Subtasks and the "My Tasks" section: Show me the project!

I am the project manager/producer for a small creative agency that has recently fully embraced Asana. We’re quickly adjusting our workflows without any hiccups…until now.

Our work tends to have many deliverables that multiple members of the team collaborate on. For the most efficient workflow, we’ve found that Tasks with well built out subtasks works the best for file sharing/version control, conversations, and the ability to spread out deadlines and assignees within a single task.

However, when you start to build up multiple projects that have multiple deliverables with similar workflows–for instance, a copy writer may be assigned a “copy draft” as a subtask for different tasks across different projects–it starts to get really complicated and unclear in your “My Tasks” section which project you are working on. For subtasks, the project tag doesn’t show up, just the parent task in gray.



Ideal solution: Why isn’t that there?!

Other solutions:

  1. Sorting “My Tasks” by project. - This works for the most part, but because we are a deadline driven team, having due date sorting is ideal, and you lose the customization capabilities that might allow you to arrange it by due date or your own priority.
  2. Naming Conventions - I’ve experimented with naming conventions of the parent tasks to make it more explicit, but it feels like a hack, and a not very elegant solution for an overall elegant tool.
  3. Deal with it - This is our current best fix, as it is fairly easy to click on a task to see more details and get the full picture. But again…not very elegant.
  4. ???

Would love anybody’s thoughts on possible work-arounds using tagging or custom fields… or something else?

Cheers!

32 Likes

Hi @Lucas_Anderson! I agree with you that this isn’t ideal and that it would be better for Asana to include the Project in the task pane.

I don’t think there’s a better solution than what you named, basically sorting by project when you need to but otherwise clicking on it to get more details and prioritizing as you wish. If you were creating content via forms, there’s a more robust way you could create your tasks via Zapier that would allow you to include the project name in the Task description automatically.

This is one of many reasons I recommend using subtasks as little as possible unless using them as part of a “Task Template.” I discuss in more detail in the Asana Training Masterclass, but the end result is it’s often better to push the hierarchy one level higher to using Section Headings and Tasks when possible. :slight_smile:

Todd,

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately with our use case, and Asana’s somewhat weak file management capabilities, moving up a level higher with Section Headings isn’t really possible. I guess we’ll just wait until Subtasks and/or the Files tab are beefed up!

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Hi @Lucas_Anderson - Glad your team is enjoying working with Asana.

Also, thanks for sharing this feedback! I’ve shared it with my team. I do think that you’re doing the right thing with your workarounds. Naming conventions have worked very well for us here. In addition, when I am in My Tasks, I tend not to look at the tasks at face value. Instead, I find it helpful to click into each task so the right window pops up and I’m able to see context (where the subtask came from, etc.). A little habit that you may find useful.

I just wanted to say that i agree with the OP. It seems like it should be easy to make the project name appear more consistently and in full (not truncated). So the full “line” maybe even all the way from the “team” level is shown all the way to the subtask.

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Same thought from our company. We have with working with Asana with our team for a while, and we would love to have the project tag appearing in the subtasks, that are shown as No Project in the My Tasks list. This feature would make much more easy organizing pending work, because at this moment the subtasks are quite confusing and difficult to follow.

Thanx a lot!

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@Ramon_Prats if you’re excited about seeing a new feature I recommend that you vote for an existing suggestion in the product feedback category or create a new thread :slight_smile:

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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Feature request: show subtasks in lists

We’re a similar style agency and face the same issues - each team member needs to be able to view their tasks/subtasks by due date for their individual workload. Please add this feature!

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Hi folks, this issue goes deeper than just displaying the subtask in the search results resp. the ‘My tasks’ list. I am using Harvest for time tracking and if I want to log time to a subtask Harvest does not recognize the subtask being allocated to the project the parent task is assigned to. Therefore Harvest suggests to create a new project or manually select one. This isn’t just unhandy, it causes mistakes as I am assuming the project is already there and I just hit the timer clocking to the wrong project.
I am considering this a mistake in the concept of the data model, not just a UI glitch when displaying search results. this issue shouldn’t be up for a vote in the community — please have your dev team get to the bottom of this issue and fix/improve it. Technically I have hundreds of unallocated tasks sitting in my projects that only when viewed in the right perspective are visible as subtasks of a project. Moving my subtasks up a level as a workaround is not an option!!

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We continue to have the same problem. Our organization within a project has become a mess because employees are pulling sub-tasks out of the task into the main project and it has caused confusion.

We need the sub-task to inherit the main task/project information.

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Chiming in on this thread. Our organization has recently fully embraced Asana use. However, many of my tasks in a project need to be subtasks, because otherwise they will clutter up the main project area.

When I look at “My Tasks,” most of my tasks appear without a project because the subtask is not inheriting the project. This is unmanageable and doesn’t make design sense. So far I am finding it’s a net negative to my productivity and focus because I cannot view my task list properly by project due to the subtask issue.

Please make it a development priority that subtasks inherit the main project. The nesting of tasks and subtasks in Asana is supposed to be a feature, not cause a bug. Thank you for your consideration.

10 Likes

Just found a solution for this in another post - albeit an imperfect one, as you have to remember to do it for each subtask. Apparently the subtasks don’t inherit projects, tags etc from their parent. Asana say they are working on a solution for this problem but in the meantime you can manually add the subtask to the Project. You can do this by clicking Add to Project in the subtask pane, or by CTRL+P while the subtask is open. It can be done when creating the task or retrospectively.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Feature request: show subtasks in lists

Hi I am a very new user trying to create some examples to implement with my team - what do you mean by “naming conventions”? What does this look like in Asana?

I’m not sure the pain and importance of this is being recognised. Here are some threads that could perhaps be merged here (I’m sure there are more, these just came up immediately):

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We have the same issue. We use subtasks on nearly all of our tasks and have them assigned to various team members with due dates. We need to be able to see which project they are associated with in the My Tasks section. It seems very strange to me that they are disassociated with a project when they are literally called ‘subtask’ of a project task.

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This seems like a rather trivial thing that should be implemented right away. I can’t see any reason to not tag subtasks with the parent project.

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The problem with adding the project to the subtask is that it makes the subtask appear in the list view as though it were a top-level task. A subtask should appear on a collapsible list under its parent task.

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Also asking that the project name! will be shown also in subtasks

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