My personal to-do list (in my personal workspace) doesn’t have any projects at all – I just create sections in My Tasks for different aspects of my life (e.g. Home, Financial, Travel ^) and put the tasks under it. This demonstrates that you can just create a task in My Tasks without it getting there because someone assigned it to you.
For My Tasks at work, most of my organizing is basically to create workarounds to avoid clutter. This is an area I really hope Asana can improve soon. My team uses templates and dependent tasks extensively. Template tasks to which I’m assigned will literally never be completed, so they’re just in the way on My Tasks forever. I deal with this by sticking them in a Templates section at the bottom of My Tasks. Dependent tasks, by definition, can’t be dealt with yet – some for months or years. This is especially annoying in conjunction with repeating tasks. For example, when I conduct an employee’s annual review, next year’s review comes to life on My Tasks even though I can’t touch it for a year. So I have another section called “Dependent Tasks” and stick those there.
^ In addition to trip planning, each U.S. state I have left to visit is a task. It’s very satisfying to click that check mark when the plane lands. I’m down to Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, and New Mexico!
Oooh this travel idea is so fun! Sounds like you’ve had some fun travels. I’d love to create this type of list for countries, cities, and historical sites, too. The Pyramids at Giza and the Terracotta Army are on my list.
I’ve been implementing GTD in my Asana workflow for the past week and here is how I am handling the My Tasks organization.
New Tasks: This is my GTD inbox. All new tasks, ideas, etc go here to be sorted to the appropriate projects and action lists.
Today: During my morning review I pull next actions from my action lists/projects and place them in Today.
I completely ignore the Upcoming and Later sections as they don’t fit in with the way I have implemented GTD. If any GTD’ers are utilizing these sections I’d love to hear about it.
To be sure I don’t miss something “stuck” in Upcoming/Later, I have a saved search for tasks assigned to me, but not in any projects. I review that regularly and place the in the appropriate action list/project.
@Alexis I noticed your screenshot was of your personal projects… Do you track your tasks in there, or do you have this structure in your organization and you just added it to your personal projects to show?
I work across several organizations, so it would be nice to get my tasks in to my Personal Projects organization… but I’m sure this isn’t possible
Hi @TheTim! Good question. I organized this just for show, however the setup looks exactly like it does in my My Tasks. However, you could create a project specifically for your tasks. @Kaitie has a project like this called Kaitie’s Work Tracking. It could be a start for keeping things more organized in your org if you’d like an alternative to tracking your day to day in My Tasks.
I’ve had a Master Actions project for some time, but haven’t been using it recently, just because adding every task assigned to me in to the project, then removing it later didn’t feel like the right thing to do, when I was just mirroring when a task is assigned to me.
I think I might try to replicate the project sections inside My Tasks. The only disadvantage is that I have a section I use for “Waiting on” which I use to chase up tasks not assigned to me. But I am sure that there must be an easy way do this using some save searches instead.
I was struggling to see Upcoming tasks until I realised I had view Sort = Due Date! With none selected I can see the New, Today, Upcoming and Later
The methodology I am going to try and use is something like this (very similar to @Carlo I think(
New tasks will come in, where I can process them quickly - i.e decide if the should be marked Today, Upcoming or Later
Today tasks should be kept short, just to the tasks I intend to complete today. Pulled in from the Upcoming list each morning. Because it’s such a short I shouldn’t need to divide up the tasks in to sections
Upcoming is where I’ll add a bit more context to my personal task planning. I have sections such as Office - Proactive, Office - Inactive, Thinking / Decision, Calls etc. Anything which has been recently moved to Upcoming won’t be in a section so I will treat them as what I call Review & Organise tasks, and as part of my morning ritual will check these and place them in a suitable section, or move in to Today
I’m reviewing all the projects I am involved in daily, so will come across all the tasks assigned to me which will appear in the Later section of My Tasks page and I’ll Move them in to Upcoming, so I shouldn’t need to use this section, however I might find it quicker to dive in to them from My Tasks
We also use a custom Field Progress. So I am setting up saved searches using Progress = Waiting. The trick is that it should be assigned to whoever is responsible for the blocking task, so I can have multiple searches and quickly check blocking tasks by individual.
Hey @enyonam. I’m a bit late to the party, but you can organise tasks into today/upcoming/later in your inbox as well. Either by clicking on the Due Date or using these shortcuts:
Nevertheless, I feel the inbox could use some more usability attention. It’s something every new employee I’ve onboarded has struggled with so far.
I have much of my week in the Today section because I like to organize my work by what I’m going to do Mon/Tues/Wed/Thurs/Fri. Unlike some Asana users, my due dates do not necessarily represent when I plan to do a task - rather specifically when a task is due. Maybe I have a big project I’d like to work on Wednesday, so I’d like to get all tasks due Wednesday done ahead of time - on Monday or Tuesday, for example. So, while tasks will inevitably get auto populated into today, I like to plan ahead for my week and move things around by day as new things come up.
This is very interesting. I’m glad this thread was dusted off. It never occurred to me to organize My Tasks because I always thought Today’s tasks were, well, for today. But I like the idea of sectioning off the Top 3 priorities within Today.
After my post above in November, I began organizing My Tasks and it’s been a HUGE improvement for me. I didn’t realize I was overwhelmed by My Tasks before this.
What I’ve done is taken a page from the Productivity Planner and created three sections for Today:
TOP 1 (if this was the only thing you did today, you’d be satisfied)
Secondary 2 {completion of these tasks are very important}:
Additional Tasks {to be done only after the above three. No more than 9 here!}:
In the Upcoming section, I place the remaining tasks due within the next 30 days. I created sections based on type of work which requires more thought in planning how long these tasks will take such as:
Creative Services
Website
Social Media
Marketing & Advertising
Tasks that are over a month away go in Later.
Every Monday morning, I block off the first hour of my work day for planning. This is when I review My Tasks and reorganize the list. Tues-Fri, planning only takes the first 15 minutes or so of the day because I’m familiar with the task list already and it’s much easier to shuffle the list for that day.
So, thank you to @Martin_Prechelmacher for dusting off this thread back in November. It’s been a huge help to me!
Thanks for sharing, @Crystal_Alifanow! I love the Productivity Planner method and find that calling out the Top 1 can be a great way to instill focus for the day.
Our team does this collectively by sharing our top focus every day with the rest of the team to keep each other in the loop and identify potential areas for collaboration.
This is awesome, Crystal! I am delighted that you came back to this thread to report on what you’ve been doing with your my tasks. I might have to take a page out of your book!
Every Monday we are going through what everyone in the team shall do during the week, and our intention was to use My Tasks as the task gross list since it should for all different projects. However, I just noticed that it’s only me who see my titles and categorizing. For everyone else, it just a messy list with no order at all.
I tried to use “Save view for Everyone”, but it did not help me Anyone who knows how we can make my own My Task Categorizing and order visible for everyone in the team? We use the free plan edition.
OK thanks, but is there any possibility for my team members too see the same categorization I see in my own “My Tasks” and vice versa, e.g. my own created Current Week, Next week, +2 Weeks etc.
If you click on the picture of one of your colleague then you will see his MyTasks, with only his public tasks. Private tasks are obviously only visible by him.
However, you could create a project specifically for your tasks. 
Anyone who knows how we can make my own My Task Categorizing and order visible for everyone in the team? We use the free plan edition.