Totally agree. But we need an official statement that Asana will not have this, no plans, no matter what people say.
If that happens, this thread can rest in peace.
Telling everyone that this will not be possible is a ‘solution’ as well.
Like going to another platform, for example.
But thinking about business, Asana wouldn’t say ‘this will not be done’. If so, lots of people would start migrating and Asana would lose market value
I talked about this a lot with Asana, and they can’t say “it won’t be done” because that’s not true. They frequently revisits topics like this, you just don’t see them having those internal discussions.
Need this setting. Hope it can be done soon.
You should be able to create a rule that runs when (for example) a form is submitted, which if chosen as the trigger, can automatically be designated within that project as a subtask of the applicable parent.
For self-created subtasks, not sure if there is a rule option for that, as it is second nature for our organization to use the keyboard shortcut for that use case.
Subtasks don’t make any sense to me.
When they are added to a task, they are not considered to be in the parent task project.
Subtasks can be added to projects using [tab]+[p], but then they appear both as a task and a subtask.
When looking at subtask in my tasks, one can’t see what the relevant project is, since it doesn’t seem to live outside a project. This is a frequent request and feedback from our users, since the parent task project is the context needed to see what context this subtask belongs to. When working with templates, tasks and subtasks have the same name, and having to go open them individually to determine which project they belong to is a hassle.
When I run a rule to be triggered when tasks are added to a project, and I select “Rule runs on tasks and subtasks”, the rule doesn’t run on subtasks because it’s technically not part of the project. This is explained to me as 'intended behaviour`.
The overallfeeling I get is “it works this way because we programmed it this way”. What I think we should move towards is “this behaviour is intuitive for the users”
The solution that makes the most sense to me would be:
I’d be curious to hear if anyone thinks the current behaviour does make sense.
Your assessment is spot on IMO. I was shocked to learn that this is how Asana currently operates. Makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever - and I honestly expected more from the ‘most powerful project management platform in the world’.
Very disappointed they aren’t already doing what you’ve described here. I’m a new Asana user (after getting frustrated to the point of no return with the limited functionality/options of Microsoft’s native ‘tasks by planner and to do’ platform)—but without these basic features and workflows, I’m not sure Asana is really much better.
+0.5. The problem with subtasks is bigger than that.
Why is a subtask, not just a regular task that is organized under another task?
Since it is a second class citizen for altering and listing, it can NOT be used when subtasks are assigned to people other than that task assignee that gets the alerts and is listed as the project.
I could image a subtask still useful for breaking up a long running task into subtasks all completed by the same user as the task itself. That way a parallel task from another department that might be blocked by the first subtask could get unblocked sooner. But that fails as well because people are allowed to close a task without completing its subtasks.
I think very few or no users really agree with current subtask behavior. At best, we’ve learned to accept it, cope with it, work around it, specially train new users on it.
Edit: To clarify, this is a suggestion to Asana, not working functionality.
Quickest fix I can think of:
You could build the rule being triggered by the action on the parent task (add new subtask) since that parent task lives in the project the rule is monitoring. I’m guessing this is easier than watching for the creation of the subtask, since it technically doesn’t seem to live in the project.
Being able to filter a project on tasks/subtasks would be nice, but we can work around that with adding custom fields.
Hi Jan-Rienk, is this currently possible? I don’t see the option “When a subtask gets added to a task in this project” in the rule builder.
@DeclanMc No it’s not. It’s my suggestion to Asana that might be a MVP (minimal viable product) to solve this problem.
There actually is a sort of way to do this at the moment if you’re using Task Templates.
Now, whenever you create a task from the task template, all of its subtasks will automatically have “Yes” selected for the Subtask field, which will automatically move them to the Project Subtasks section, thus adding the subtasks to the current project. Of course, if you need to add other new subtasks for a particular task, you’ll have to remember to set the Subtask field manually.
It’s not the cleanest solution, but if your workflow involves only certain types of tasks that you can set as templates, it could save time not to re-add subtasks to the project every time.
Hopefully, this can serve as a workaround for some peeps until we get an official subtask rule trigger.
one option is to create a follow-up task [Shift+tab+F], as this will create a “sub task” assigned to you with an easier way to assign it to the same project.
I don’t know how, since in Asana’s logic subtasks arent part of the project, but this works.
If you have any ideas how to get this to work for subtasks in a project template I’m all ears.
If it were a dependant task that might be a solution, but I don’t think follow up tasks are useful for this.
Subtask have to inherit the Parent task project. If not in impossible to manage, as a PM I have 1 main task like : “Resolve the issues xxx” and 4 times the Subtask : “Check the statut”, “Check the statut”, “Relunch a user for test”, “Put it in release”.
All my “task” management is almost only the 'follow-up subtask" because this only things that PM is doing. And if I can see it in my line because “not prject tasks” can’b filtered it makes we forgot a half of thing where I need to “check”, “follow-up”, “replay”, “send” and “informe”.
Because if not, I will just have same main tast during the days ans weeks, and everyday thingking “ooook, what I suppose dto do on it ? reply someone or just check a statut”
This has been an issue since 2017? What a joke
7yrs later a basic feature still not implemented by Asana, but they sure were quick to release a worthless AI feature. Why am I here?
If you read the entire thread, you’ll see that this product feedback is not something simple they just haven’t found time for. It is something deeply rooted in the way Asana was designed years ago. We know this is discussed often, and we see a few hints here and there that subtasks are slowly becoming part of projects. To be fair, a good chunk of users actually do not want this behaviour. And adding a toggle/option is usually not a solution Asana is going for.
this is my personal opinion, I don’t work for Asana
My qualms with that take are this: the growing need and adoption of subtasks in itself is the workaround of what is beginning to seem deeply rooted in the way Asana was designed years ago. There are many standard project management workflows out there and it’s interesting to me how you need to find workarounds at every corner to enable most of them within this platform.