Assign multiple assignees on one task

honestly this is ridiculous. i understand the design philosophy and i’ve asked for this to be changed for years. in almost every organization I’ve worked in there are times where there are tasks on a regular basis that could be completed by /anyone/ at the organization as long as someone gets to it that day. something as simple as taking out the trash. those should be able to be set assigned to multiple people, so it doesn’t need to be manually assigned each day. someone can just be like, oh, no one took the trash out today, and handle it, without having to make a time wasting discussion of it or copy tasks or any other complicated thing. Just let us do this.

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I got the trash today. Check it off! :slight_smile:

Is there anyway to assign to a list of people (but not using a team name)?

E.g I have a lot of people (over 20) from other teams completing the same task and I want a way to invite them all easily without having to type in their names each time (its for a monthly meeting).
I know you can do this using team names, but it would be nice to be able to create a list of collaborators and use that instead of a creating a whole new team.

Does anyone else have need for this or have any ideas?

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How about we have another tier of assignee? Keep the one primary assignee, but have option to choose multiple secondary assignees. Honestly, I’m not finding the proofing function not very helpful for a couple of reasons: 1) I don’t know how to get my request for approval onto everyone’s task list, 2) people see the “Approve” button at the top of the task and can mark it “Approved” when not everyone has signed off (I only want it to show approved on the task when ALL the required people have actually approved it).

My hope was that people could log into Asana in order to answer the question “What do I need to do today relative to this project?” How can they see that it’s on their to-do list to proof and approve?

I agree with the folks above, that copying tasks is too much of a headache.

Thanks!

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Lol. This issue is three years old. Just give your users what they want.

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This actually can be done differently — let tasks be “owned” by one person and allow to have a number of watchers, that will receive all updates on this task.

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For real. At least three years of people asking for this. There are so many different reasons for this, especially within smaller teams that are moving quickly- for example where you don’t care who achieves it, so long as it’s done.

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Are there ANY plans to implement this? Only being able to assign one person to a task is a huge headache. We have many tasks that are collaborative and require two (or more) people, all of whom are responsible for whether it gets completed. Asana can proselytize all it wants about how we should be managing projects, but it should ultimately leave it up to us to decide what works best for our needs. If the little ‘collaborators’ feature is supposed to be enough then tasks that tag me as a collaborator should show up in my “My Tasks” page. Good lord, add this to the ever-growing list of reasons I wish I hadn’t moved my entire workflow here before trying it in more real-world applications.

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Who did you go with? I’m struggling with getting my team on board Asana

I’m with you, and also voted for this feature to be added. Assigning copies doesn’t really work for me either.

A workaround for your specific examples could be to create a list of recurring tasks which are assigned to no-one and save them in a single project or a report. Staff could be mandated to check in on this project or report daily, and take care of any incomplete items if they have capacity. When recurring items are repeated, they automatically repopulate the next time that they’re needed, whether that’s daily, weekly, or something else.

I know that’s not the solution we are all hoping for, but maybe it can help in the short term.

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Could not agree more. I’m thinking of switching programs because this feature is so essential to our day to day at a ranch where I have innumerable tasks that need to be done, and it hardly matters by whom.

Agreed. It’s worth dumping Asana over this. Let me know if you find another tool that gets the job done.

I moved back to Trello - they do support multiple assignees per task. Their lack of central dashboard is a pain, but there are some paid addons that are great, and frankly I’d rather give my money to a company who’s not going to tell me how to manage my teams. :roll_eyes:

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Thanks. Looks like I’ll be doing the same.

It mildly feels like Asana is promoting a management philosophy (as they have every right to do) above providing tools for management. In which case, while uncomfortable and also resource draining, it is incumbent upon Executives to make critical decisions on alternate frameworks and platforms on which to build. My angst is that it took me so long to get to this reality after finally going “big-time” and taking project management serious as I grow my business.

Having a workaround for opening a failing door latch is genius on the first day, an annoyance on the next, picked apart and criticized on the next, a hindrance on the next, chaos on the next and impending mutiny on every day thereafter. Having a workaround in systems that people are not predisposed to utilize in the first place… every day after day one… disastrous!

Like every other system in our small business, I’m working diligently to find ways for it to work with us and not for us to work with it. If I find that circling back to Asana is the best option for us, I am confident that the effort will be rewarded.

“There are no small successes… only small celebrations.” May your celebrations be frequent and full!

Confession: I just realized that on top of the cogent reasoning i engaged in above… i have issues unrelated to Asana, which makes this feel “icky.” Whenever someone tells me that i can’t do something because it’s against “best practices” it feels like a power play instead of principled concern for product efficiency, brand identity, my success, or the like.

3 years in and the repeated offering of “you need to have one key person assigned to an individual task” ‘because that’s how we’ve always done it, it’s the best way for us and you,’ is so Baby-Boomerish in its approach to dealing with tech consumers in a global market! I just feel like running away! ugh!!

Says more about me, than it does about Asana. Confession end.

i want to be able to see all my boards which are independent proyects, aswell as all my subtasks, which i organize in the task viewer to see for example all the clients who owe me money, since inside their project there’s a subtask that says they owe me but i can’t be getting inside of every one to see which owe and which doesn’t, now that im expanding i need another person to have the same view i do, which makes the subtask look like individual asignments while being inside an independent project.

im not trying to say 2 people need to finish a task, im trying to be able to organize the subtasks without making amess of my proyects, thats why i want to make 2 people “responsible” so they can both see every single subtask displayed and use the sections to have them grouped.

this just clutters the project, there need to be another way to let multiple people see the task in their mytask, as others have suggested, what if i want to make a task for 15 people to be at a meeting so that they all have it on their “my task”, or to answer a form? instead i need to go on google calendar, make an event and add 15 people, then ask them one by one to also check their calendar.

you are killing me

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Just want to add to Jano’s comment that using the “Assign Copies” function clutters the project. Here’s an example: I make a task to review and approve a document before it goes out to a client. I assign 3 copies to 3 different people. Those 3 people make comments on 3 different tasks – and now (a) they aren’t talking to each other, and (b) I need to check for feedback in 3 different places.

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@Justine_D I feel your pain with this. In our team, we have had to enforce among ourselves a workflow to address the problem you mentioned. We create a task assigned to the person needing the review (e.g. Review this document). If you are ultimately responsible for submitting said document, you are the assignee. Then we create a subtask with similar/same title assigned to each person who is to review the document, but add a simple text indicator to let people know that it’s a special kind of task e.g. [Sub] Review this document. We chose [Sub], which stands for subtask. These special subtasks are understood by the team to mean that each individual subtask should be completed by the date/time (due time really helps people to get it done on time). The description field in the subtask usually says “Please comment in the parent task”, but after a while, we all got used to this pattern, and there wasn’t anymore confusion.

With this pattern, each person has their own accountability trail with their own subtask, comments are put in the parent task, and you as the parent task assignee are ultimately able to monitor/mark off the task once you feel the effort was sufficient. If my awkward description doesn’t make sense, refer to the image below for an example.

To cut down on effort to set this up, I recommend after creating the first subtask (don’t include the assignee name in the subtask title, though it may be tempting), duplicate it X times (before assigning it to a person) including the due date. Then from the parent task, just assign each subtask to a person. It’s pretty fast.

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