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?
I think you hit the nail on the head @Jasluv_Brar . This isn’t a ground breaking idea yet it seems impossible for the Asana team to understand or see its value. I’ve come across numerous requests for basic features that are just impossible with Asana, or you get told to “use the API”.
I’ve been looking at Notion too and its feature set is staggering by comparison to Asana.
Look at that - you can’t even edit your own comment on their forum. Good grief!
@Marie and @Phil_Seeman I would want to have this as a need in my HR processes. Every instance would have a trigger and the routing would be based on aspects of the task being converted.
A detailed example would be that if an employee gets time off approved through our project that is a time off approval process, then that approved time off then becomes a subtask of the “task” that hosts personnel information of each employee under the personnel project.
More specifically, the time off request is generated through a form that is linked to the fields of “Department” and “Employee” so the trigger could be that when this time off request is approved, make this task a subtask of the same employee in the personnel project and it would be able to do that because the fields would align.
From what I see, this isn’t possible but seems that based on general logic of matching the trigger to the action based off of a field, I think it would be easy to make happen.
I look forward to your thoughts and feedback.
I am Hoping for the same thing!!
The subtask task would be done using zapier. Each task has a contract number associated with it, which would match the contract number that is found in the form submission.
Basically the task comes in through your forms, making a task in one project. Then that would trigger the zap to parse the contract number and search in the other project for the matching contract number and then turn the form submission task into sub task under that main.
The ID would be identified by the contract number.
@Brittany_Young - welcome to the forum! For your specific use case, this should be possible. I don’t use Zapier so can’t comment on exactly how you would implement it there, but the logic would be:
- Have a global custom number or text field in your intake project called
Contract Number. In your second project, set this value on each parent task. - When a form submission is received, send a request to Zapier with the newly created task (or have Zapier listen for this)
- Get the value from that
Contract Numberfield and have Zapier use the search API (I assume it has a module for this, if not, I assume there’s some kind of HTTP request module you could use) to look for tasks in the second project that are not subtasks and have the correctContract Numbervalue - If zero or multiple results are returned, throw an error. If only one result is returned, call the set parent endpoint and make the form task a subtask of this other task.
- (optional) call the remove project from task endpoint to clear the form task from the form project
Again, I don’t use Zapier so I don’t know what modules they have already built vs. what you would just need to set up a simple HTTP request for, but this would theoretically work for you.