Managing contractors in a team (without adding them to Asana)

Hi everyone. A common question I hear is “How do I manage the work of contractors (or team members) who aren’t in Asana?”.

My natural suggestion is to use a tag (if there are lots of contractors) or custom field (if only a few contractors) instead of the assignee to illustrate which contractor is responsible for the work. That way, the person managing the work can still search for work and sort by contractor, without actually assigning the tasks to a user.

Interested to hear alternative approaches.

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This is really helpful, thanks. I’ve been struggling to find a use for tags but this could be it.

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@paulminors, I agree. I use tags to designate a task that is assigned to a non-Asana user. I then create and save a custom search to keep track of all of their tasks.

I also use this technique. As well it’s handy for before the contractor starts because you can begin adding the “web contractor” tag before you know the exact person who will fill the role.

@Mark_Hudson I also use tags to denote priorities (P1, P2, P3, or ‘on hold’). This works much better for our company as a whole since tags can be connected to any task or subtask. Before we were using titles in each person’s task manager, and it was a mess! Recommended, especially colour coded!

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