One of the biggest challenges in project management is going from leading a single project to leading multiple projects. When you’re leading just one project, you can remember the entire context and easily see what needs to get done next. When you start to work across projects, you need to track separate goals and make sure that each team has what they need to make progress.

At Asana, we’re passionate about making teams more productive and giving teams the tools they need to make their coordination effortless. When we launched Asana Search Views last month, we took a big step towards that vision, and today we’re excited to announce the next big step: Project and Assignee Sorting in Asana Search Views.

Create custom reports across projects and people

• Track progress of multiple projects. Search for projects and create custom project groupings to see complete and incomplete tasks grouped by Priority Heading.
• Ensure your team isn’t overloaded, by quickly reassigning tasks. Group tasks by people and simply drag tasks to reassign.
• Sort tasks in more ways using Search. See your Organization’s tasks grouped by people or Projects. Just leave the search field blank and press Search.
• Find tasks faster. Search for tasks within projects or by assignee.

How it works

From any Search View, click on the Sort menu and choose Project or Assignee. Asana will remember the sort, so when you come back to a saved search it will be sorted the way you left it.

When you’re sorted by Project, you can Drag & Drop to reorder, or move a task between projects. You can also press ‘enter’ to create a new task.

When you’re sorted by Assignee, you can Drag & Drop to reassign tasks to another person.

To make the views more useful, the “In projects” field will now return tasks in any of the listed projects. If you want to combine the projects with AND, choose “In multiple projects” from “Search by another field”

Sort by Project and Assignee in search views is a relatively small feature, but we think it unlocks a lot of power for PMs, executives, and managers. It will be rolling out steadily over the next few days.

We’d love to know what kinds of reporting you’d like to see in Asana. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Today, we’re excited to be launching a collection of new features aimed at helping companies use and support Asana across their entire enterprise. We call it Organizations.

Since we began, Asana has been on a mission to help great teams achieve more ambitious goals. We started 18 months ago with our free service, targeted at smaller teams and even individuals – helping them get and stay organized.

When we launched our first premium tiers six months later, we enabled medium sized teams and companies – think 10s to 100s of people – to go further with Asana. In the year between then and now, we’ve been continuously amazed by all the places and ways Asana is being used to organize a team: in industries as diverse as education, healthcare, finance, technology, and manufacturing; in companies from two-person partnerships to Fortune 100 enterprises; and in dozens of countries representing every continent but the frozen one. There’s a lot of important work being organized in Asana.

But we’re still just getting started – there remain teams that we haven’t been ready to support: the largest teams, those that grow from 100s to 1,000s of people. While it would be remarkable if it only took a small number of coworkers to design and manufacture electric cars, synthesize DNA, or deliver healthcare to villages across the globe – these missions are complex, and require more people to be involved in them to succeed. Many of the teams using Asana today are inside these bigger organizations, and they’ve been asking for Asana to work at enterprise-scale. So for the past several months, we’ve been working on just that.

What’s New in Organizations

When we talk with bigger teams using Asana, we find they share common themes. The first is that they have multiple different teams working together, each doing their own work, but depending on each other in important ways. The second is that there are more people who are in multiple teams – especially management – who need to see across those teams at the same time. The last theme is that they often have dedicated IT professionals supporting them, with security and data access requirements. With Organizations, we’ve addressed each of these areas.

There are four new things you’ll see in Asana when you’re in an Organization:

Teams
Teams are groups of teammates inside your Organization and the projects they are working on together. We’ve seen that teams don’t always map to a strict company org chart, so anyone in your Asana Organization can create a new Team, and invite existing or new Asana members to it. The Teams in your Organization are listed in the left pane, in an area we call the Team Browser. Premium Teams can even decide how their membership is controlled, and whether the Team is visible to others or not. The options include:

• Public – the team is open for anyone in that Organization to join immediately
• Membership by Request – an existing team member approves new members
• Hidden – the team is invitation-only and isn’t visible in the Team Browser

Unified My Tasks, Inbox and search across all Teams
If you work with many separate teams at the same time – as managers, executives, project managers, and client services teams do, just to name a few – we’re making your world much better. Within your Organization, you have a single view of your tasks, a single Inbox, and can search and save your searches across the entire Organization. This will keep you connected to more of what’s going on, with less effort.

Auto-joining your Organization
Now, new users who sign up for Asana on their own, using their @yourcompany.com email address, will be automatically joined to your Organization. They’ll be shown all the teams listed in the Team Browser, and can join or request membership to any of those, or create a new Team. This will be a much quicker start for new teammates, while also answering the common question “are there other teams in my company using Asana already?”

Centralized administration
A big part of supporting bigger teams is making it easy for IT to support. Organizations on premium plans can now can designate “admins” for an Organization, who are able to configure some security settings, manage users, and centralize billing. Admins can also see account activity, easily remove users from the Organization, and require access to Asana through Google Accounts.

How do I get started?

Starting today, Organizations is built into Asana for everyone. New users who are the first from their company to sign up, will be creating their first Team inside a new Organization. Over the next day or so, we’ll let most of the existing teams convert their Workspace to an Organization themselves, so you start creating Teams right away. If you have multiple Workspaces you want to merge into an Organization, or any questions about converting your Workspace, you can read more in the Guide, or contact us.

We’ve also made it easier for companies to decide when and how they want to upgrade Asana. You can upgrade any Team by itself, starting at only $50/month for up to 15 users. Or you can upgrade your entire Organization, making all your Teams premium. There’s no difference in the price, and we have the same user tiers for both. All Asana premium plans give you private projects, public and private teams, unlimited guests, and an higher level of support, in addition to more users. Upgrading your Organization also gives your IT teams the administration capabilities listed above.

We’ve also strengthened our free tier with this update. Free Organizations offer unlimited projects and tasks, and unlimited Teams up to 15 members each, with most of the features listed above, including Teams, single view of My Tasks, single Inbox, and auto-joining for new users.

Another Step

With Organizations, we’ve addressed the most important requirements of bigger companies, an important piece of the larger puzzle. But over the next several months, we will continue to launch new features that make Asana an even more powerful way to coordinate your team, organize your work, and track progress towards your goals.

Our goal is to be the tool all the world’s best teams rely on to do great things, and we won’t rest until we’re there.

A few weeks ago, when we introduced Colored Projects & Tags on these very pages, many of the commenters wrote in to ask kindly that we add Drag & Drop file uploading.

Drag & Drop attachments have been on our roadmap for a while, so in a bout of mad inspiration, we took designs from a previous Polish Week and coded them up.

Today, we are happy to ship the feature to you, live in your task pane as of right now.

Drag & Drop file uploading works just like it sounds: you grab a file from your desktop and drag it over the task pane. A light grey box with some illustrations inside will appear to indicate that Asana is ready. Release over the drop region and…your attachment is now attaching itself to the task.

We’ve been using it for a couple of days and really think it makes Asana faster to use.

Note: this first version we’re launching doesn’t let you attach multiple files with one drop. But don’t worry. That, too, will come in time.

Enjoy!

Every morning, I wake up, and look at all my tasks. I pick out the ones that are most important, and mark those for Today. Then I look at the first Today task, start it, work on it until it’s done, and then proceed to the next task. I do this for each task in my Today list, until they’re all complete. Then I go home satisfied with a job well done.

I wish. Despite years of studying productivity and even meditating daily, I — like most everyone I know — struggle hard to stay focused. “Multitasking” is really just interrupting yourself in the middle of one thing to do another. “Context switching” is very expensive for humans: not only does it make things take longer, but constant distraction effectively lowers IQ and makes you perform worse even on those tasks that you do accomplish.

Both research and common sense demonstrate that single-tasking is optimal for productivity. On those occasions when I find it, I feel great: productive, effective, in flow.

At Asana, we’re obsessed with flow, and how technology can help achieve it. So for hackathon, Rachel and I decided to build Focus Mode. Focus Mode allows you to see one task at a time, without feeling tempted or overwhelmed by all the other tasks in your center pane. We’ve been using it internally for a few weeks now, and it’s done wonders for helping us get more work done, one step at a time.

How It Works

Select the task you want to focus on. Then, select “Focus Mode” from the dropdown menu in the upper right corner of the task details pane. Or, hold down Tab and press X.

The task becomes the center of attention. Everything else fades away. To get back, click anywhere on the background, or press Escape.

Hope you enjoy this small addition as much as we have!

More Tricks for Focusing

• Close other windows and browser tabs, unless they are essential to the task at hand.
• Close chat.
• Set your phone to “Do Not Disturb” (for iPhone) or Airplane Mode.
• Try putting on headphones, but without music. I find this helps me block out the rest of the world, and also hints to other people not to interrupt me.
• Take a deep breath and imagine yourself doing the task. What’s the very first action you’re going to perform?
• If you find yourself spending more than 15 minutes on a single task without getting anywhere, take a quick break and try again for 15 minutes.
• Still not feeling inspired? Try Focus Mode on another task.

Tags are one of Asana’s most flexible features. Combined with Asana’s filtering capabilities, the free-form nature of tags means you can use them in almost any way you want. Some of our customers use them to indicate priority (“P0, P1”). Others use them to categorize stages in a workflow (“In Progress”). Still others use them to give a task a label (“blog post” or “video demo”) or to simply add more data that might be helpful, like labeling a feature “requested by customer.”

Today, we’d like to tell you about a handful of improvements we’re making to the way tags work in Asana. Some of these improvements are live right now. The others will be rolling out over the next couple of weeks.

Here’s what we’ve cooked up:

• We’re bringing the Tags list back to the Left Pane (optional). If you missed having your Tags visible in the Left Pane, this will make your day. Simply go into the “Workspace Settings” menu and select “Show Tags List” to bring them back. This feature is live now.

• We’re giving the power of Tags to Guests. Next week, thanks to a significant improvement in the way we handle permissions, Guests will be able see Tags on tasks that are shared with them. This is great if you’re managing clients or contractors in Asana, and want to give them the power of Tags without letting them see every Tag you’ve created. The same change to permissions means that Tags you only use on private Tasks will only be visible to people who can see those Tasks.

• We’re simplifying Tags by replacing Private Tags with Private Projects. We originally had two options for creating private views of tasks: Private Tags and Private Projects. This created a fair amount of confusion: people weren’t sure when to use Private Tags and when to use Private Projects, and there wasn’t really a clear reason to use one or the other. To simplify this and eliminate the source of confusion, we will be making Private Projects the only option and turning all existing Private Tags into Private Projects. If you’ve been using Private Tags, this shouldn’t have any significant effect on your existing workflows. You can just use “Sort by Project” to get the same view.

We think these changes make the experience of using Tags better. Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Asana’s interface is designed to be fast, flexible and powerful while staying out of your way. This minimalist design philosophy is reflected in our color scheme: a range of unobtrusive grays and whites that are designed to be calming – to not catch your eye and distract you. But sometimes, a little bit of color can be a great thing.

Today, we are happy to introduce Colored Projects & Tags: a simple but powerful way to add visual organization to your tasks, personalize Asana to your liking, and add some color to your day.

As the name suggests, Colored Projects & Tags let you assign one of a broad range of colors to any Project or Tag in Asana. When you select a color for a Project or Tag, that color will replace the default gray we use for labels in the Center Pane and the Task Pane. It will also show up in the left pane, next to the name of the Project or Tag.

Using Colored Projects and Tags

The colors you choose are unique to your personal view of Asana, so you can use them however you see fit, and so can your teammates. Here are two ways people on our team use them:

• Balance work with themes. Instead of using different colors for each project, group them by type/theme with a single color. For example, if your job spans multiple functions, use blue for Marketing projects, Green for Sales projects, etc. This way, when you look at your “My Tasks” list, you can instantly see how your work is distributed.

• Prioritize critical tasks. Using colors to indicate priority can help you quickly focus on your most important work. If you’re using tags for bug tracking, for example, you can make all P0 and P1 tags red, so top-priority bugs immediately catch your eye. Likewise, you can color whole projects by importance (red for most important, blue for least, and so on).

Selecting Colors

There are two places you can go to assign a color to a Project or Tag:

• The new Left Pane drop-down menu. When you hover over a Project or Tag in the left pane, a down-arrow will appear to the right of its name. Click that arrow, and the new Left Pane drop-down menu appears. From there, you can select a color. (You can also quickly duplicate, archive or delete the project, or turn it into a favorite).

• The drop-down menu in the Center Pane. If you’ve navigated to a Project or Tag view, you can also use its drop-down menu in the Center Pane. Click the down arrow in the upper-right corner of the Center Pane and this menu will appear.

We’ve been using Colored Projects and Tags internally for a while, and many of us find them indispensable. Others simply enjoy the small bit of visual flair they add to Asana.

If you’ve always wanted to spice up Asana with a little bit of color, now’s your chance.

Just under a year ago, we launched an API to allow developers to build new tools on top of Asana. Since then, we’ve seen companies and independent developers use the Asana API to integrate Asana and their internal tools, add features like time-tracking and reporting dashboards, and even build separate products.

But until today, the only way to grant another application access to your Asana account was to use your API key.

Today, we’re introducing a better way to authorize other applications to use your Asana account: Asana Connect.

What is Asana Connect?

Asana Connect is a way you can connect your Asana account with any partner website or app using a trusted authentication method, OAuth. Now, whether you’re signing into the partner app or granting the partner app access to your tasks, you can use Asana Connect to securely authenticate and connect to your Asana account.

Asana Connect is based on OAuth, which is an authentication standard supported by companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and many, many others. When you “Connect with Facebook”, for instance, you’re using OAuth to let another app access some information about your Facebook account to identify you and make requests of the Facebook API on your behalf.

Likewise, if you signed up for Asana with your Google account, you were using OAuth.

Starting today, developers can begin to write apps that will let you securely give them permissions to access data in your Asana account. You can either accept or reject this request with the click of a single button.

Revoking these apps’ permissions will be just as easy. You can click on your name in the lower left corner > Account Settings > Apps to see the Apps you’ve authorized with Asana Connect.

Why Asana Connect is better

Using an API key to give third-party applications access to your Asana account was functional, but it suffered some drawbacks.

• Applications would need to prompt you for the key, which you’d then have to go to the Asana app to locate, copy, return to the application, and paste in. This is not the smoothest experience.
• Worse, to enter the key on a mobile device you’d often have to actually type it out. The API key is long and full of different characters and numbers, which enhances its security but makes it tedious to enter on mobile keyboards.
• One API key was shared by all applications, meaning if you wanted to deauthorize just one application, you would have to reset your API key and enter the new one into all the apps you wanted to keep using.

Asana Connect makes those drawbacks go away.

The future soon

Of course, it will take developers some time to implement this new authentication method, but we hope that in the weeks and months ahead, you’ll see a lot fewer “enter an API key here” text fields and a lot more “Sign in with Asana” buttons. In fact, our friends over at Flowbs and Cloudwork already have Asana Connect up and running!

Developers can read up on all the technical details in the Developer Documentation, as well as check out some example code showing how to implement OAuth for Asana on Github.

Imagine if, with one click, you could answer the question “What work is due today for everyone on my team?” or “What are all the tasks that are more than a day behind schedule?” Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could get that information without having to ask for it, even if you hadn’t been on the original email threads?

Today, we’re excited to announce Asana Search Views – a powerful new way to manage the work you track in Asana. Search Views take the power traditionally found in more complicated, specialized tools and deliver it with the same focus on simplicity, usability, and design that we bring to the rest of our software.

A New View Of Your Team’s Work

Search Views let you slice and dice tasks in Asana in practically any way you choose. With a few quick clicks (or keyboard shortcuts), you can, for example:

• Search for all the tasks completed by one or more people on your team in the last seven days.
• Search for all incomplete tasks tagged with “Customer Suggestion” ever created.
• Search for all tasks that have attachments and are in a specific project.

Once you’ve created a Search View, you can quickly navigate between the tasks you’ve found to see their details, or select multiple tasks to change them all at once. You can sort the Search View by when tasks are due, when they were created, and how long it’s been since they’ve been updated.

And if there’s a Search View you expect to use frequently, you can quickly make it a favorite in the left pane, essentially creating custom reports that update each time you navigate to them.

Accessing Search Views

You can get to Search Views in two ways: For a simple full text search, type any word or phrase into the search box and choose “Search Tasks”. For a more advanced, structured search, click the arrow at the right of the search box.

In the drop-down, you can now specify any or all of the following: Assignee, Projects, Tags, Attachments, Completion Status, Due Dates, and more.

To quickly see how it works, click on any of the suggested searches to go to all of the tasks you created, followed, or assigned. From there, you can focus the search by re-opening advanced search and narrowing down to incomplete tasks, those with attachments, or the ones not assigned to you (choose ‘Not me’).

If you’ve created a Search View you want to use again, you can click the star next to the Search title to save it. You can rename it if you like.

SIDE NOTE: We’ve also brought the Tag list back. Just choose “Show Tags List” from the Workspace Settings menu and they’ll appear at the bottom of the left pane.

Using Search Views

Search Views are designed to be flexible, and there are tons of ways to use them. Here are a few:

Find Any Task Across Your Company

Full text search looks across the entire content of tasks, including the notes, comments, projects, and people, so you don’t have to try to guess what someone else named a task. Simply type in any keywords and we’ll do the rest.

Manager Reporting

Add your teammates to the “Assigned To” field, then filter by project or tag to drill down to the information you need. See at a glance when projects are falling behind or when tasks are slipping through the cracks, and take action immediately.

Bug Tracking

In building Search Views, we focused on building a search powerful enough to contend with the best dedicated bug trackers in the market.

You can now slice and dice your Asana tasks to find exactly what you want, from stale bugs to new and unassigned ones. The saved Search Views enable new workflows, like having the QA team watch for completed bugs that haven’t been QAed yet, or the customer service team watching the bugs they opened to see as they become assigned and then completed.

Another Step

At Asana, we envision a future where teams work together as seamlessly as a guitarist’s left and right hands. Since we launched, we’ve been meeting with teams, listening to customers, and improving Asana to expand the scope and complexity of projects that teams of can take on. We think Search Views represent the next big step towards that vision.

Asana’s task pane is where you go to manage the details of your tasks, and it is where most of the action in Asana happens. Today, we are happy to announce that we’ve given the task pane’s design a major upgrade.

The new design makes the task pane simpler, more elegant, and more delightful to use, without adding or removing any features. We’ll be rolling out the new design slowly, so you will see it in your Asana account sometime over the next few weeks.

The improvements we’ve made

See critical information at a glance

One of the biggest changes you’ll notice is the toolbar at the top of the task pane. Before, the critical details of a task were strewn across the pane. Now, they key information about a task (Assignee and Due Date) are always visible in the top-left corner of the pane.

Better Collaboration

Asana works at its best when it is used as a communication tool, so we made changes to the look and feel of commenting and following to promote communication.

• We’ve moved task followers to the bottom of the task pane and made them always visible so that you know who is involved in the conversation.
• We switched the display of followers from a list of names to a row of faces so that Asana feels more personal. (If you haven’t added your picture to your Asana profile, you should!)
• We’ve ensured comments always stay on screen when you’re typing in them, even as you scroll up to look at comment history.

Make keyboard shortcuts obvious

Many of Asana’s biggest advocates love the keyboard shortcuts that exist throughout Asana, but many people never find out about them. To address this, we added keyboard shortcut prompts to the tooltips that were already present in the app. We’ve seen some shortcuts quadruple in usage because of this small change.

Cleaner interfaces

In the past, an empty task could feel overwhelming because the task pane was so cluttered. With our redesign, the task pane is much cleaner in its empty state. The pane is also physically smaller, and grows vertically as more information is added into it.

As part of this change, we’ve reduced the prominence of the “Today/Upcoming/Later” setting, so it is no longer visible all the time. But don’t worry, it’s still there: simply click on the “Assignee” button when the task is assigned to someone the settings will appear. For power users, this feature is still quickly accessible via keyboard shortcuts:

• TAB+Y: Today
• TAB+U: Upcoming
• TAB+L: Later

Improving everyday experiences

We believe that when the tools you use are well designed, you are more effective at what you do. You are able to grok information more clearly, your mind feels less cluttered, and you feel more in control. When you collaborate with others, everyone experiences the same clarity and control, so your team is able to get and stay on the same page.

Most of our users spend a large proportion of their time in Asana using the task pane, so it is important for it to be well designed. We believe that you deserve to look at and interact with something that is beautiful as well as functional.

We’ve been testing the redesign with volunteers, a subset of users, and internally at our company. The feedback has been really positive, so we’re excited to roll this out. We hope you enjoy this change as much as we do.

It’s hard to imagine that in another 10 years, today’s incarnation of email will still be the de-facto communication tool we use to organize ourselves, to manage our work and to collaborate with our teams.

But, despite our belief that workplace communications tools must and will evolve, we understand that old-school email will not vanish immediately, or even particularly soon.

This is why we built the email bridge.

What is the email bridge?

The email bridge is the system we built to connect message-centric email to task-centric Asana. It lets you and your team do two main things.

• Send emails to Asana to turn them into tasks.
• Reply to task emails from Asana to turn them into comments on the original task.

Turning emails into tasks

To send messages and turn them into tasks, you’ll need to choose the Asana Workspace the emails you send to Asana should go to. This can be done in three steps:

• Go into your Account Settings by clicking your name in the lower left corner of Asana’s interface.
• Select the “Email Dropbox” tab
• Choose the Workspace you’d like to use.

Your Email Dropbox can now receive emails. The email bridge will turn them into tasks with these conventions:

• Email subject —> Task name
• Email body —> Task notes
• Email attachments —> Task attachments
• People in the CC field —> Task Followers

Once you’ve created an Email Dropbox with the above steps, there are three main ways to use it:

• Email tasks to your personal task list. Using the email address associated with your main Asana Workspace, simply send (or forward) an email to x@mail.asana.com. This will create a new task in your “My Tasks” list. If this is something you will do frequently, you should add x@mail.asana.com to your address book.
• Email tasks straight to a project. To do this, you’ll need the Project ID, which can be found in the URL of the project. The Project ID is the first string of numbers in the URL when you’ve selected a project: Once you’ve got this number, you can send emails to at the address x+PROJECTID@mail.asana.com. If you’d like to automatically assign the task to someone on your team, include them in the “To” field of the email.
• Auto-forward emails to a project. If you have an email address like “jobs@yourcompany.com” or “bugs@yourcompany” and you’d like to automatically turn emails to that address into tasks, you can set up auto-forwarding.
  • First, add the forwarding email address (e.g. jobs@yourcompany) to your Workspace as a Workspace member.
  • Set up auto-forwarding in your email service to send emails to Asana.
  • Your email service will send a confirmation link to Asana. Go to the task created by the bridge and click that link.

Turning email replies into comments

The email bridge also turns replies to emails from Asana into comments on tasks. If anyone on your team prefers to stay in email, this can be a great way to keep the conversation around your team’s tasks organized in Asana.

There are a couple of ways this works:

• Assign a task to a teammate. When your teammate receives the task notification email, he or she can simply reply to it. The email bridge will automatically turn that reply into a comment on the task.
• Comment on a task that has followers. The task’s followers will all receive an email with your comment. Any of them can reply to this message and the bridge will add their reply as a comment.

Mind the gap

Here at Asana, email represents a small fraction of our internal communication. Instead of sending email messages back and forth, we send tasks. Instead of creating multi-person email threads with CC, we simply add followers. And instead of spending hours each week staying on top of email, we rely on Asana’s Inbox to keep us connected and up to speed.

But for many teams, email remains a way of life. Asana’s email bridge is our way of acknowledging this fact, spanning the gap between messages and tasks and giving you and your teammates a way to incorporate Asana into your workflow while keeping a foot in email’s message-centric world.