Archive a Section in a Project

[lpb]

Over two weeks ago I wrote about the loss of functionality to complete a section and its tasks and maintain that historical association between section and tasks. It relates to this thread. Also, I just updated that post to 1) make it more clear, and 2) add a workaround (extra work). Here’s the content of that post:

Background

The new sections behavior update (Lists/Boards) rolling out now breaks many List workflows that rely on easily completing no-longer-needed sections.

This is because a section can’t be completed, only deleted, and not if it has any tasks within it (even only completed tasks). Usually one wants to keep completed tasks around for history, not delete them. And one doesn’t want to lose their membership in the section which provides context, historically, so moving to no section is not helpful either.

The only option I’m aware of with sections now is just to shove them down at the bottom of your project so they’re as out of the way as possible. They could be preceded by an additional section called “IGNORE EVERYTHING BELOW” which might help some, but it’s all ugly and undesirable.

A workaround is not to use sections. I often use a custom field instead, which in many cases is better than a section because you can sort/group by it, but for many of these workflows, adding custom field options (the equivalent of adding a section) is too painful, or otherwise a custom field is not a good substitute.

Another (painful) workaround in order to replicate the removed functionality of maintaining the association of completed tasks to the section they belong to is to:

1. Create a new project called “<Project name> - Completed”,
2. Create a section of the same name as the one you’re about to delete,
3. Change the project association for all of this section’s tasks from “<Project name> v <Section>” to “<Project name> - Completed v <Section>” thus moving these tasks to a separate completed/archive project,
4. Delete the section from “<Project name>”.

This forces you to have two projects where you used to only have one, but allows you to maintain the section membership for completed tasks/sections that once could be done in a single project. (This is an unfortunate example of Asana creating work about work, I’m afraid.)

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And another similar report by someone else:

Mark Sections as Complete (in new spreadsheet List view)

NEED: The ability to mark a section as complete so it no longer appears within a project when filtering for incomplete tasks. AND to be able to do that without deleting the history of tasks within that section. SUGGESTION: Add an option to sections and boards to either a) complete the section as you would a task, or b) archive the section as you would a project. *Please do not conflate this issue with the need to be able to delete a section. These are two related but fundamentally different is…

And another:

How to hide sections when I completed all the tasks inside the section?

Hi all, After the latest Asana update, you can’t really complete section until you have tasks inside, even completed tasks. This is weird: it is naturally to close section when all the tasks are done. However, we don’t want to delete them, but to complete, but the section becomes obsolete now. In our case, we use Asana for sprints planning, once the team complete the tasks we close the sprint by removing the section. Is there any option to roll-back to the older version of Asana?

I’d guess this is breaking a lot of workflows.

Thanks,

Larry