Feature request: Ability to order "today" list tasks the day before

As someone who uses Asana to organise every aspect of my life, I would love to be able to drag and drop the next day’s tasks into the order I actually want to do them in, and to add anything else that comes to mind, before going to sleep. Asana is hands down the best system I’ve found so far for holistic life-organisation, but the fact that I am forced to wait until the day’s tasks appear in my “Today” list to plan my day is a bit frustrating.

As a professional organiser I help lots of people create a good workflow for their day-to-day, and a piece of (evidence-based) advice I often give them is to “plan tomorrow, today”. Recent research has even shown that writing out a detailed to-do list helps people to fall asleep quicker. (See: https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/01/15/researchers-say-this-5-minute-technique-could-help-you-fall-asleep-more-quickly/ )

A simple solution would be that tasks appear in the “Today” list in the same order as they had in the “Upcoming” list, which would provide the opportunity to order tasks in advance.

Hi Christina,

I might be confused, but I bring things in my Inbox that are due several days from now from my “Upcoming” list into “Today” all the time. And I change the order of items in both lists how I plan to work them as well by dragging them into the order I want. I don’t tend to rely on things from Upcoming moving into Today automatically, but manage it each morning as I prepare my day (there’s nothing stopping me from doing it the evening before however).

Have you tried dragging and dropping? As you hover over a task you’ll see six dots appear to the left of the task on the line. You can grab those and move things around.

Sorry if you’re aware of this already and I’m missing the point. :slight_smile:

Hi Ryan, thanks for you response. Yes, I do the same as you - manage my to-do list each morning.

I could of course move all of tomorrow’s tasks into my “Today” list in the evening - that’s a good point. But searching through the hundred or so tasks sitting in my “Upcoming” list to identify the ones for tomorrow would be a hassle.

I guess I would also (perhaps irrationally) feel frustrated at never having the sense of achievement of seeing my to-do list empty at the end of the day.

I think I may have found a solution that might work for you (it requires knowing some keyboard shortcuts and creating a report)!

So I started with a search that finds all tasks that are:

  • Assigned to me
  • Due tomorrow (or whatever time range I set)
  • Incomplete

I then saved the search as a new report and changed its sort order to “Due Date” and then changed its name to “Due Soon”.

Now you can peruse the list and multi-select the items you want to work on tomorrow (using CTRL and SHIFT clicking) and when you’re happy with the selection, hit TAB+Y and they’ll all be marked for “Today”.

I didn’t realize you could use the keyboard shortcuts from the My Tasks screen anywhere. I was going to suggest a feature request to add the little control from the My Tasks screen that lets you move which section tasks are in, to be available on tasks outside of My Tasks, but the keyboard shortcut is a good workaround.

Let me know what you think or if anything’s confusing.

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Great, I’ll try that. Thanks a bunch!