Allow converting messages into tasks

I often receive actionable messages from peers which would become a task in the future.

The problem is that the message usually initiates with a question, so the other person doesn’t know if it’s going to be something actionable until a response is provided, so rather than creating a task, the person prefers to just send a message, which makes sense.

However, the way in which Asana currently offers creating a follow-up task doesn’t help much, as the initial scope of the task would be better represented by the description instead of simply linking to the message while keeping the comments discussed on the message present on the task itself.

This is something which could be achieved by converting the message into a task rather than creating a follow-up which loses context a little.

4 Likes

Hi @Marcus6, thanks for taking the time to provide this feedback! What a cool feature this would be :slight_smile:

Hopefully this is something our Product team can implement in the future. I’ll keep you posted if I have any updates :slight_smile:

3 Likes

That is an awesome idea! Upvote +1

4 Likes

I upvoted.

Some history: Messages used to be “Conversations” and Conversations used to have a way to convert one to a Task!

Larry

5 Likes

Had the same idea, found your thread. +1 upvote!

The conversation often needs to be saved, and it’s important to know that a task has been created so discussion on the original thread can stop, and can continue on the more purposeful task. So the fact that a task has been created must be visible in both places.

1 Like

x 100 - my team has a real struggle whether to create a message or a task. Would love to help them by being able to convert!

I guess you could say that you can’t expect someone to do something sent via a message :man_shrugging:

Right? Well, right now with the limitations on what you can do with messages, it’d help a lot to convert a message to a task that we can then organize, schedule etc.

1 Like

Yes! I would love this ability to easily create a task from a message. I’m not such a fan of the messaging feature in Asana because people often message me about things that need to be tasks - and it’s an extra step to convert it to a task. Thanks!

1 Like

I keep running into the need of converting messages into Tasks. This would come in so handy and possibly save Asana some storage space so we are not re-uploading files from a message into a task.

1 Like

It looks to me like this exists now… If you click on the 3 dots on a message there’s a “create follow up task” option:
image

This is not what we expected, we want the discussion+title to become a task. What you are pointing out would only create a task with a link to the message.

1 Like

Converting messages to tasks is becoming more and more of a must-have. We have shared projects with clients, and most of them keep creating and sending messages instead of creating a task. This requires our team to download assets/files locally and reupload them to an Asana task. This process creates unnecessary work for our team that can easily be eliminated with a “Convert message to a task” option.

I doubt we are the only few that are having this need, and having so many Asana users re-upload the same assets/files to Asana tasks would not benefit your server storage costs.

I beg you to please add this to your roadmap.

1 Like

It would be really nice if a conversation could be turned into a task.

4 Likes

Thanks for this feedback, @mary-lou! Interesting suggestion. Could you please elaborate on your need for this? What do you hope to achieve by turning a conversation into a task?

Obviously, brainstorming creates ideas. Ideas are communicated in comments. Ideas may become tasks. So it would make sense if comments could be turned into tasks as well.

7 Likes

I was searching the net, supposing that you had already created this feature. So I greatly support the above notion.

3 Likes

Ditto! We had captured lessons learned in a conversation and I wanted to add that to our Company Knowledge Base Asana project but was not able to. Since I can’t just turn it into a task with the comments, I will have to copy and boil it all into one task in order to add it.

2 Likes

We would also need this. We constantly find conversations soon uncover that some people need to complete some task. It is annoying to have to copy paste the background into the task - even more so if multiple tasks arise. It is not always possible to know in advance that a task is going to be the outcome of the conversation.

2 Likes

I agree 100% with the need to convert a conversation into a task. Conversations are discussions. Tasks are action oriented. Many tasks start as conversations. This should be a great feature to have, thank you.

3 Likes