This feature is extremely important to my team’s ability to stay efficient and get the most of workloads. Without this feature, there really is no point for us to even use workloads as the majority of our tasks are subtasks. Can you provide us with any updates on this? It’s been three years since this forum was started with seemingly no progress.
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Asana does not share their roadmap, you will not have a clue until it actually happens.
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Please add this! This a crucial feature that right now is being discussed as a deciding factor of whether or not our company will stay with Asana or move to a different product. I want to STAY!! Please help!
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Yes, please implement this. I’ve been using Asana for our org for a week, and it a big roadblock with this issue.
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I understand there may be a few arguments for not automatically doing this, but there are probably more cases where this is the expected behavior.
Ideally, there would be a setting area where you can turn on:
• Automatically add subtasks to the same project as the parent.
• Automatically add followers of parent tasks to their children.
• Automatically copy all fields from parent task to their children.
Let these be options we can opt into.
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Ugh! It’s a sub-task for a reason. Having it duplicate at the task level makes it pointless to have subtasks. I’ll just move them all to that level and hand indent. ;-/ very annoying, but at least I won’t have duplicates. Please fix this!
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My biggest issues with the current functionality are:
-
When sub tasks show up in My Tasks, they don’t have the project name on the right hand side - so we need to make sure literally every task we create says “[task to complete] for [xyz project]” … this is clunky and repetitive
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When you manually add a subtask to a project, it pops out to the parent-level … this adds a bunch of unnecessary clutter and defeats the purpose of subtasks
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I actually don’t like the automatic added subtasks to project because
- visually there is no indication what parent or story it belongs to unless you drill in.
- Sprint planning board will become very bloated with many sub-tasks you basically need to tetris manage
- Its a lot simpler to move the story card with sub-tasks inside it along the swimlanes and open it to see details
What I do want is when I go to portfolio Workflow I want to see the sub-tasks even if they aren’t part of the project. Currently i only see the task only and no workflow information even if I have 20 tasks assigned to myself with dates and times.
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I also strongly support this request. I manage an editorial calendar for a publication as well as other projects for my team of content creators. We found that it made much more sense to manage the article development workflow as sub-tasks rather than cluttering up the list and calendar views with thousands of individual tasks and creating thousands of manual dependencies to indicate which workflow tasks are lead up to which article. It just isn’t practical. Using sub-tasks also makes it easier to have a template task to copy, which is an Asana-recommended practice. “Sub” doesn’t mean it has less impact – it’s still work that needs to be done, and they can also have significant workload impacts. So excluding sub-tasks from Workload and recommending that people add sub-tasks to the project to make them show (even though that might cause the project to become more confusing/cluttered), all doesn’t make sense to me from a project management/workload management perspective. I hope Asana decides to include them soon. As it is right now, Workload is such a great feature but it would be unusable for how my teams use Asana. It sounds like many others feel the same way too. Thank you.
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I have to admit, the delay in doing anything about this is pretty discouraging to me. This has been a problem with… every… single… client… implementation I’ve ever done. I’ve even had a client abandon Asana because this was such a problem. The workaround of manually adding subtasks to a project is such a mess.
It’s been three years since this was posted, with countless threads merged into this one. Subtasks work correctly in a couple other views in Asana (so clearly it’s possible), but not in projects. Is there any hope this will be fixed in the next 10 years? @Marie, @Natalie, @Emily_Roman? ****
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Everything has been said basically. It is a big pain point and you need to do something about it.
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I completely understand where you’re coming from as I’ve responded to many confused or/and frustrated users on this specific topic. I’ve explained this a couple of times in the Forum, but because of how subtasks were built in the first place, there is no easy fix to this. I’m bringing this up in most of my meetings with Product to make sure we keep this conversation open and continue to evaluate solutions. I’ll be sure to post an update as soon as I have one!
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Same here. Both clients and employees think Asana is “confusing” because of this. It’s an added level of complexity that has resulted in low adoption by clients and frustration within my organization.
Why don’t subtasks have associated projects the way top-level parent tasks do?
Context: Looking at a single-item task list, such as the results from a search.
I don’t want to have to add a custom field just to label two subtasks as being in the same project.
Welcome to the community forum @Katherine_Wood!
This is a popular request in the Forum and while I don’t have an update to share at the moment, this is definitely on our radar. You can create an advanced search report or add the subtasks to the project.
I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with the main existing thread on this topic to avoid duplicates and consolidate feedback on this topic.
I hope this helps!
I need the subtask to belong to a project when I am exporting searches for reporting purposes. For example, I need to see each task that represents a Facebook post, across all the projects that have Facebook posts. When I export my “Facebook post” search, none of them have associated projects so I am unable to analyze—I can’t sort by project or even sum how many Facebook posts took place in a given project.
One alternative would be searching for “Facebook post” IN “Project” but the issue there is if I have 10 projects I have to perform this search 10 times and then concatenate the results into a single CSV in order to do my basic analysis.
If I add a subtask to a project, it then appears in the top-level project view which doesn’t work well with my team’s preferred organizational view.
It would be great if I could add a subtask to a project but not have it appear in any section (so it would still mainly be visible either by clicking through parent tasks into the subtask, or in an exported search). Is that possible?
Why not search for tasks in project A, B, C and D?
Current Subtasks make workload useless.
A designer might have 8 hours worth of subtasks assigned you them tomorrow but they look 100% free. Help???
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Sure. Do not use subtasks 
Joke aside, subtasks are not part of the project so they don’t count in Workload. You can’t count both the main task and the subtasks, so I am not sure how it would play out.