Most missed deadlines don't happen because you forgot the task. They happen because the task was sitting in a project you didn't open that day.

When your work is spread across six projects, you have six calendars to check. On a low-energy day, you check two of them. And that's how a paying client ends up being the one who reminds you that something was due.

Someone I was recently working with asked me this exact thing. She had my templates and had been through everything, and she still felt like she was missing something. Here's what she was missing, plus the one weird Asana quirk that trips almost everybody up.

There are three ways to get everything into one calendar in Asana. They do different jobs, so I'll show you which one I use for what.

You can either keep reading or watch the video:

1. Make an overview calendar project

Here's the thing most people don't realize. A task in Asana can live in more than one project at the same time. It's the same task, not a copy. You update it in one place and it updates everywhere.

So you make one project that exists only to be your calendar, and you add tasks from your other projects into it.

1. Create a new project and start from blank. Mine is called Marketing Calendar, but call it whatever makes sense for you. If it's all your client stuff, something like Client Deliverables works.

2. Add the Calendar view and mark it as the default. I like month view with weekends showing, so I save that view.

3. Open a task in one of your real projects (I used my Instagram content calendar), hit the plus button where it says Add project, and choose your new calendar project.

The task still lives in its original project. It keeps the attachment, the comments, the description, the due date, everything. And it's also sitting in your calendar project.

If you change the due date in one place, it changes in the other. If you mark it complete in one, it's complete in both. There's no duplicate to forget about, and nothing that makes you do double the work.

Keyboard shortcut: with a task open, press Tab + P to add it to another project. It's handy if you don't see the plus button, or if you just prefer not to click around so much.

Use color coding to see where each task came from

Each task in your calendar project picks up the color of the project it came from. My Instagram project is pink, so my Instagram tasks show up pink. The little blocks beside a task show the other projects it's in, and you can hover over them to see which ones.

In my real Content Marketing Calendar, each color is a different type of content: Pinterest, Instagram, Threads and YouTube. I love the color coding in Asana. It gives me that bird's-eye view and lets me sort everything the way my brain works.

A task needs a due date to show up on the calendar

If you add a task to your calendar project and it's not showing up, this is almost always why. It needs a due date to appear in the calendar view. It will still show up in your other views, just not the calendar.

The catch: subtasks don't show up on project calendars

This is the part that trips a lot of people up, and it's the thing my client was missing.

You can add a subtask, give it a due date, go to the project calendar, and it's not there. It's also one of the most requested features in the Asana community, and it's been requested for years. So if this has confused you, you're very much not alone.

This matters a lot if you work with a VA, because subtasks are usually where the handoffs live: design the graphic, edit the video, schedule the post. Each of those often has its own person and its own due date, and none of them show up on your calendar.

Subtasks do show up in two places:

• My Tasks (if they're assigned to you)

• The team calendar

The team calendar isn't a great place to live, though. It's very cluttered, with every checklist step at once, and for projects with lots of subtasks it gets even more overwhelming. It's technically all there, but you're not going to find anything in a hurry.

Here's what I do instead. If a subtask has a date that really matters, like a client approval or a hard deadline, I add that subtask to my calendar project too, the same way as in step one. Now it shows up with the other things that matter, and all the little stuff stays out of my way.

3. Use the My Tasks calendar

This one takes zero setup. Go to My Tasks and switch to the calendar. Tasks and subtasks assigned to you, from every project and every team, all show up in one calendar.

You can set it to month view, but I find that overwhelming for My Tasks. I just want to know what's going on this week.

The limit is that it only shows your stuff. If you have a VA, you won't see what's on their plate here. For that, you want the calendar project from step one.

Which calendar to use for what

• My Tasks calendar: What do I personally have to handle this week?

• Calendar project: What's going out, what do my clients see, or what is my team doing? This is the one I actually plan from.

• Team calendar: For when I need to dig into something and find something specific.

Bonus for paid plans: add start dates

If you only use due dates, you're only seeing the finish line. On paid plans you can add a start date too, and the task turns into a bar that stretches across the days you're working on it.

I use this for promotions. Right now I'm running a promotion on my Pick-My-Brain sessions, so it spans the whole promotion instead of showing up on just one day. It also means you can see that the client project and the launch emails are both running the same week before it becomes a problem, instead of finding out the night before.

If you're on the free plan, don't worry about this one. Everything else here works on the free plan.

One calendar for the days that don't go to plan

My days don't always go the way I plan them. My daughter's school has called me in the middle of a client day, and I've had to go pick her up while the day kept going around me.

What saves me in those moments isn't a perfect setup. It's being able to open one calendar and see in about 5 seconds what actually has to happen today and what can wait. That's what stops a missed deadline from turning into a lost client.

Want the calendar already built? My Asana System Templates include my whole marketing calendar setup and the projects that feed into it, made for the free plan, with step-by-step walkthroughs.

Get my foundational Asana templates here