Tips for project conversations

Hi all,

Honestly the more I use conversations the more I become confused by them. I’ve left a note addressing some of this in Product Feedback, but I think I just need some more tips on how to make conversations work for my team. Am I missing something, or does this seem like the process that has to happen with conversations…

  • I start a project conversation and am forced to send it to everyone on the project (or everyone on the project that has opted in for all conversations.) There is no way to deselect people at this point, even if this particular conversation is not relevant for 100% of people on the project.
  • Then once I send the message, suddenly there are no more collaborators on the conversation. If anyone wants to receive more messages, they must opt in, or I have to add people individually as collaborators of the conversation.

Do I have this wrong?

My preference would be that I can select people from the get-go whether I want them involved in that particular conversation. Then they will always be collaborators of the conversation unless they choose to opt out. But I don’t think anyone should be required to do the step of opting in to continue receiving notifications about the conversation. No one on my team would bother to spend that time.

And just one more thing to keep in mind, I think that trying to have conversations on a task level could fix this, so that I can choose which members I want involved from the get-go. BUT, my team relies on the emails sent and responding to comments/conversations in emails. I think that the task comment emails are really inefficient. They resend the entire comment chain every time. Attachments and images are sent as links instead of the actual file, and every attachment is sent as a separate email, even if they were uploaded at the same time. And it includes all that unnecessary info about “so and so created this task at X time.” “so and so assigned this task to Y.” So unfortunately, talking within the task comments is not an option for our team.

Thanks so much!

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Rarely have we had Conversations expand into anything resembling a discussion. Because of the behavior you pointed out, they typically get used only for team wide notifications. I’ve toyed with the idea of using them for voting, but have been too busy to get back to that.

Discussions for our team occur either at the task level between collaborators, or if they get too technical we just have an impromptu meeting and then someone posts the main points back to the task.

We also have Microsoft Teams (basically a less evolved version of Slack) where our team level conversations will sometimes occur, but it has the same issue of not allowing you to tailor to specific people within the team, it’s all or nothing.

All these communication platforms have actually kind of destroyed the old tried and true of email, which has been making keeping track of what people said and where a real problem. I would love if I could get it all in Asana, but we work with several other teams that haven’t adopted it and for whatever reason refuse to.

Not sure if this is helpful to you, but figured I’d throw out what’s kind of evolved for us.

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@Sam_P I think you described the feature very well. For me it is a weird/partial solution to a real life problem:

  1. we do want to send a news to everyone on a team sometimes (and not type everyone’s name)
  2. people usually want to opt-out of some discussions by email

But I would personaly solve this issue differently:

  1. have two options: “send to all” or “manual selection”
  2. allow people to opt-out instead of asking them to opt-in
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