Can I mark an event on a project calendar without it being a task?

Just signed up to Asana today and am feeling a little overwhelmed (although loving it)! Is there a way to distinguish between something that is actually a task and something that is just more of an event? Let me clarify by giving a specific example…

I’m creating a content calendar for my blog and social media channels. Say I want to mark on the project calendar for this particular themes for every week’s posts so that I can map out over time the themes I want to cover. Let’s say I want one week’s theme to be ‘community’. I do not want ‘community’ showing up as a task in any of my tasks lists but I merely want it to be marked on the project calendar. I will, of course, have individual tasks related to this theme like ‘write blog post’, etc. which I want to appear as normal tasks that I can see in ‘My tasks’ and check them off as they get done. I’m not interested in using subtasks as they seem a bit limiting to me. For me, I think I can keep things much more organised just using tasks.

I hope this all makes sense! I’m wracking my brain trying to think of a way to achieve this and coming up with nothing!

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Hi @Stephanie_Baxter, and welcome to the club! The idea of events or themes is a frequent feature request, but in the meantime a workaround is to create a section of your project called “Events and Themes” or something like that. If you’re a Premium user, you can create custom fields that have colors assigned, and then your event and theme “tasks” will be color-coded in the List and Calendar views of your project.

(Note for larger teams: If you make your events and themes tasks in their own project, anyone on the team can apply these items to their own projects by using Advanced Search. Just do a search that includes both the “real” project and the events/themes project, and flip the search to Calendar view. Then click the star to the left of the search results name to favorite the search, and click the ^ to the right of the name to rename it. Now every time you click the name in the left nav, you’ll get the equivalent of the project you had before with events/themes added.)

Okay, back to Stephanie… I’m not sure if your comment about subtasks means you’re not planning to use any at all, or just that you don’t want to do the events/themes that way. My team’s primary use of Asana is for a content calendar, which for us is all one huge project with hundreds of tasks and dozens of subtasks under each task. We have a section for templates, and we copy the templates to create content items. Here’s a guide that explains it:

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As long as the task is not assigned to anyone out will not appear on “my tasks”.
I create a section on my projects that has due dates, meeting dates, and reference information. They may appear in the project Calendar but not on anyones lis.

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