Beyond complete & incomplete: Move your tasks through any process or workflow with Sections

Editor’s note: We’ve made some updates since this post was published. You can now search by Sections.

The life of a task is often more complicated than incomplete to complete–many Tasks go through multiple stages, follow a specific workflow, or go through a unique process. For example, if you’re using Asana for an editorial calendar, each article may move from idea, to a draft, to review, to approved, to published. Or, if you’re using Asana for recruiting, applicants may progress from resume received, to phone screen, to first-round interview, to second-round interview, to hired.

Priority headings are now Section Headings

We’ve created a way to accommodate tasks that follow a specific process or workflow, while maintaining the simplicity and flexibility of Asana: Sections. Many Asana users were already taking advantage of priority headings to represent steps in a process, so rather than introduce an entirely new way of setting up your processes in Asana, we just made priority headings more powerful. Since these headings are now useful for more than just priorities, we’ve renamed them “Sections”.

How to set up Sections

Sections are used within projects to group tasks into stages, steps, priorities, milestones or any way that helps you manage your processes and workflows. You can create a Section from the “New” menu at the top of any Project, or to speed things up, just end a task name with a colon in the center pane (the same way you created priority headings in the past).

When a task reaches the next stage or step in the process, moving tasks to the appropriate Section is simple. Now, at the top of the task details, you’ll see the task’s current Section and can click on the Section name to move the task along. A blog post draft I’ve just reviewed can be moved quickly to “Reviewed” and assigned to the next editor. After a few more Section moves, the post will be published and the task can be checked complete.

Tasks can also be multi-selected. So, engineers who need to triage multiple bugs quickly can move several bugs at once from reviewed to verified to resolved, and sales teams can easily pass multiple leads to qualified leads to contacted.

The future of Sections

Sections are just a first step towards accommodating any process or workflow, look for more new features soon. Learn more about Sections on the Asana guide.