Asana Content Calendar: Workflows and Automations (2026)

Before we jump in: You can get your free Asana content calendar template here.

Asana’s content calendar template is good but quite simplistic. If you want something more opinionated our Asana template might be for you. Fast to get started. Easy to adapt.

• Why Content Calendars Drive Predictable Marketing Results
• Is Asana The Only Content Calendar Tool?
  • Essential Asana Features for Content Teams
• How to Set Up Your Asana Editorial Content Calendar
  • Step 1: Model Your Content Creation Workflow
  • Step 2: Configure Tasks and Subtasks for Each Content Piece
  • Step 3: Implement Strategic Content Tagging
  • Step 4: Set Up Due Dates and Publishing Schedules
  • Step 5: Master Calendar View for Content Planning
  • Starter and Advanced Features That Scale Content Operations
• Complete Asana Content Calendar Template Breakdown
• Download the Asana Content Calendar Template
• How to Customize Your Asana Content Calendar System

Why Content Calendars Drive Predictable Marketing Results

A content calendar turns reactive publishing into a planned, repeatable system. It makes the entire content creation process visible so nothing falls through the cracks, and it gives the rest of your organization a clear view of what has shipped and what is coming next.

Using a content calendar consistently adds predictability. It sets the foundation for steady content production. With the right SEO optimizations in place, that consistency turns into predictable traffic and predictable leads. This is the cornerstone of a content marketing strategy. Read our high-level post on the benefits of content calendars here.

Draft.dev Insight: In our 2026 Developer Marketing Survey, 51% of developer marketing teams are increasing investment in content marketing and SEO this year. Yet 42% of teams using vendors outsource content creation because internal teams are capacity-constrained. A structured content calendar is how you manage that volume, whether the work happens in-house or with external writers.

Is Asana The Only Content Calendar Tool?

There are many tools for managing a content calendar. We wrote about how to set up a content calendar with Trello and how to set up a content calendar with Airtable. Asana is a project management platform with all the components for a strong content calendar, and its 2026 feature set makes it particularly suited to teams that need structured workflows with built-in approvals.

Choose Asana if your team needs approval gates, subtask dependencies, and reporting dashboards.

Choose Trello if your team prefers a simpler Kanban-only approach with minimal overhead.

Choose Airtable if you need database-style filtering and custom views across large content inventories.

Essential Asana Features for Content Teams (2026)

• Board and list views with customizable sections to model your content creation process
• Calendar and Timeline views for publication scheduling and deadline tracking
• Collaboration tools including tasks, subtasks, task owners, due dates, comments, and @mentions
• Task templates (Starter plan) for standardized content workflows across content types
• Automation rules (Starter plan, unlimited on Starter+) to auto-assign subtasks, move tasks, and trigger notifications
• Forms (Starter plan) to collect content ideas from stakeholders through publicly available intake forms
• Dashboards and reporting to assess process performance and identify bottlenecks
• AI features (Starter plan, 1,500 AI actions/month): smart task summaries, status updates, and workflow suggestions
• AI Teammates (Advanced/Enterprise, launched early 2026): prebuilt collaborative agents for content production, campaign management, and intake triage

How to Set Up Your Asana Editorial Content Calendar

Step 1: Model Your Content Creation Workflow

Start from idea to content being written, published, and promoted. Set up “sections” on the “Board” view of your project. Each section is a content creation stage, e.g. content backlog, preparation, editing, promoting, etc. Each section shows the status of the card as it moves through the process.

Content Creation Workflow Stages:

1. Content Backlog – Prioritized content ideas with keyword research
2. Preparation – Content briefs, writer assignments, and resource gathering
3. Writing – First drafts through final revisions
4. Editing – Copy editing, SEO optimization, and fact-checking
5. Scheduling – CMS upload, meta data, and publication timing
6. Scheduled – Final review before automated publishing
7. Published – Live content ready for promotion
8. Promoting – Multi-channel distribution and amplification
9. Done – Performance tracking and optimization insights

Step 2: Configure Tasks and Subtasks for Each Content Piece

Each content piece is a task on the board. Each task will live in a section of your board. Each task will have all the necessary information to move it through the process.

Each content piece has sub-tasks to show what needs to be done. Be clear on what you expect to get done at each stage. Disassociate planning from execution. That aligns the team and removes any hesitation when it comes to doing the things.

Step 3: Implement Strategic Content Tagging

Use tags to define content categories, content types, etc. Tags are great to define content types, content channels, and content funnel stages. For example:

Content Classification Tags:

• Content Types: “Article”, “Ebook”, “Case Study”, “Video”, “Infographic”
• Funnel Stages: “TOFU”, “MOFU”, “BOFU”
• Distribution Channels: “Newsletter”, “LinkedIn”, “Blog”, “Webinar”
• Priority Levels: “High Priority”, “Standard”, “Evergreen”

This allows you to quickly see what articles or ebooks are being worked on or planned.

Step 4: Set Up Due Dates and Publishing Schedules

Who doesn’t love due dates? It enables your team to coordinate around the most urgent tasks. It ensures content keeps moving through the process efficiently.

Step 5: Master Calendar View for Content Planning

Use the calendar view to see when content will be published. Seeing when content will be published is great for finding opportunities for co-promotion and distribution.

Calendar View Benefits:

• Content clustering for maximum SEO impact
• Launch coordination with product releases and campaigns
• Competitive timing awareness to avoid conflicts
• Seasonal planning for holidays and industry events

Starter and Advanced Features That Scale Content Operations

Approvals (Starter+)

Add approval gates at transition points in your workflow. For example, require content manager sign-off before a task moves from Editing to Scheduling. Approvals create a formal record of who reviewed what and when, which matters for teams with compliance requirements or external stakeholders.

Automation Rules (Starter+, unlimited)

Automate repetitive handoffs: auto-assign subtasks when a task moves to a new section, notify the editor when a draft enters Editing, or flag tasks that have been in one section for more than 5 business days. Asana’s Starter plan includes unlimited automation rules (previously capped on the old Premium plan).

Forms (Starter+)

Collect content ideas through publicly shareable intake forms that feed directly into your Content Backlog section. Each submission becomes a task with pre-filled fields, reducing manual data entry from stakeholders who do not use Asana daily.

Dashboards (Starter+)

Built-in dashboards visualize process performance: tasks completed per week, average time in each section, and bottleneck identification. Use these to spot stages where content consistently stalls.

Asana AI (Starter+, new in 2026)

Asana’s AI features include smart task summaries, automated status updates, and workflow optimization suggestions. On the Starter plan, teams get 1,500 AI actions per month. For content calendars, the most useful AI feature is auto-generated project status updates that pull from task activity across the board.

AI Teammates (Advanced/Enterprise, new in 2026)

Asana launched AI Teammates in early 2026: prebuilt collaborative agents that handle complex, multi-step workflows. For content teams, the most relevant prebuilt agents cover content production and campaign management. These agents can draft intake summaries, triage incoming content requests, and flag at-risk deadlines, all within the Asana interface with human checkpoints at each step.

Draft.dev Insight: Our 2026 Developer Marketing Survey found that 85% of developer marketing teams use AI for content ideation and drafting, but only 7% find it “very useful.” Asana’s AI features fill a different gap: they handle the project management overhead (status updates, bottleneck detection, intake triage) that content-focused AI tools do not touch. Automating these handoffs lets your team spend more time on the creative work that requires human judgment.

Complete Asana Content Calendar Template Breakdown

The content calendar template comes as a .csv that you can upload during project creation. This will prepopulate your board with the main content creation stages as outlined below.

Content creation process modeled in the template

• Content Backlog: This is where all your content ideas go. It’s a prioritized list of content ideas. If you are using Asana Starter (formerly Premium), you can use the “Form” feature to collect content ideas from stakeholders.
• Preparation: This is where you get your content ready to be worked on. Write a content brief. Assign a due date. Find and identify a writer. Hand it off to writers. Giving enough context to writers reduced revisions at a later stage.
• Writing: This is where content gets written. From a first draft to feedback rounds to a finished article ready for editing.
• Editing: At this stage, the content gets refined and made ready for publishing. From proofreading to copyediting to SEO optimizations to adding links and so on.
• Scheduling: We have the final content piece. Now we need to get it ready for publishing. This includes creating design assets, adding them to the CMS, and scheduling for publishing.
• Scheduled: Everything is prepared. The content is just waiting to be published.
• Published: Content is published and ready to be promoted.
• Promoting: Content is actively promoted via defined channels.
• Done: Time to party and celebrate yet another content piece going live.

It also includes:

• A how-to-get-started guide.
• A template task for content pieces, ready for you to copy and adapt.
• Predefined sub-tasks on the template task for easy adaptation.

Download the Asana Content Calendar Template

When Asana Stops Working for Content Teams

Asana handles structured content workflows well, but it has ceilings. Here are the signals that you may need a different tool or a more complex Asana setup:

Content-specific metadata. Asana tasks support custom fields (Starter+), but they are not built for content-specific metadata like target keyword, word count, SEO score, or CMS status. Teams that track 10+ data points per content piece often find Airtable’s database-style fields more natural.

Freelancer access friction. The free Personal plan supports up to 10 members. Starter adds unlimited guest access, but guests see the full project, not just their assigned tasks. Teams managing 5+ external writers sometimes prefer Trello’s simpler single-board guest permissions.

Cross-project visibility. If you run separate Asana projects for blog content, email campaigns, social media, and video production, seeing a unified content calendar across all four requires the Advanced plan’s Portfolio feature ($24.99/user/month). On Starter, each project is a silo.

Database-level reporting. Asana dashboards show task-level metrics (completed, overdue, by section). They do not natively report on content performance metrics (traffic, conversions, engagement). For performance tracking, you will need a separate analytics layer or an Airtable/Notion setup that connects to your analytics tools.

How to Customize Your Asana Content Calendar System

Add Context To Your Content Strategy

Include essential context in your project overview page:

• Provide information about your target audience
• Provide links to content goals, cadence, channels, etc.
• Provide playbooks to align across your team on how to best get certain tasks done.

Essential Content Calendar Resources:

• Content plan
• Content brief
• Keyword audit and topic clusters
• How to optimize images
• Promotion checklist

Adapt the Workflow to Your Team

Customize these elements:

• Adapt the sections to fit your specific workflow
• Modify the subtasks on the Template Task for your content types
• Adjust timeline estimates based on your team’s capacity and quality standards

Make the template your own. Have everything you need to publish great content predictably. A well-prioritized backlog with excellent content ideas relevant to your audience. Know the status of each content piece as it moves through its creation process. Get full visibility of what content will be published and when. Identify opportunities for co-promotion and distribution.

A well-organized content calendar is one of the core building blocks of a predictable and scalable content engine.