Asana Integration

The HourStack Asana integration allows your team to schedule and track time from the tasks they’re already working on in Asana — which means no duplicating tasks, interrupted workflows, or jumping back and forth between applications.

You can connect or disconnect integrations anytime through your account settings. All integrations are scoped to you personally, meaning that nobody else on your team can access your integration connection or data. You'll have access to your Asana integration across all of your workspaces.

Other Helpful Resources:

• Scheduling With Integrations
• Manage Your Integrations

Connecting the Integration

To connect your Asana account, navigate to your account settings and find Asana under the available integrations and click "Connect". This will take you to Asana to log in to the account you'd like to connect to and to authorize the HourStack app to access your Asana account data. Once you've authorized the HourStack app, the integration will be connected and you can start using it immediately from your calendar.

Integration Settings

On your account settings page, click the "Manage" link next to your connected Asana integration to manage the settings.

• Automatically complete tasks Turn this setting on if you'd like for source Asana tasks to be completed in Asana automatically when you complete the corresponding task in HourStack

Integration Configuration

Tab and filtering selections you make within the integration will automatically be saved to your integration configuration so that each time you open the integration, it will be in the state you last left it, even across browsers or devices.

Asana Workspaces

The Asana integration features two primary views, the list of Asana workspaces and the list of tabs that help you navigate the tasks within your workspace. To display Asana tasks, you must first select an Asana workspace as the source for the tasks. The list of workspaces is sorted alphabetically and includes both workspaces and organizations you have access to in Asana. You can switch the Asana workspace you want to source tasks from any time using the breadcrumb navigation at the top of the integration.

Asana Tasks

The tabbed UI brings task discovery much more in line with what you experience when using the Asana app allowing you to find tasks to schedule and track time against as quickly and simply as possible.

Tabs Include:

• My tasks: Lists tasks assigned to you in the same manual order you've set in Asana. We were disappointed to not be able to include the sections to group each task, but we are told the Asana team is going to add this capability to their API in the future. As soon as it is available, we'll add it and you'll have a 100% representation of your My Tasks page in Asana.
• Projects: You'll likely spend much of your time working in this tab. You'll see a full list of your projects in the same manual order they appear in the Asana app. We've included the project colors and icons to make finding them faster. Once you select a project, all the tasks under that project will be shown grouped by section as defined in the project within Asana.
• Tags: These are a helpful way to find similar tasks across your Asana workspace that you want to schedule at the same time. For example, maybe you have a task tagged billing in Asana where you run the monthly billing for each project. You could go under tags, locate the billing tag, then see a list of all open billing tasks ready to be scheduled and completed.
• Users: This is the quickest way to find tasks assigned to other team members that you want to schedule for in HourStack. You won't see their My Tasks view–that is private as is yours–but you will have access to all of their public tasks.
• Search: Quickly find any task by name. We utilize the Asana "Typeahead" API, which is the search you find in the navigation bar of the Asana app. We'll return the exact same results, but it's limited to tasks in this tab. If you'd like to search for projects, tags, or users, select that tab first, and a search input specific to that resource is available.

Subtasks

Parent tasks with subtasks will show the count of subtasks at the bottom of the task card. Subtasks are collapsed by default, so click the link to expand the list of subtasks. Asana allows subtasks to go multiple levels deep and we support this as well.

A Note About Projects

Asana supports multiple projects, which is not a feature HourStack has or plans to implement. For tasks with multiple projects, we'll pull the first project in the list as supplied by Asana. If you are wanting a specific project to be associated with the task, navigate to the task under the projects tab and we'll ensure that is the project selected for the task when multiple are present.

Also, keep in mind that subtasks in Asana do not inherit the parent task's project. Subtasks default to having no project, so you'll need to select the appropriate project when you create the subtask.

Creating Tasks in HourStack

You can use Asana tasks to create tasks in HourStack by dragging and dropping them onto the calendar, or by clicking on the Asana task and selecting "Schedule task" from the menu. Notes from the Asana task are automatically copied over to the HourStack task. Creating tasks from integrations requires the same permissions as creating tasks from scratch.

Project and Label Assignment

Note that Asana uses the term tags while HourStack uses the term labels, but they are functionally equivalent.

• If the Asana task is assigned to a project and/or tags in Asana that exist in HourStack, then they will be selected automatically. If you have the required permissions and the project and/or tags in Asana have had name changes, then we’ll update the project and/or tags in HourStack to match.
• If the Asana task is assigned to a project and/or tags in Asana that don't exist in HourStack and you have permission, the project and/or labels will automatically be created when a task is created from the Asana task in HourStack.

Accessing the Original Asana Task

Tasks in HourStack created from Asana tasks will remain linked. Content changes will not be synced between HourStack and Asana, but from within HourStack you'll be able to directly access the Asana task from the task by clicking the Asana icon, or the options dropdown when editing the task.

Manually Completing Asana Tasks from HourStack

There are a couple of options for manually completing Asana tasks from within HourStack. For the automatic completion of tasks when a task is completed in HourStack, see the integration settings section above.

1. From the integration sidebar, click the task and select "Complete in Asana".
2. From the task itself, click the options menu and click "Complete in Asana".

Asana Time Tracking and Custom Fields

If you are using Asana's native time tracking, then you'll have a Time estimate field, which accepts a format of HH:MM. If not, you can create a custom number field of the same name that will accept the number of minutes you'd like to schedule the task for. Alternatively, you can create a custom number field with the name Duration or Allocation that will accept the number of hours you'd like to schedule a task for, in decimal format. We'll automatically set the scheduled duration in HourStack to match the value from Asana.

Disconnecting the Integration

To disconnect your Asana integration, navigate to your account settings and click the "Manage" link next to your connected Asana integration. Click the "Disconnect" button and confirm you'd like to disconnect the integration. This will disconnect the integration from the HourStack side. To fully disconnect the integration you'll need to deauthorize HourStack under settings > apps > authorized apps in Asana as well.

Deauthorizing on the Asana side is required if you want to switch to integrating with a different Asana account.

Note about Asana enterprise workspaces

Enterprise workspaces in Asana have the ability to whitelist apps. If any of the Asana workspaces you belong to are on an enterprise plan, ensure they have whitelisted the HourStack app. If it is blocked by any Asana workspace, then you won’t be able to access it from any other workspace due to how Asana handles blocking apps. They are aware that this is an issue and will be releasing a fix in the future to ensure the app is only blocked for that specific workspace.

Integrating with Asana via the HourStack Browser Extension

With the HourStack Browser Extension you can easily schedule and track time on tasks in Asana whilst remaining in the web app. You can read more about how to utilize the browser extension by reading the section titled “Adding Tasks from Integrated Apps” for the following browsers:

• Google Chrome
• Firefox
• Microsoft Edge

• Connecting the Integration
• Integration Settings
• Integration Configuration
• Asana Workspaces
• Asana Tasks
• Subtasks
• A Note About Projects
• Creating Tasks in HourStack
• Project and Label Assignment
• Accessing the Original Asana Task
• Manually Completing Asana Tasks from HourStack
• Asana Time Tracking and Custom Fields
• Disconnecting the Integration
• Note about Asana enterprise workspaces
• Integrating with Asana via the HourStack Browser Extension