Estimate Effort (hours)

Hi, I know that, with other platforms, I can time tracking of the activities. But I would like to know if someway it’s possible to input estimate effort in each task, so I can know how much time of my month are already located.

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This is a great question, @jean, and one we hear from customers often. There’s another great post here about different integrations community members use for this: Do you track your time? - #11 by dickvandruten

If you want to track in Asana, I’d recommend setting up a project with a field for estimated and actual hours. I do this up to 15 minute increments (using 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1 etc.) and have effectively been able to resource plan and track work across the different categories of projects I work within. You can see an example of this from my live project here:

Do you think something like this might work for your needs?

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Hi, Kaitie!

Tks a lot for your help, I didn’t know that was possible have custom
fields. Seems to be really ease :slight_smile:

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Custom fields are a wonder once you realize what they can do. It’s one of those ‘how did we exist without them?’ updates.

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@Caisha is there a way, utilizing custom fields, that we could add an estimate field that would “bubble up” to the estimate fields’ of the parent tasks? Alternatively, could we have a parent task that has a status that remains static, until the subtasks are all advanced to the next status?

Subtasks are great for organizing thoughts, but tallying effort becomes more challenging, and often results in double-counting (both a parent task and subtasks are assigned estimates).

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I have a follow up question: is there any way that you can add those estimated and actual times in Asana (without having to export the data) to show the total estimated and actual times in real time? That would be a real plus, as I have to know immediately when we are exceeding the estimated hours that we calculated to spend on a project.

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Hi @Daniel_Koster! The functionality you describe is not currently available, though you can multi select custom fields to view the sum total of all the field values. Real time, though, would be new! Feel free to add the idea to the #productfeedback category.

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@Alexis is there a plugin we can use for cost estimates if the function is not available in Asana.

following this thread…

Having the same question from a client. Would be great to have this in Asana

hi @Kaitie. I was wondering if there has been any updates on being able to have all those hours in the custom field be added up? My team has a cumbersome external gantt chart that unless Asana can replace that for seeing how loaded each of team members are for task hours each week, we can’t justify paying for premium.

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@Catherine_Seiwert,

Have you seen the new Using Asana List Layout | Product Guide • Asana Product Guide section totals for numeric custom fields in list view?

Also, the Workload feature (requires Business plan)?

Related, I haven’t tried it but there’s this Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/asana-counter-extension/npbhpppmgfjodckhiomoicgjaakmklnl

Hope that helps,

Larry

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Hi @lpb. Thanks you pointed out this feature.
It’s usefull but not what we are looking for…

will it work with timeline?

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