Allow to automatically add subtasks to project

Well…5 years…~1,000 Yes votes, meaning somewhere from 10,000 to 100,000 customers want the same thing…and no action. So…

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I too have been following this thread here for some time now and wonder why there is no solution.

What I have been thinking about: Couldn’t a rule help where subtasks are explicitly addressed e.g…

When SUBtask added…
… add to THIS project…
… to column/section xy.

THAT would help me and my team a lot. In this way, subtasks would appear in the timeline automaticly and remain in view of my team as to-dos.

And so every ASANA user could define for themselves (and for every project separately) whether subtasks should be inserted separately into the project and, if so, where they should be sorted.

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Couldn’t one of your devs add this feature in just a few weeks? Why is this taking 5 years??

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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.

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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!

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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’…)

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:

Thanks,

Larry

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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.

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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.

Are there any updates on this? It seems that this issue has been a longstanding desire from the Asana Community.

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Asana is deploying rules on subtasks as we speak, and as an action you have the ability to add a task to a project, so maybe it works now?

What exactly do you expect from the subtasks being part of the project?

I imagine workload view is a big one. Currently, one of the better workarounds is having a “subtasks” section that every subtask connected to the project is manually connected to. This solution, and others, are quite the pain and only bring confusion.
That being said, compared to something like Monday.com, Asana’s workload view is sorely lacking in other areas (portfolios don’t generate the view, meaning, seeing one persons entire workload across projects/teams is a headache at best). Their reporting charts are a much better feature for tracking “workload”, but even this function still suffers from subtasks not tracking under their respective projects.

Currently there is an innate rule that would only need to be slightly adjusted in order to automatically add subtasks to the project their main task is housed in, but for some reason the rule is set up to allow them to be automatically housed in every project but the current one.

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Ideally this task and 100’s of others wouldn’t show up as no project when its obviously associated to a project.

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Looking at your Screenshot, all you need to do is click on show inherited fields and add it to your desired project

Another possibilty:

If you have to many Subtasks, turn them into tasks and collect them in a “task container”. This way they will always be part of a project and you have them all in one place.

The show inherited fields does not change whether it moves out of the “No Project” bucket in My Tasks.
Perhaps I don’t understand the idea of taking subtasks and turning them into task containers. Here’s how our projects are built. Each Section represents a phase of design in the architectural world. Under those Sections are the sheets needed. And within each sheet, we have the items (subtasks) collected that need to be done to make that sheet look correct.


Then clicking on one DD-G001 as an example:

If these need to be part of a task container then it ruins the organization that is relative to each sheet.

If you open a subtask, you can go to “…” and “Add to projects” and then choose the main project. The “show inherited fields” will be gone.