After hours of digging and experimenting with automation software and macro recorders, I have to say, it doesn’t really seem like this team at Asana listens to the feedback on these forums. I’ve come across many conversations dating back to 2020 where individuals are asking for rules/automations regarding subtasks. Instead, we got an update for “convert to” rules that everyone couldn’t care less about (see picture below). Have been using Asana for 2+ years alongside other software and every time it comes down to automation, Asana is the worst out of the bunch. Seriously considering moving everything to notion just to get out of this ecosystem. For the love of God, just add some automation functionality to subtasks. Allow us to automatically convert and edit subtasks based on triggers inside of Asana. What’s even worse is that there seems to be no attempt to solve these problems. Asana doesn’t seem to care to fix the issue and on top of that, it doesn’t seem like they care to collaborate with companies like Zapier either. If anyone can help solve this issue using a workaround, your help would be appreciated. I am trying to create a rule or zapier automation that will automatically convert a task to a subtask once it is added to a project.
Hello @Jasluv_Brar,
What you’re looking to achieve here is technically difficult because you would need to specify what task your subtask would be affiliated with. @Phil_Seeman, is this something Flowsana can help with by any chance?
Hi @Jasluv_Brar,
Flowsana would have the same challenge that @Marie mentions here. In your desired automation, how would it know under which task to place the newly-converted subtask? Would there just be one task that’s “hard-coded” into the rule action as the parent for all converted subtasks? Or…?
Yes I would really love to be able to do this as well. I get lost in zapier but it seems that I dance all around the answer. I wish someone could help me connect the dots. An ideal chain of events for one of my projects is:
Form filled out >>> task made from form>>>zap identifies specified information from the task made from form>>>>identifies same specified information within another already existing task in the project>>>>moves task created from the form to a subtask position in already existing task in the project. I want a task to automatically become a subtask when certain features match.
Hi @Julie_Vrobel,
I’ll ask you the same thing I asked above…
Can you elaborate on this? I.e. how specifically would Asana or Zapier or ______ determine which task the target task should be moved underneath of?
I would like to set the affiliated main task in the rule. But there is no way to even “convert to subtask” using a rule.
Correct, in my case, it would be a hard-wired rule that would take a task and turn it into a subtask under a specific main task if it met the conditions set out by the trigger. For example. I have set up a rule that adds a task from one project to another if a certain custom field is selected. Now in the new project, I want to create a trigger that would automatically turn the task into a subtask if it had a certain custom field selected. Which is what I am struggling to do.
^^Yes, looking to do the same. The “convert to subtask” function that currently exists, which allows you to convert one task into a subtask of another is what we’re looking to do…automatically if there is a trigger met from a form submission (ie project type field).
Since the form submission creates a task, I’m struggling to understand how it would be complicated to automatically convert the task to a subtask of another (existing) task?