By Ali Demirci, founder of Woofocus · October 24, 2026 · 6 min readWhat we read
Woofocus is a small web studio. We have run client work in Asana for years, and in October 2026, before writing much of Proofyard, we wanted to know what the team actually did in it all day. So on 5 October 2026 we ran three read-only passes over our workspace through the Asana API:
- Task fields for the 1,231 tasks changed since April 2026 (611 open, 620 completed).
- Activity: 5,616 history entries on 280 tasks. The numbers below use the last 90 days, which leaves 2,709 actions by people on 264 tasks.
- Structure: 28 active projects, 34 archived ones, the fields, the portfolios and the members.
The whole workspace holds about 7,000 tasks. Five people work in it, and there are no clients in it at all: we reach clients by email, Telegram and BugHerd.
Which of these sounds like your studio?
What we counted Due-date changes, and which way they moved
868 changes in 90 days, 756 of them later.
- How
- Every due-date change in Asana's history, compared with the date before it
- Check yours
- The first number in the health check
Due dates: moved often, and almost always later
The single most common thing anyone did in our Asana was change a due date.
- 868due-date changes in 90 days
- 756pushed later, against 3 pulled earlier
- 5 daysthe median push
- 92%made on or after the old due date
92% of those changes were made on or after the old due date. That is not planning ahead. It is rolling late work forward, usually in batches: on Monday and Wednesday evenings, often after 22:00, up to 45 in one sitting. One task was moved 83 times.
The dates themselves told the same story. On the day of the read, 54% of open tasks with a date were overdue, by a median of 7 days, and 57% of completed tasks had been finished after their due date.
I should say who did the moving: me. 92% of the due-date changes were mine, and I made 71% of all actions in the workspace. A lot of this is one founder's habit of keeping a list honest by hand, which is part of the point. It is work, and none of it is design or development.
Hand-offs after a question
The second pattern is about hand-offs. In the same 90 days there were 418 assignments and 414 comments, and 54% of reassignments came within two minutes of a comment by the same person.
- 418assignments in 90 days
- 414comments in the same 90 days
- 54%of reassignments came within 2 minutes of a comment by the same person
- 43tasks changed hands four or more times
Read the tasks and the reason is plain. Someone has a question, writes it in a comment, and hands the task to the person who can answer, because in Asana that is the surest way to be seen. The answer comes back the same way. Most of the traffic ran between me and each of the other four, in both directions, and 43 tasks changed hands four times or more.
Where the actions went
All 2,709 actions by people, by kind:
| What people did | Share of actions |
|---|---|
| Change a due date | 32% |
| Assign or reassign | 15% |
| Comment | 15% |
| Add or remove a "blocked by" link | about 7% |
| Complete a task | 5% |
| Add a task to another project | 5% |
| Change the Priority or Phases field | 5% |
| Rename | 3% |
| Duplicate | 3% |
| Move to another section | 1% |
| Attach a file | 0.3% |
Dates, hand-offs and comments make up more than 60% of everything. Completing a task is 5%. The "blocked by" links were mostly not dependencies either: we used them to park tasks for a catch-up call with one person and removed them after the call.
An Asana rule also posted 75 reminder comments in those 90 days. They are not in the table, because a rule wrote them, not a person.
What we hardly used
Some of what we paid for sat still. Across the workspace we found one task with a tag, one milestone (from 2023), no real Asana approvals, no goals, one portfolio with no updates, and four project status updates ever, none since April 2026. Start dates were set on 0.1% of tasks and due times on 0.7%. Sections were barely used: 43% of tasks sat in "Untitled section". Our workflow lived in a Phases field and in reassigning, not in board columns.
None of this means those features are bad. It means a studio our size did not reach for them, and we did not rebuild them.
How we counted
We read Asana's own history of each task (its "stories") and counted three kinds:
- A due-date change is a story of the type
due_date_changed. It counts as pushed later when the new date is after the old one and pulled earlier when it is before. The median push is the middle value of the days moved, over the changes that moved a date later. A change counts as made late when it happened on or after the old due date. - An assignment is a story of the type
assigned. On each task, every assignment after the first is a reassignment. - A hand-off after a comment is a reassignment made by someone who had written a comment on the same task in the two minutes before it.
"Tasks that changed hands four times or more" counts tasks with at least four assignments in the window. The 90 days end on the day of the read. Actions by rules and integrations are left out of the shares.
The free health check uses these definitions on one project at a time, so you can compare your numbers with ours.
What these numbers cannot tell you
- It is one studio. 5 people, one workspace, 90 days. Your agency may work nothing like ours.
- It is mostly one person. With 71% of actions mine, the numbers say as much about how I use Asana as about Asana.
- Two minutes is a rule of thumb. A reassignment soon after a comment is not always a question passed on. We did not check each one by hand.
- The history is Asana's. Anything Asana does not record as a story (a date discussed on a call, a task handed over in chat) is not here.
- Counts are not a grade. A busy project moves. The question is how much of the moving a person has to do by hand.
What we changed because of it
Each number turned into something we built:
- Dates move with one key on any row, and a task pushed three times or more shows how often on its row.
- Hand off is one step: the note, the new owner and the date together. You can also ask a person a question without handing the task over.
- Clients review from a link without an account, since they were never in our Asana anyway.
- We built no goals or portfolios. Approval is a phase in each project's flow.
How these work in Proofyard is on the smart actions page and in the Asana comparison, which also says where Asana is the better choice. What it costs per person is on our pricing page.
Run the same count on your projects
The Asana health check is free and needs no account. Paste a personal access token, pick a project, and it reads up to 400 tasks changed in the last 90 days. It only reads, and the token is not stored. You get your due-date changes, how many were pushed later, the hand-offs right after a comment, and the tasks that bounced four times or more.
If your numbers look like ours, the AI for web design agencies piece is about where that time can go instead.
Sources
- Woofocus Asana workspace, last 90 days, read through the Asana API on 5 October 2026. Three read-only passes; nothing was written to Asana.
- The workspace's size (about 7,000 tasks): Woofocus Asana workspace, read 3 October 2026.
- The counting rules: the health check's code, which uses the same definitions.