-pointing arrow to the right of the project name and select Save As Template (Figure F).

Figure F

In the resulting window (Figure G), give the template a name, set the privacy, and click Create Template.

Figure G

Once the template is copied, it will then be available from the Template Select screen by choosing the name of your company in the top-left dropdown (Figure H).

Figure H

And that, my friends, is all there is to using templates in Asana. Once you’ve built a collection of templates, creating and managing new projects will be exponentially easier.

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