I’m not sure if this feature has been talked about before, but I didn’t see it while I was scrolling through the forum. We run into an issue a lot where people will assign tasks but there isn’t a good way to decline a task. It’s become kind of a joke in the office where we call it “Assign-a.”
If there was a way to add a way to request a task or decline a task it would be very helpful. 
Hmm, interesting idea. This seems similar to my thread here:
The consensus seems to be that someone who is assigned a task needs to speak up if they have concerns about the assignment or due date. Your suggestion would be helpful to take some of the intimidation away from this back-and-forth, especially for people who assign their superiors or less-close colleagues to tasks.
It seems straightforward enough to have a request become an In Box notification, but there might be a question about how to treat requests while they’re pending, and what happens if someone makes a differing unilateral assignment and then the request is accepted later.
Pain
Anyone can find your ‘My Tasks’ list, and although they can’t view private tasks they can add/edit/delete tasks there. People can also assign anyone to any task with reckless and unabashed power!
Question
Can we instead change this to a ‘request’ that people can then review to either accept or reject?
Potential
This could be part of a dashboard for individuals; rather than other people being able to navigate your ‘My Tasks’ list, they see a dashboard instead, with a vague overview of what your working on and your capacity - as well as being able to make requests. This could be the same for people looking at teams they are not a member of; the team could perhaps create a view for externals (even outside the business…?) which give a controlled window into what they are doing.
Good idea! There is one other thread I know of on this topic:
but it hasn’t gotten any votes and I’m actually surprised there hasn’t been more interest in and discussion of the general idea you raise; that is, a more formal way to request work of someone, and then they have the opportunity to accept, decline, or counteroffer. (There is a whole interesting body of conceptual work on this topic of action-based workflow, but I digress.)
I also like your idea of melding it with some view of peoples’ capacity.
Will be interested to see if anyone else chimes in on this topic.
I think it would add unnecessary complexity. Refusing a task is simply assign it back to the person and explaining why, no need for a constraint workflow in my opinion.
OK, Bastien, now you’ve made me take the digression I was tying to avoid. 
I definitely agree that would be the case, if done without an organization-wide policy and initiative. There is, however, a whole body of work on the idea of collaborative work as conversations which live in language. Without getting into the details (we could do that in a separate thread perhaps), one of the central concepts is the notion of the 4-phase workflow where Person A makes a request of Person B, who then can accept it, decline it, or make a counteroffer. It can be a powerful way of working collaboratively if done right (and can be a mess if not!).
@Zach_LeMien, @Craig_Fifer, @asherterpstra - I would love to get your feedback on something I’m considering building to address this task-request topic; see this forum post for details.
