Assuming you didn’t mean “expand the section,” you can somehow request this of Asana but it’s unlikely to be done, I think, because the subtask behaves as a top-level task without subtasks itself, and so there’s no associated expand/collapse icon for it.
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FYI you can accomplish this with a Flowsana rule: the rule would be “When a new task is created, add it to project [the current project where the rule is being created]” and you would select to have this rule apply only to subtasks, which is an available option in Flowsana.
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This feature would increase Asana’s pitch for encouraging users to upgrade to the Business plan as automatically attaching subtasks to a project would hopefully allow for users to better utilize the workload and goals features. Currently both the workload and goals do not capture data presented by sub-tasks. Having this feature would provide a more accurate view of a team member’s workload without having to go through all the clicks to add a project to a sub-task (which creates task duplication by creating a task on the project). It also would provide for a more accurate picture of progress made towards goals.
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This “unrealized feature” makes Asana much less useful and thus attractive and subtasks virtually useless. With nearly 1,000 votes, you’d think the Asana team would make the update. It’s appears to be such a basic required element for project management, as to be nearly inconceivable that Asana would allow this issue to continue for so long. This really puts a blemish on the brand and creates a top-of-mind point of discussion when talking about Asana to others.
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I agree, having this automated would be a huge help. I am spending about 20-30 minutes every Monday making sure my team can see the attached project. Please fix this! Thank you!
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That’s a really bold statement, we use subtasks heavily and successfully, while knowing the limitations. They could be better, but definitely not useless.
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@Bastien_Siebman I’m with John on this. When someone assigns a subtask like “Finalize report” to me, it shows up in My Task list with zero context. To figure out what it means, I have to click on the subtask to click on the parent to check which project we’re talking about. That makes My Tasks basically unreadable.
Add to that that if a subtask does get added to project, then it goes in the top-level list for the entire project, negating the whole point of a “Subtask”. It means that by design, the user cannot see a subtask’s most basic feature - which project it’s a part of. Add to that the fact that outside of the browser, you can’t see subtasks when looking at a project, and it’s literally impossible to get an overview of a projet with subtasks.
These are all basic design flaws that Asana staff have been talking their way out of having to fix for years. I don’t know if it’s an awkward code base that can’t be fixed or a product team that just doesn’t understand how project management happens, but it’s made Asana more trouble than it was worth. .
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In addition to the basic project assignment flaws within My Tasks, which many users have pointed out. My team believes the same correction logic should easily apply when creating a follow-up task, with the only difference being characterized by the visibility/privacy rather than a random hyperlinked description being thrown into My Tasks
Unfortunately, this comment speaks out for all of my own thoughts (thank you for that!): it’s hard to believe that when a subtask is added to a parent task that has an associated project, the subtask is not associated with the same project. From the UX perspective, the expectation of having subtasks to be automatically associated with the parent’s task project seems to be so… intuitive. No, let me actually say this in a stricter still (hopefully) politically correct way: it seems to be a single option a brain can bring to the mind.
And the cost of a sustainable implementation for this is the only reason I can imagine has been a road blocker for more than 5-years saga (and more than 200 comments). Guys, please hire me, and I’ll do it. Otherwise I’ll do it after sending my kid to college.
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+1 on this. This is exactly the limitation in Asana that drives me crazy and makes me re-think using the tool and finding something else. It is such a foundational issue that we effectively don’t use subtasks anymore because they are next to useless.
To be fair, they are extremely effective for some use cases, and have serious limitations for others 
@Bastien_Siebman Can you share some use cases where subtasks are useful?
Also, any workaround suggestions for this? It’s a problem for me too.
Elliott_Collins
1 Jul
@Bastien_Siebman I’m with John on this. When someone assigns a subtask like “Finalize report” to me, it shows up in My Task list with zero context. To figure out what it means, I have to click on the subtask to click on the parent to check which project we’re talking about. That makes My Tasks basically unreadable.
Not entirely correct, it shows up with the parent task next to the subtask name. Which should be enough: a SUB task needs only its task as context (playing the devil’s advocate here).
For example, we have leads in our CRM as a task and we store as subtasks intro calls and quotes. Another example: meetings are tasks, if I need to send the recording, “send recording” is a subtask of the meeting’s task.
Yes: manually multi-home OR use custom coding.
I hope it helps.
@Bastien_Siebman - Having the name of the parent task is enough context unless you run multiple projects for different customers with the same sets of tasks. In which case, you still need to go to the parent task to get context about which project it belongs to.
The way around this would be verbose naming for the parent tasks. However, that just adds more time spent working on busy work whenever your tasks are generated via a project template rather than getting things done.
Flowsana helps overcome this quite a bit for us.
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@Skyler that’s what we’ve done. I use a project template for each of our locations that we build out, e.g. a new store or manufacturing site. I had to create a unique naming code for each of our locations, which then gets added to each task/sub-task for the project. I’ll have to check out Flowsana. I’ve never used that.
Please note, duplicating a sub-task as a ‘task’ to be able to report on it is a band-aid solution; you should consider rearchitecting if needed & allow within dashboard reports ability to “turn on” or “turn off” reporting for sub-tasks + sub-sub-tasks, etc.
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Pretty wild to see Asana has been letting these subtask and task assignment issues pile up for 5 YEARS, and they all originate from their wildly unrealistic “task owner” ethos. Despite the existence of several dozen threads with a combined voting breaching thousands nothing is done. Interesting how many of the biggest complaints about Asana originate from their own internal creeds preventing other companies from following their own management methodologies.
Multiple assignees and workload reporting are effectively roadblocked because Asana is too stubborn to allow other companies to follow any other ethos than their own. The lack of basic administrative privilages such as overviews of private projects and preventative measures against task deletion originates from Asana’s extreme fear of micromanagement. It is not micromanagement to want effective reporting measures for your team, and you can’t report what has been deleted.
I badly want to move forward with Asana for my team, but reading these forums and seeing the lack of actionable solutions on behalf of asana for years and years on popular threads really prevents me from presenting Asana as a worthwhile solution to my superiors.
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This is probably one of the most unusable things about Asana. We’re considering not using subtasks instead, but what a pain.
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What a highly unreasonable feature that is missing here - and for so long, too! It’s causing enough issues in reporting and task mgmt that we’re considering moving to another PM system with this basic functionality. Come on, Asana. Listen to your users.
I am new to Asana and loving most of its features so far! But I cannot believe that subtasks are not automatically linked to their parent task’s project. This is such a huge flaw in my opinion. I see that it has been a complaint for many years. Is there any updates to fixing this, Asana??
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