I’d like subtasks to automatically be attached to the project so I don’t have add them manually if I want to see them in the calendar view. Please and thank you.

To be fair, there would be a lot of complications requiring new features and controls to avoid knock-on problems. Just one example: The Timeline of a Project currently shows just the tasks that are officially in the project. Hence, no Subtasks on the Timeline (unless you “home” them 1 by 1). Same for Project Calendar. If Subtasks automatically get added to the project, then many people will find their Timelines and Calendars exploding with Subtasks that they never intended to give that level of prominence. The Timeline is already cumbersome, and requires frequent manual maintenance (moving tasks around) to stay acceptably readable. The Calendar is so inflexible as to views that I can’t even use it for my personal to-dos. So, then Asana needs to create control for each view: Show Subtasks? Y/N But…then the people already reliant on having added certain Subtasks to these views intentionally will no longer have a choice to show only those intentional ones…it would be ALL Subtasks or none. OK, fine, you say. Just give people another control so they can show or hide certain Subtasks. But would that be a batch change, or one by one? How cumbersome would it be to start managing visibility of Subtasks indivdually? I shudder. The fact is that Asana has clearly made some CS101-unaware design decisions way back that cannot be fixed without tangling things up even worse. And users consequently have been forced into an amazing variety of workarounds. And the tools are not equal to quickly undoing and redoing workarounds at the user level for high scale organizations. If you paint yourself into a corner, then attaching ropes to the ceiling to try to swing yourself out into the hallway may make things worse. And suggesting (or doing things that de facto require) that 10,000 users attach ropes to the ceiling of 500 rooms each… No. I don’t blame Asana for their choice not to bandaid more extensively.

Hello, is there any chance that the subtasks will be included in the project on “My tasks” list soon? It’s a big disruption for my teammates and me.

Hi @Kłosia , welcome to the forum :smiley: If each subtask is assigned to one of your teammates, then the subtasks should appear in each of their ‘My Tasks’, just like any other task which is assigned to them. If subtasks are unassigned, then they will not appear in anyone’s ‘My Tasks’, regardless of whether the parent task is assigned or not. Hope this helps!

Hello @Richard_Sather, thank you for your reply. The problem is that we would like to see the subtasks within tasks in “my tasks”. Now we can add manually the subtasks to the project but even that solution isn’t that great because we’d like to see the task with the drop-down list of subtasks - the same as it is in the project view, not as quite a separate task

(in ‘My Tasks’…) [image] Kłosia: we’d like to see the task with the drop-down list of subtasks - the same as it is in the project view Right, I see what you mean! Perhaps you may want to create a new topic for this in the Product Feedback section so that you and other people can vote on this :wink:

@Kłosia, I agree; please vote for this request that I posted a while ago: [image] In My Tasks v2 List view, provide expand/collapse twisties for tasks with subtasks Product Feedback In the new My Tasks v2 as of around April 2021, I was expecting to see expand collapse twisties next to tasks that have subtasks, just like is done for all other projects in List view, but none are there. This is a really key feature to enable working with an extra level of subtask information (because the right Task Detail pane can now show either the parent or first subtask child). It’s particularly important not to lose this functionality in the one project (My Tasks) many probably work in t… Thanks, Larry

You shudder at the idea of managing subtasks one by one and I agree you should–that’s the whole problem for many of us though, we are already doing that right now in this situation . It isn’t fun. Of course it would be terrible if a solution to this only caused problems for others. I just think is not a given. Having a Show Subtasks? Y/N view is not the only solution. Rigging up timeline or calendar view so it only shows tasks and no sub tasks by default, which you could then case by case override, should be achievable. I think it resolves the scenario you laid out. It works out to functionally the same behavior either way for people who don’t care about subtasks getting auto assigned, and is great for folks dealing with this problem. If there is a toggle to auto assign tasks, that is actually doable I think. People who turn this auto-assign on (because you don’t have to turn it on) who want only certain subtask on their calendar/timeline would have to do what they do now, in my scenario of defaulting to no subtasks (not blanket excluding them)– they manually opt the subtasks in. It’s probably way fewer than assigning half to nearly all of themto a project like many of us do now. Since you can opt out of the automatic assigning, you can elect to not deal with these things if you think they are a problem for your team. Things do not change. There are teams that use Lists and Boards much more than Timeline or Calendar. And this where this problem is very painful I believe. It’s not just about Timeline and Calendar view. These settings that make those views nice over there hurt people on teh other side. The scenario you want to avoid. So I’m arguing we are actually there. And Asana clearly already treats tasks and subtasks differently, even when they can have many of the same attributes and interact comparably with different features. I don’t think a concrete reason why what I proposed, or something along those line , can’t happen–giving people the option to have subtasks automatically be assigned to the parent task’s project without controlling to some degree where that matters and whether it is even a feature applied to that team. Because of this I feel like a solution is viable that gives control to users rather than forcing arbitrary change on them. Timeline and Calendar are obviously important and no they shouldn’t get compromised by this feature. I suspected before your comment it just wasn’t seen as important and Timeline and Calendar are kind of viewed as more vital features. But I don’t know as much history about Asana as you do, I don’t know the tech debt they have–apparently it is a lot and maybe it is too much for what I have asked? So in that scenario I realize we may have to wait for an eat crow/mea culpa/come to god era rebuild(s) to even ask this. But, if we get there, there are good solutions to this problem when you have good infrastructure.

I’m definitely alluding to the tech debt they obviously have. I don’t have any insight as to how Asana got that way, how they themselves see it or don’t see it, and whether they have a master plan to refactor their data model. I agree with you that there are logical solutions that don’t have to be painful - if we disregard the tech debt. And I don’t know how deep it goes, or what change might unveil a previously hidden portion of it.

It is actually crazy how many work arounds and backwards bending we have to do because subtasks simply just don’t exist when it comes to counting as work. Why were they even made in the first place if they don’t exist in the project level reporting, and then they still didn’t exist when portfolio level reporting rolled around? I am so tempted to mandate no subtask usage period, but we would start drowning in tasks. Days like these I really regret going with Asana.

[image] Austin_Crawford: Why were they even made in the first place I believe they were made as a way to allow the assignee on the task to list steps to take in order to complete the task. Overtime, it has been used differently by the community, and Asana is trying to bridge the gap between the initial use case, and the way people used it.

Allow to automatically add subtasks to project

Asana Community Product Ideas Features Launched

Larry_Berger_lpb 10 December 2022 14:23 239

@Kłosia, I agree; please vote for this request that I posted a while ago:

Thanks,

Larry

Topic		Replies	Views
Subtasks in "My tasks" show in a "No project" project Ask the Community	105	27336	6 January 2021
Show project on subtask in 'My tasks' view Features Launched subtasks , productivity , projects , tasks , launched	142	18478	15 August 2024
You can now see and action subtasks directly from your Project task list! Product Updates	62	24947	23 December 2020
Allow Rules for Subtasks Features Launched launched	123	27669	27 January 2023
Subtasks now show parent project and fields in the task pane ✨ Product Updates	79	3931	6 August 2026

Allow to automatically add subtasks to project

Related topics