Advanced search, sort by last modified doesn't work the way I expect

I need a list that is sorted by “last modified”. The option exists in the “filters” part of advance search however it only works for the 1st task in the list. The rest of the tasks are not sorted by last modified. Am I doing something wrong? Very frustrating. Please help. Thank you

Hi @Steve_Pavlish, welcome to the Asana Community Forum :wave:t2:

When sorting a search by “last modified”, tasks will be arranged with the latest modified at the top descending in chronological order. The tasks can be modified by any users and in any way. Tasks will not be shown in the order modified by you only.

Were you expected tasks to be shown in the order that you modified them, or that any user modified them?

Looking forward to hearing back from you :slight_smile:

I find that the Last Modified Sort in Advanced Search does work correctly, given these caveats:

  1. The last modification is by any user OR by Asana itself, via automatic triggering of Rules

  2. The Last Modified Date is quantized only by days (date appears to be stored as an integer, hence only YY-MM-DD, no hh:mm:ss).

The above should be fairly easy to confirm, through exporting to Google Sheets and checking the Last Modified column.

I agree with your implicit goal, which is that 99% of the time I’m interested in deliberate modifications by defined users, not in a whole list of Rules-driven updates. The use cases are:

  • I recently made a whole bunch of updates at the end of a long day, I want to revisit them the next morning and check that they are correct
  • I’ve been on PTO for 1+ weeks, I want to catch up on recent human activity in a project (not a gazillion Rules-driven updates)
  • Somebody tells me that they have revised a Project extensively, I want to go in and check the changes
    etc.

In all cases, Rules-driven updates are of no interest. (I could see checking for Rules-driven updates only to check that the Rules are operating correctly, and that should be infrequent.) I would definitely like to have a filter for who did the modifications: me, anyone, User X, or a list of users.

Even a modest use of Rules means that Rules-driven changes will often swamp the Last Modified list.

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