Back referencing/linking when a task is referenced in other tasks

@Bastien_Siebman Good to hear from you, I appreciate your response! I checked out your tools’ page, very impressive and I may sign up as you have a ton of useful stuff!

Sorry if that came across as cynical, but I truly believe Asana needs to improve the roadmap handling. I first experimented here 2 yrs ago, but gave up for other tools. In the end I could not find anything that fit my team’s needs well enough during that whole time, so I am going to try Asana again. Main reasons:

  • Simplicity of task creation and visibility, in particular the improved list view which shows subtasks nested
  • Large number of native integrations
  • Great communication - the conversations are designed with real insight. Key for me is the subject. Gives them a real chance to replace Email, and much more sensible than Slack where the messages can deteriorate into an endless stream that is next to impossible to follow
  • App has really come along nicely, and some of my team is trying to go more with iPads these days

However, I have always been disappointed with the presence of the Asana Product team here in the community, and I think the pace of the roadmap is way not in line with the other seemingly outstanding elements of the organization - well designed fundamentals of the core App, massive funding, award after award for great place to work, etc.

  • There are a bunch of threads in here with 5+ messages asking for clarification from Asana official representatives, and zero response.

  • I do not understand the lack of a public roadmap. The Release Notes are Ok, but not too detailed, and do not connect to any activity in the forum here. And I think Asana is just going slow. There are a ton of new apps coming up that are releasing similar functionality, and more, at a fast pace. Examples of features that I think took way too long for an organizations of Asana’s capabilities:

    • allowing projects to be in list or board view, or
    • a start date on tasks/projects.

I realize there were challenges with those, but this is not a 35-person start-up and I expect more (Asana is not cheap!).

In the end I am here though and hoping to get the most from Asana, and very optimistic for now! I would love to get the ability to have those terrific mentions already present show up in tasks “where they are mentioned.” One use I have are team meetings: If you make a task for a meeting, you could then go to each task you are talking about, @mention the meeting task, and then if those references were picked up in the original meeting task, you’d have a nice list of what you talked about and what decisions were made automatically generate in the meeting task. Simply share that task to your team, and viola you have an amazing meeting note. Even the function of “Follow-on Tasks,” one of my favorites, does not include any trace of the follow-on in the original task, nor automatically close it, which could be useful. With reciprocal linking, that would happen automatically. I created a request around that as well:

There is also a very up-and-coming note-taking tool called roamresearch.com which is predicated on reciprocal linking. It really shows the potential here. And once again, I feel like Asana is 1/2 way there, so with the mentions coming through on “the other side,” you’d also get some of the benefit that Roam is showing is very helpful when organizing.

Once again thanks, and I look forward to seeing all that the Asana product team has in store, even though I wish the pace was faster!