A while back, one of my teenagers wanted a quick bowl of microwave mac and cheese. If you’ve never used them, it’s pretty straightforward. Put some water in the little bowl, pop it in the microwave for a couple minutes and voila, done! Except somewhere between hungry and distracted, my teenager somehow forgot the water. A couple of minutes later we had less of a quick meal and more of a small campfire inside the microwave. Thankfully nobody got hurt and the house survived — though it smelled like smoke for a few days.

Here’s the thing: my teen wasn’t prone to be careless. They just missed a step. It was a classic case of human error. Most of the time human error isn’t laziness or incompetence — it’s a smart, capable person moving fast and skipping something small that sometimes turns out to be a big deal.

In Asana, one of the most common versions of ‘human error’ is a task getting marked complete when it shouldn’t be, or stalling out because nobody knew what to do with it next. That’s where a feature a lot of people don’t even realize exists can help: task types. A task type lets you control what happens when someone needs to handoff or finish a task — including giving them options rather than just marking the task complete.

Where Task Types Earn Their Keep

Reference tasks. Some tasks aren’t meant to be done — they hold information. A statement of work, an SOP, contact info for a key stakeholder. The trouble is that anything with a “mark complete” checkbox could accidentally get marked complete, and if your project filters by incomplete tasks (which I usually recommend), that reference task vanishes right when someone needs it. A reference task type swaps the complete button for a set of options that easily keep the task in place. No more disappearing content.

Handoff tasks. A single task often needs to travel through stages, and sometimes across people. Think of a maintenance ticket: scheduled, in progress, on hold, then resolved. Or a lease renewal moving from notice sent, to terms negotiated, to signed. A handoff task type lets you walk one task through all of those stages, with some options keeping it open and the final one marking it complete. Pair it with a rule or two and the task can even reassign itself to the next person automatically. Again, the value of this is the task doesn’t get prematurely marked complete. It’s active and in-motion until all handoffs are finished.

Custom approval tasks. Asana has a native approval task, but it lives on the higher paid tiers (Advanced & Enterprise) — and it comes with a quirk that sometimes drives people a little crazy: when someone requests changes, Asana marks the task complete, so it disappears. A custom approval task type (something you can build on the Starter tier) lets you build the approval flow that makes sense for your situation. You decide which responses keep the task open and which close it out. Whether you’re working around the paid tier limit or just the disappearing-task problem, it’s a clean and easy fix.

Setting Up a Task Type

Building a task type is pretty straightforward. Head to the Customize button inside a project and look for the Task Type option, give your task type a name, then set your options: the active ones that keep a task incomplete, and the done ones that mark it complete. One thing worth keeping in mind — task types are globally available across your whole organization once they’re created. So be strategic with naming and your options, since you (and everyone else) will see them show up in other projects.

Go ahead and give it a quick try right now!

Questions about optimizing your projects and workflows in Asana? Drop me a line!

Image courtesy of truhomereo on Pixabay.