“We already pay for Asana. Why would we buy something else?”
It’s a fair question, and we’d ask it too. You’ve just read Traction , your leadership team is bought in, and you’re staring down another subscription before you’ve run a single Level 10 Meeting. Meanwhile there’s a perfectly good project tool sitting there that your team already opens forty times a day.
Most of the answers you’ll find online come from someone with a stake in the outcome. Agencies who configure project tools will tell you it works beautifully. EOS platforms will tell you it’s doomed. Neither is quite right.
Here’s what we’ll cover: how to actually build the EOS tools inside Asana, ClickUp, and Monday.com, which components hold up and which don’t, and the three places the workaround quietly charges you. We ran EOS at our previous company on Google Sheets, OneNote, and email chains for years before we built software, so we know which parts rot first. We also sync with all three of these tools, which means we have no particular need for you to abandon yours.
EOS has six components. A project tool covers some of them cleanly, some badly, and a couple not at all.
The pattern is consistent: anything that looks like a task with an owner and a date maps over fine. Anything that depends on a weekly rhythm or a facilitated conversation does not.
EOS tool How well it maps What you get Rocks Well Projects or goals with owners, due dates, and an on-track field To-Dos Very well This is literally what these tools are built for Issues list Reasonably A list with priority and status fields, moved through stages V/TO Poorly Becomes a static document that goes stale after the planning session Accountability Chart Poorly A doc or whiteboard nobody revisits between quarters Scorecard Badly No native concept of a weekly measurable with a target and an owner Level 10 Meeting Not at all No timer, no segue, no rating, no structured IDS
That last row is the one people underestimate. You can put an agenda in a project tool. You can’t put a meeting in one.
Tiffany Keegan, a fractional integrator who has built this setup for real, got further than most people expect. At a self-implemented company whose stated goal was keeping software costs low, she found the ceiling:
“They were already on Asana, so I did some research and figured I could build out about 90% of what I needed right there. I built our Level 10 Meetings in Asana, created People Analyzer templates in Google Sheets, and ran our quarterlies and annuals out of Asana too. It worked, and I loved being able to assign a To-Do straight out of a meeting.” — Tiffany Keegan, Fractional Integrator and Founder, Fox Ops
Ninety percent, and it worked. Worth noting where the other ten went: the People Analyzer ended up in Google Sheets. Hold that thought.
Setting up EOS in Asana Asana handles the task-shaped parts of EOS with very little fighting.
Rocks. Create one project per quarter, with each Rock as a task owned by a single person. Add a custom field for on-track status with three options — on track, off track, done. Use a board view so the whole leadership team can see status at a glance.
Rock review. A separate project that pulls Rocks together for the weekly look. This is the piece Tiffany found most useful, because assigning a To-Do out of a live meeting is Asana’s native strength.
Issues. A list with custom fields for priority and IDS stage. During the meeting you sort by priority and work down.
L10 agenda. Build the agenda as a task template and set it to recur weekly. Each agenda item becomes a subtask.
Scorecard. This is where you’ll stall. Asana has no weekly-measurable concept, so you’ll either maintain a linked spreadsheet or build a portfolio dashboard that approximates one. Most teams end up with the spreadsheet.
The Asana community has a long-running thread on this that’s genuinely useful if you want other practitioners’ configurations.
Setting up EOS in ClickUp ClickUp is the most configurable of the three, which cuts both ways.
Structure. Create a Leadership Space, then folders for Vision, Rocks, Issues, and Meetings. Getting the hierarchy right at the start saves rework later.
V/TO. A ClickUp Doc inside the Vision folder. Your Accountability Chart can live as a Doc or Whiteboard alongside it.
Scorecard. A List where each row is a measurable, with custom fields for owner, target, and weekly actual. Table view gives you something close to a real scorecard, and a dashboard on top gives you the trend view.
Issues. A folder with lists per department, statuses moving through open, in discussion, and solved.
L10. A task template with the agenda as subtasks, recurring weekly.
ClickUp gets closest to a working Scorecard of the three. The cost is that someone has to own the build and keep it current as the team changes. That someone is almost always your Integrator.
Setting up EOS in Monday.com Monday.com ‘s board model fits the weekly rhythm reasonably well, and we do have at least one die-hard Monday.com fan on our team, though he did eventually give into the siren song of Strety Projects . The setup is not so different from other project management software setups for EOS.
Scorecard board. One row per measurable, one column per week, with owner and target columns. Monday’s formula and status columns give you visual on-track indicators without much work.
Rocks board. Group by quarter, one item per Rock, with owner, due date, and status.
Issues board. Items with a status column tracking IDS progress.
L10 board. Groups matching agenda sections, with automations to reset it weekly.
There are partner-built template suites and Monday-native EOS apps if you’d rather not build from scratch. Some are free, some come bundled with consulting hours. We’d suggest looking at what’s on offer before spending a weekend building boards.
What it actually costs you None of these setups collapse. That’s the part most of the advice gets wrong. You build it, it works, and then it charges you rent in three places.
The last ten percent spills You’ll get Rocks, To-Dos, Issues, and an agenda inside the tool. The Scorecard and People Analyzer end up somewhere else — usually a spreadsheet.
At that point you’re running two systems and calling it one. Tiffany’s setup ended exactly here: Level 10 Meetings and quarterlies in Asana, People Analyzer templates in Google Sheets. The setup worked, but it added a layer of maintenance and complexity that makes your life harder — not the goal of EOS!
You now own a maintenance layer Somebody has to build the configuration, teach the team to use it, and keep it accurate as people and priorities change. Suzy Joeckel, an EOS Implementer who has also held the fractional Integrator seat, watched a client take this on with spreadsheets:
“I had a client that decided to do their whole EOS implementation in Google Sheets. You can. But now you have to manage the Google Sheet. You have to govern it, teach people how to use it, and you’ve added another layer of management on top of the thing.” — Suzy Joeckel, Professional EOS Implementer and Fractional Integrator
When a To-Do gets archived without being done, or a Scorecard number gets revised, a general project tool gives you no meaningful record of who did what to your operating system.
Suzy has used most of the tools in this space and built a business inside one of them, so she’s not arguing from the sidelines:
“The more tools you have, the more hot water you get into if you’re not teaching the team how to use them together.”
Without transparency, shadow systems become the norm When tools get too annoying, or don’t fill the gaps people need to, people start working with their own tools and systems. (It’s the nightmare of IT departments and leaders alike.) It’s so hard to detect because oftentimes, they’ll then hand-carry pieces of it into whatever the company officially uses. Suzy ran this pattern for years (but as an approved contractor, don’t sic your IT gal on her):
“All my 1:1s, my People Analyzer notes, every leadership thing I had to track lived in my personal Trello. Then I’d transfer pieces of it into whatever tool the company I was working with was using. So I had this whole shadow system running in my head and in Trello, just to keep my own integrator work organized.”
This is obviously a much bigger problem if it’s an internal integrator or employee doing the same thing. Once a shadow system exists, your operating system has stopped being the single place the team looks. And the transfer work is pure overhead. Harvard Business Review studied 137 workers across 20 teams at three Fortune 500 companies and found they toggled between applications roughly 1,200 times a day, losing just under four hours a week simply reorienting themselves — about 9% of their working time.
Four hours a week is a Rock’s worth of capacity, spent on nothing.
So when do you move from project management software to EOS software? It isn’t a headcount. Teams keep waiting for a number, and the number never arrives.
The moment is when the upkeep costs more than the subscription saved. Tiffany didn’t leave Asana because it broke:
“I think Asana is a great platform. But then I realized: everything I’m using Asana for, I can do in Strety. So one day I just cut everything over and cut Asana out, and it was actually way better.
The less software I have to open, the better. It’s just going to make me more efficient — less clicking, easier for our brains than going to this system and then that system.”
She ran both side by side for about a month before deciding. That’s a reasonable way to test it.
The hybrid path You also don’t have to make an all-in choice between your project tool and an EOS software. A lot of teams we work with run both, deliberately.
Project execution stays where your team already works. Strety Projects are awesome, but they’re deliberately more lightweight than what you could build in a legacy project management software. For specialized teams like construction firms, or people who need all the project management bells and whistles those platforms have, we definitely don’t recommend trying to squeeze a complex workflow into a simple project tool.
That being said, you can still move the operating cadence — the weekly meeting, the Scorecard, Rocks, the Issues list — into EOS software built for that job, provided that the software integrates with your run-the-business tool. Then the two talk to each other, so a To-Do created in a Level 10 shows up on the board your team already uses, and progress flows back without anyone retyping it.
We built two-way sync with Asana, ClickUp, and Monday.com , along with specialized platforms like ConnectWise, Autotask, Procore, and Microsoft Planner and To Do for exactly this reason. Your Integrator stops being a courier between systems, and nobody has to give up the tool they like.
For context on the cost, Strety runs around $13 per user per month with every integration included, and the trial is 30 days. Compare that against the hours your Integrator currently spends maintaining boards and spreadsheets and transferring items and pressing “CMD-C, CMD-V” every day.
Rebuilding the L10 as a checklist. The agenda isn’t the meeting. Without a timer and a real IDS segment, your Level 10 becomes a status update — the exact thing EOS exists to eliminate.
Letting the V/TO go stale. If nobody has opened it since the last planning session, it’s an artifact. A living V/TO gets referenced in the weekly meeting.
Waiting for a crisis. Most teams move after a bad quarter. The three costs above show up a full quarter earlier than the bad numbers do. Watch for the spreadsheet appearing beside your project tool — that’s the early signal.
Frequently asked questions Can you run EOS in Asana? Mostly. Asana handles Rocks, To-Dos, and an Issues list well, but it has no native Scorecard with weekly targets and no timed L10 agenda with a structured IDS flow. Those you build and maintain yourself.
Does ClickUp have an EOS template? There’s no official template from EOS Worldwide, though community and agency versions exist. ClickUp’s custom fields and dashboards can be configured into a workable Scorecard and Rock tracker with real setup time.
What’s the best tool for Level 10 Meetings? Whichever one your team opens on a Monday morning without being reminded. A general project tool can hold the agenda, but it can’t run the meeting.
Can you run EOS without dedicated EOS software? Yes. Plenty of teams run EOS well for a couple of quarters — and some dedicated people even longer — on spreadsheets or a project tool. If you’re still deciding whether EOS is right for you, our free EOS implementation template will get you through your first few meetings without spending anything.
When should we switch from a project tool to EOS software? When the Scorecard stops getting updated without reminders, when a spreadsheet appears alongside your project tool, or when someone on the leadership team starts keeping their own private tracker.
Is it cheaper to run EOS in a project tool we already pay for? On the subscription line, yes. Once you count setup, ongoing maintenance, and the time lost moving items between systems, the gap narrows fast.
Do we have to give up our project management tool? No. Two-way sync keeps EOS To-Dos and project tasks connected, so execution stays where your team works while the operating cadence lives somewhere built for it.
Where to start If you’re evaluating this honestly, run one test on your current setup. Look back at last quarter and ask whether the Scorecard got updated every single week without anyone chasing it. If it did, your project tool is carrying more of EOS than most, and you should keep going.
If it didn’t, the heavy maintenance layer is starting to drag your implementation down. As Suzy puts it:
“The tools don’t fail your company. Teams fail because they don’t operationalize the tools consistently.”
Building a workable EOS setup in Asana, ClickUp, or Monday.com is absolutely possible. Just count the maintenance before you commit to it, because that cost lands on your Integrator, and their time is often the scarcest and most valuable thing you have.
If you’d rather not build and govern it yourself, try Strety free for 30 days — no credit card required. Keep the project tool you like is Strety Projects aren’t your cup of tea. We’ll connect to it. If you’re actively evaluating EOS software, check out what your fellow integrators say about Ninety vs Strety here .
