Tracking who completes a task

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Hello, my team uses a shared project to keep track of recurring tasks. They aren’t assigned, people just check them off as they arise. I am trying to figure out a way of tracking which team members complete the most tasks. I downloaded the project metrics as a CSV, but it seems that I cannot track task completion by users unless they had a task assigned to them. Does anyone know a way to get around this?

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Hi @Ben3

Just so I understand, why couldn’t individuals assign the task to themselves just before they tick complete?

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They could, but the biggest issue with this is then when the task reoccurs, it stays assigned to that person. If possible, i’d like to try to find a slightly more streamlined way to do this, without requiring my team to do extra steps & complicating the process.

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One thing you could try is using our API to read the stories on the task - these are both the comments that users create and the “system stories”, the breadcrumbs that get recorded on a task when its state changes.

There are a few caveats to keep in mind with this approach:

The stories were never meant to be an authoritative audit log. If:

  • The same user
  • Makes multiple changes that counteract each other
  • within an hour

we collapse the stories into one story. For instance, if you complete a task, you’ll see that it gets a “Ben3 completed this task” story. If you then incomplete the task within an hour, you don’t see a new story that the task got uncompleted, rather the first story goes away.

In addition, the user who did the action which created the story can delete their stories from inside of Asana, so it’s something to keep in mind. Asking people not to delete their “task completion” stories seems much easier than asking them to always self-assign tasks though.

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I see what you mean. I think Matt’s suggestion is the best, if you know your way round the API. Speaking as someone who doesn’t, my low-tech approach would be to use subtasks in some way. Maybe each time someone completes the task they add a subtask with today’s date as the title, assign it to themselves, then complete both. It sounds fiddly, but it would only take a few seconds. You’d then be able to use advanced searches to track who’d completed what in the last X number of days.

I know it’s not as smooth as you’d like, but it might do the trick.

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