Critical path on timeline

Available on Asana Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise+ tiers, as well as legacy tiers Business and Legacy Enterprise.

With critical path, you can quickly identify which tasks are crucial for the completion of your project and visualize them on your timeline view. Critical path will allow you to take note of roadblocks and manage your project’s timeline while providing you with a complete view of your project.

Calculating your project’s critical path

Your project’s critical path is the longest chain of dependent tasks that need to be completed for your project to be finished. However, subtasks are not included when calculating your critical path.

Calculating how long it will take you to complete your project is done through task duration and dependencies between these tasks, including any time gaps.

For example:

• Task B is dependent on Task A
• Task A’s date range is December 1 to December 5
• Task B’s date range is December 10 to December 20

The total time for this path would be 20 days.

To determine your project’s critical path, your project needs:

• Tasks with a due date to detect task duration
• Task dependencies
• The last due task in your project must be dependent on other tasks

Your critical path will vary depending on changes in dependencies and due dates.

Note: Critical path is available to projects with a maximum of 2000 tasks with due dates.

Highlighting your critical path

To visualize your project’s critical path on your timeline view, click on the Timeline tab.

From here, you can:

1. Click on the three dot icon
2. Enable Highlight critical path

Your project’s critical path will be highlighted in yellow.

If you cannot see your critical path right away in your timeline view, scroll to your last due task. If this task has no dependencies, you will only see this task highlighted.

Note: Your critical path won’t be highlighted if the task presents circular dependencies. For example, A is blocking B is blocking C is blocking A.