The Asana app is a powerful project management tool used by over 1.5 million users across busy teams worldwide to track milestones, stay on top of projects, create product roadmaps, and assign task work. Popular for its intuitive design and massive scope across marketing, product, and sales operations, Asana offers a one-stop destination for almost everything your team needs to manage their work and hit your goals. But, the one element missing is how to balance a massive task list without enough time in your busy schedule to get it all done. 

Across the board, 78.7% of professionals are experiencing stress from increasing task loads and not enough time in the week to keep up. But being busy - even to the point of being overworked - is not the same thing as being productive. Your workweeks may be getting overrun with unproductive meetings, countless hours of shallow work, management responsibilities, excessive context switching, all while trying to accommodate other people’s priorities, leaving you with very few, and scattered, opportunities to fit in the actual task work required for your role. Time blocking tasks on your calendar allows you to defend dedicated focus time for heads down work on your priorities, so you can bridge the gap between all your work outlined in Asana, and your actual availability every week. 

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through how to automatically block time for your Asana projects and tasks right in Google Calendar via Reclaim.ai so you and your team can start prioritizing task work on the calendar. 

What are the benefits of integrating Asana with Google Calendar?

With the mission to let you ‘work on big ideas, without the busywork’ – Asana has created a platform to centralize all of your team's workflows in one place so that everyone is up to speed on what’s happening and when. 

But when your task list and your availability for the week don’t align, you risk not only falling behind on project deadlines, but feeling stressed out and overrun, or even mentally exhausted if the cycle continues. 

Here are some key task management stats from Asana users:

• Individual contributor users at Asana average 3.7 hours/day on task work.
• But only 2.0 hours/day on productive task work, and 1.8 hours/day on unproductive tasks
• Asana users complete 51.9% of planned tasks each week vs. 53.5% industry average.
• 28.6% of managers using Asana average more than 4 hours/day on task work.
• On average across Asana users, managers spend 5.1 hours/week assigning, prioritizing, and reprioritizing work for their team.
• Managers using Asana want to defend 8.4 additional hours/week for each member of their team to focus on task work.

If you’re not already using time blocking to boost your productivity (by up to 80%!) – now is the time to start. Time blocking is, quite literally, segmenting your days into blocks of time dedicated to individual tasks. Simply schedule everything that you have to get done in your calendar – like focus time for any important tasks like writing a strategy doc, debugging an issue, or prepping a sales report before their deadlines, and even time block priority Habits like taking a daily lunch break or getting your workout in. 

By integrating your Asana app with Google Calendar, you can make time for all of your tasks around your busy schedule, by priority, to get more done every week.

Here are top benefits of integrating your Asana task list with Google Calendar: 

• Defend time to work on your tasks
• Improve planning across your team
• Limit decision paralysis
• Ensure tasks and projects are completed before their deadlines
• Minimize time wasted via context switching
• Improve your capacity planning
• Defend your schedule from unnecessary meetings

Ready to upgrade your weekly planning by integrating Asana with Google Calendar? Let’s walk through how to schedule your Asana tasks right to your calendar to automatically block the time you need for your projects before they’re due.

How to integrate Asana & Google Calendar

Let’s walk through how to get set up with the Asana Google Calendar integration via Reclaim.ai – a smart calendar tool that automatically finds the best time for your tasks, routines, breaks, and 1:1 meetings through flexible time blocking. The integration works by syncing your connected Asana project tasks to your Reclaim Task list, and from there, auto-schedules them in Google Calendar, by priority, around your existing calendar events. 

Here is the step-by-step guide to enabling the Asana and Google Calendar integration via Reclaim:

1. Sign up at Reclaim.ai (if you haven’t already).
2. Connect Asana in Reclaim: In Settings > Integrations, enable the Asana integration in Reclaim by clicking the “Connect Asana” button, and confirm permissions in Asana.
3. Select the projects to sync via Reclaim: Next, choose the Asana projects you want to sync, and click “Next”.You can sync new projects anytime in Asana by clicking the "Customize" button in the top right of the project, and then adding Reclaim from the app section (under “Made by Developers”).
4. Schedule your Asana tasks in Google Calendar: To sync a task via Reclaim select the Asana task, and click the "Schedule via Reclaim" button. A popup window will appear where you can add an Earliest Scheduled Date, a Time Estimate, and whether to schedule during your work hours or personal hours (which can be adjusted in Reclaim). Reclaim will now automatically schedule time for your Asana task in Google Calendar based on your selected preferences. Note: If you do not specify a Time Estimate or an Assignee, Reclaim will schedule time for the task based on your Default Task settings and automatically assign the task to you.    
5. Additional integration details: Reclaim will log your progress both in Asana and Reclaim based on the task status in Asana, and the completed time scheduled on your calendar. The integration is also multidirectional, so if you mark a synced Asana task as “done” in Reclaim, it will also be marked as “done” in Asana, and vice versa. If marked completed in Asana, Reclaim will remove any future time blocks for the task automatically from your calendar! You can also easily reschedule your tasks by dragging-and-dropping them to a new time/date in the Reclaim Planner or in Google Calendar, and the task details will be automatically updated across all platforms.
6. Invite your team: Invite your team so they can integrate their Asana projects with Google Calendar, and get more accomplished every week, together.

Check out the Asana Integration Overview help doc for more information on getting started and managing your integration settings. 

Asana is a project management gamechanger - no doubt - but if you also want to boost productivity around your time management too, Reclaim will help you get even more out of your workweek. You can integrate all your work apps to sync with Google Calendar, and block time more than just your tasks, but also your regular routines, one-on-one meetings, and even just regular breaks to decompress after video-conferencing meetings. 

Get more done

And just like that, your Asana workflow is elevated and auto-scheduling to Google Calendar so you can get more done, in less time, every week.

This integration has been highly anticipated by Reclaim users, and we hope this walkthrough helps you get set up and maximizes your productivity via Asana and Google Calendar. Tweet us at @reclaimai to let us know how the Asana integration is working for you, and if you have any questions about getting started.