Assign multiple assignees on one task

If we can’t have multiple assignees, a person custom field would be great that way you can highlight the different roles and who needs to be informed.

I tried a hack it by manually adding team member names to a custom field dropdown but the limit is 50 and there are 70+ people on the team. Plus it would be good just to look up people’s names that are already there, rather than manually adding them. Monday, Airtable, Notion do this already

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I admit this would be really convenient as well, however here is what I’ve done as a work around:

There are many times where you have a task that requires multiple different people to complete a part of that task or maybe it’s just you, but you want/need to do parts of the task on different days. To get around that, I’ve been making the initial task and leaving it unassigned and undated. Under that task, I create subtasks layout out each part of the job. Then I can assign those subtasks to individual people or on person with different dates.

In my example, I have one task under a project section, “writing articles reminding people to sign up” , but this task needs to be done on multiple websites and I wanted to break up the work between myself and a co-worker while stretching them out over about a month.

I created the task, then created subtasks for each website to write an article on, then assigned the individual subtasks to myself or my coworker with the desired due dates.

One of the only negatives I’ve found about this is that subtasks do not hold the color coding on a calendar view like a task does when assigned to a specific project. As an Asana Together Ambassador, I have yet to find a way around that one besides just making your subtasks regular tasks, but that doesn’t really look right structure wise.

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In follow up to myself, I realized you can create tags on the subtasks and set the tag color to the color of the project and it’ll make your subtasks show up as the same as the project color. It does mean a bit more work when added each subtask, but if you really care about how it looks on your calendar seems like a google solution.

I think the use case that makes the MOST sense for this is on Milestones. Tasks I understand only being assigned to one person, because a specific amount of work is being completed—but many folks, managers, the person completing the work, c-suite people overseeing it need broad visibility into the dates of milestones. Even if only Milestones were allowed to have multiple assignees, that would be a huge improvement for our workflow.

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We are currently assessing Asana, and this is one feature that will be a dealbreaker.

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Mar '17 → Mar '21 …four years have passed since @Michael_M posted rather simple idea. Multiple assignees. Four years.

@Marie any answers? Considering recent announcement The Asana Community Forum has been awarded best "Support and Customer Success Community” for 2021! 🏆?

Btw. wondering if @Michael_M is still a user…

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Hi @Michal_Skrna

I regularly update our product team with the feedback shared on this thread but we aren’t planning to implement this feature at the moment. I’ve explained our reasoning for making this decision many times on this thread, but you can refer to this article for more info on this topic.

@Bastien_Siebman has also shared some handy workaround in 🔥 Hottest feature requests and their workarounds which you may find useful.

I don’t foresee this feature being implemented in the near future, but I’m committed to continue sharing your feedback with our team and will keep you posted here if our decision on this topic was to change.

@Marie thanks for your prompt answers. I completely understand “one responsible = job done” concept. From the ariticle you linked through I like this part -

“Still not convinced? Here’s a way to break up the work, but still just have one assignee: use one assignee on the parent task so the person ultimately responsible for making sure deadlines are met. Then, create subtasks, assigned to different members of the team. Divide up pieces of work across the team, but make sure someone is on the line to get the overall job done.”

The only problem is, that subtasks don´t appear neither in Timeline nor Workload so we can´t plan properly. Imagine a basic situation - a meeting or presentation where two colleagues should attend and we can plan time just for one. Multiplying all related taks is not the option, Asana list will be unorganizable, we´re architects we need simple features our work is complex enough ; )

Thank you anyway for definitely closing this topic.

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It is considered bad advice by many, as subtasks really don’t behave the way you expect them to :slight_smile:

In that case you should assign duplicates I guess.

It depends. Just yesterday I just used two subtask assignments for two people to read a document, putting the document link in the parent task so there’s no unnecessary duplication. I use subtasks for this regularly with great success. This works very well for meetings, multiple approvals and signoffs, etc. I recognize @Michal_Skrna has an issue in not being able to track meeting attendance in Timeline or Workload without additional effort, but many (most, I’d imagine) don’t care about that, and certainly it doesn’t come into play for approvals and signoffs.

@Bastien_Siebman, I know you’re very against subtasks (and we disagree on this), but to not include the above in 🔥 Hottest feature requests and their workarounds as an alternative workaround (W1.3) for multiple assignment is really not helpful, in my opinion. Would you consider adding it?

Thanks,

Larry

I plan on recording a podcast episode with @Julien_RENAUD who never uses subtasks and that amazes me. I am not completely against it, but I believe not having a clear rule is bad and I struggle to make up my mind around subtasks :confused:

Yes sure I’ll add it!

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Dear Bastien,

Thank you very much for your effort to help us manage our workflow within Asana. My point was that we need Asana make the most of the organising automated for us. We´re architects, we don´t want to spend too much time organising the work, we like to design and create ; )

Duplicating everything is an option, we´ll try to get used to it. I follow your list of workarounds, any future tips are very welcome.

Best regards

Michal Skrna

Just in case you did not know that, there is a “Assign copies” feature. You create a task, click on the assignee, and then on Assign copies. That will automatically assign a copy, there no extra manual work and everyone get their own task.

Take care!

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@Michal_Skrna and @Bastien_Siebman,

I feel the best workaround is to combine Assign Copies and Subtasks such that the assignments are in subtasks for that purpose only and the task content/details need not be repeated at all. I offered that workaround here in this very thread two years ago!:

(@Bastien_Siebman, perhaps this belongs in W1.3 of https://forum.asana.com/t/assign-multiple-assignees-on-one-task/1176/198.)

Thanks,

Larry

Weighing in because I came here searching for a solution to this problem. Using subtasks as a way to assign a single task to multiple people is a workaround we have started incorporating, but this is still not ideal. Subtasks play an important role for many of our team’s tasks, and so I have to choose whether to make use of them as subtasks or sub-assignments. I’d prefer to have both options available, because otherwise things can get messy (i.e., multiple ways of assigning a single task to multiple people = confusing).

As another aside, I don’t mind making copies of tasks, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to link them (unless I’m missing something). Therefore, if I assign one task to 5 people, but later want to make an update to the task description, I’d have to make it individually for each task. This is frustrating, and is a reason I’ve gravitated away from assigning copies (in most cases).

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This is one of the reasons why I use Assign Duplicates in subtasks–because the parent task becomes the sole original and updates can happen with one edit, not an edit per duplicate.

Could you use subtask-sections to allow both regular subtasks and assignment subtasks (within an Assignments subtask-section) to co-exist for a parent task?

Larry

We love Asana , but the number one complaint that keeps coming up is not being able to assign multiple people to a task. One of our most common use cases is that we have a list of follow ups between people in a project, and every morning we have to parse the titles of all of the ones scheduled for the current day for the list of names of the people that need to meet, since there can only be one assignee. It’s extremely time consuming and often some important ones are missed. Creating subtasks for each person was even slower and we gave up on that idea.

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I agree that the lack of ability to assign more than one person so a task is going to cause issues for my company.

My team currently uses Asana, but my company is on the hunt for a platform for the whole agency. Currently, the inability to assign more than one person to a task is making our creative team reject Asana. They want to go with Monday, that allows tasks to be assigned to individuals or whole teams. They also also allow multiple use columns - so there would be a column for, say, Account Director, Copywriter, Designer etc.

In fact, Asana’s custom column functionality is very limited in general compared to Monday.com.

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As much as I love the function of duplicate assignee, I got 50 people getting the same assignment. I have to write in 50 names to file it to them. That’s fun for the first 10 times, after that it gets a bit… bad.
Would be very great to have a function to “assign to Team” - and then it duplicates. Wouldn’t kill your design decision that one task is a person and all that - that’s fine - sure, but manually inputting names… gnah.

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There are many use cases for adding multiple assignees on a task. For example, when a document moves to the “review” stage, then there are multiple people reviewing. No, we do not want these as subtasks because they get lost in the weeds and don’t appear on the main project’s task. No, we don’t want to create multiple tasks with each person assigned because it creates clutter and cuts from the main task. This allow doesn’t allow people to collaborate in one task chat. Please make this a feature. The fact that it’s not due to ‘task ownership’ theory is not right. It is closed-minded. Perhaps when someone adds a new assignee, put a pop up warning that its’ recommended to have one task assignee. But it is not your place to make the decision for users. This absolutely ruins the user experience.

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