Asana is a very flexible solution for tracking work that’s being done, but it doesn’t provide native time tracking. If you need to set up time tracking for Asana, there are generally two common methods for doing it: using a time tracking Asana integration, or using custom fields.
Time Tracking Integrations
Many time tracking products have Asana integrations. Some examples include Toggl, Everhour, Hubstaff, Harvest, and Clockify. but there are many others. In the Asana App Directory, there’s even a Time Tracking category that lists these and other solutions.
Because there are so many time tracking Asana integrations, it’s important to have a clear picture of your needs prior to evaluating them. For example, which of the following features do you need?
- Timesheets
- Basic reporting
- Detailed reporting (e.g., by assignee, project, section, tag, custom field, etc)
- Alerts
- Budgeting
- Invoicing
Most time tracking products require that your team members track their time either outside of Asana or inside of Asana using a Chrome extension or other browser extension, so there’s an additional tool that they’ll need to use.
Time Tracking Using Custom Fields
For some simple time tracking needs, introducing a new tool for entering time can bring more overhead than the value that it provides. Another option is to have your team members enter their time for each Asana task in a custom field.
You can add a number custom field named something like “Time” fairly quickly and easily, and then have your team members enter how long they spent on each task when they complete the task.
To generate time tracking reports on the custom field, you can either use Asana’s built-in feature for getting the sum of a custom field (see “Costing” in this article), or you could use an Asana reporting integration like Velocity to generate reports on that custom field by assignee, project, or any other attribute.
One benefit of using Velocity is that its flexible reporting capabilities allow you to generate highly custom reports. Other solutions that focus solely on time tracking often don’t have as advanced reporting options as a product that is focused primarily on custom reporting.