Add Custom Field Sorting for "My Tasks" to sort by task Priority

[Deirdre_Nitsche]

If we could set a trigger for custom fields in “My Tasks”, then I could have a column dedicated to what is the highest priority (as determined by the status set in the custom field). This would greatly help myself and my team mates from being paralyzed/overwhelmed/be able to communicate when they have to much on their plate to complete.

[lpb]

Custom Fields are coming to My Tasks:

Make way for Custom Fields in My Tasks!

Hi Asana Community! We understand that access to custom fields allows another dimension, besides just sorting and sections, that is crucial for some workflows and that you also want to use custom fields to organize your My Tasks in a way that matches your mental model and is more closely aligned with how you use Projects in Asana. That is why we’re excited to announce that custom fields are coming to My Tasks! Custom fields in My Tasks will allow you to create new fields which ar…

So I think that may address your issue within the next several weeks.

Hope that helps,

Larry

[Ryan_Feeley]

Yes, custom fields did come to my tasks. However, Priority isn’t one of them…

It appears that if you start on the free plan, you get one “custom field” which is added to your organization by Asana (probably hard coded in the background). But if you then switch to a paid plan, and add your own additional custom fields, any of these is available in My Tasks, but NOT “Priority”.

Is this just an oversight or bug? Should we create our own version of “Priority”, update all our projects to use the new version?

[lpb]

@Ryan_Feeley

Is this just an oversight or bug? Should we create our own version of “Priority”

I’m not sure, but it sounds like an oversight or bug to me.

Yes, I would use your own org’s version of Priority. In fact, I recommend that over using any Asana-provided custom fields so that you have flexibility to alter them.

Thanks,

Larry

[Ryan_Feeley]

Thanks a lot Larry! Yes using our own org version seems to work.

Here are the steps for anyone else who comes across this:

1. I found the project with our biggest usage of this existing “Priority” field. In this project, I “edited” the field, and checked the box “Add this to xyz.com’s field library”. So that fixed it for one project.
2. I then edited the name of that org-based custom field to Priority__
3. In all other projects, I added Priority__, and manually made its value match the existing “Priority”. I then removed the existing “Priority” from the project.
4. When I was finished, I renamed Priority__ back to Priority.

And then I reviewed all the existing templates for our teams, and for any that had a field “Priority”, I removed it, and then replaced it with the new “Priority” associated with our organization.

It wasn’t too bad, since fortunately we didn’t made heavy use of the existing “Priority”, so a manual fix worked well enough.

[lpb]

Great, comprehensive steps for all; thanks, @Ryan_Feeley.

Sounds like you already had a local (not org-wide) Priority field (others may not). This was not the Asana-provided one (which you wouldn’t have been able to it (others may have that).

Regardless, you can do an advanced search with Add filter and include the Priority field (either one, depending, or both!) with choice “Any value” to learn the projects involved, then go project by project to do your steps.

In each project, you could sort by Priority (old field) so that you can multi-select contiguous rows of tasks to change all Highs, then all Mediums, then all Lows to speed the work.

Hope that helps too,

Larry