Adding tasks and sections to Goals

Ive recently upgraded to Asana for Business to make use of the Goals Functionality which is great. However I’d love to be able to add tasks and sections to the Goals. (Not Sub-goals, but rather tasks that can be seen in “my tasks” little steps that can be done to move the goal forward).

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This is exactly what discourages us from using this feature. But the evolution of the goals is recently quite nice, so I hope that Asana team add in the future some feature to implement tasks as a part of particular goal or sub-goal.

@Shira_Grinshtein - that’s what the now named “References” are. While not at the task level, references are linked projects or portfolios that help make sure the goals move forward. Our rule of thumb is - if there is a goal with no projects supporting it, we have a problem and aren’t going to achieve the goal.

The projects have the task-level steps that overall help us make progress.

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Thanks @Laura_Johnson1 I appreciate that, and am currently using it that way. However there are some smaller Goals that perhaps don’t require an entire project (with tasks, subtasks, milestones etc) and it would be nice to have the option of just adding some tasks within the Goals itself.

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Exactly. I’m pretty sure that many smaller goals can be managed in stand-alone tasks. For sure there are always huge projects in tracking period of goals, but it’s always filled with a few smaller ones.

It’s a pity because now you can use Goals very limited and if e.g. support people have simple tasks - you cannot manage them by using the Goals.

This functionality is simply MUST HAVE feature :slight_smile:

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I also agree with this. Goals is a great feature but my team manages a lot of work via tasks vs projects. Being able to have a goal and align an intake task to that goal would be amazing but since it doesn’t support tasks, the goal feature just isn’t useful for our use-case.

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Goals might also be supported by multiple tasks from various projects and within one project you might work towards fulfilling multiple goals. Therefore having only the option to link projects to goals links potentially unrelated content to goals. With an ability to link tasks to goals this could be done more specifically. In addition, projects in Asana are not only used for projects, but could be operational team tasks or part of a personal task list. These could also contribute to achieving a goal. These tasks might be too small to open a complete project for it and from the other perspective (team, personal list) you might lose visibility.

I am not in favour of creating tasks and subsection underneath a goal though - in that case I am wondering what would be the difference to a project. If you need to create a complete structure to achieve a goal then a stand-alone project seems like the logical way to go instead of building that structure underneath a goal.

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Just to add what has been said above, after 🥅 Introducing OKR goal types and org-wide goal templates we have now a very nice progression from organization goals to layers of subgoals to more narrowed project and individual key results. Meanwhile, Milestones are already recognized by goals, as you can set the % of completion based on the milestones completed in a project. The only piece missing to glue the goals levels with the tasks level is to let milestones contribute directly to a goal.

In technical terms, you already have the goal selection that allows to define the parent goal of a goal. Milestones could have the same goal selector.

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The inability to be able to link a task to a goal is very limiting to our teams. This seems like it would be an easy feature enhancement to enable on the backend since the functionality already exists for projects and portfolios. Is this feature request on the roadmap for release?

Hi everyone, I’m happy to announce we are launching the ability to add tasks as a source of Goals progress :tada: You can find more details in our announcement below:

Feel free to reach out via our Tips and Tricks category if you have any questions!

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