🚨 Be careful with task auto-promotion disappearing

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You might have seen the grey banner, as shown on the image, above your My Tasks view on Asana. Asana is rolling out a new version of My Tasks and you’ll be missing deadlines if you don’t do what I describe below.

Capture d’écran 2021-05-18 à 20.35.28
Capture d’écran 2021-05-18 à 20.35.281500×236 39.6 KB

:scream: What are you talking about?
My Tasks is being updated to what is referred to as V2, with a new Board view and customizable sections. A side effect of this version is that the task auto-promotion is gone.

:thinking: What is task auto-promotion?
It is a hidden treasure of Asana: your tasks move automatically from Later to Upcoming and from Upcoming to Today based on the due date.

:hammer_and_wrench: How can I get it back?
By following the instructions given in the banner, and define a specific rule in the Customize menu.

:bomb: What happens if I don’t?
All your tasks in Later will never move up and will stay hidden in that section, you might miss many deadlines!

Comment below if you need help setting this up!

:fr: Version française

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Thanks @Bastien_Siebman . Think this post should be featured!

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@Bastien_Siebman only problem I found is that I had two sections (client work and internal work) where I would keep tasks a week out. When I created the rule, it now moves all of my tasks due today, every morning, to the designated section. I lose all organization - I was ok with the automatic moving out of Upcoming so I could organize, now I must organize all today tasks every day. I lost the ease of opening my Asana and getting going every day.

Not sure if anyone else is having this issue. I’ll have more time next week to play around with how to shift my views, just didn’t have a problem before.

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I am not sure what’s different between then and now :thinking:

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What we are still missing from the old MyTasks is the behaviour for tasks that fell into the “Recently Assigned” category. Previously, those tasks would sit there until you did something with them e.g. assign them to later, or upcoming, or today, or change the due date etc.

It was a good place to leave tasks that you weren’t sure what to do with yet, or to see what tasks other people had assigned to you recently.

With the new MyTasks, this behaviour is lost. When you apply “rules”, the tasks will shift to the appropriate section at midnight. I don’t want this to happen to tasks in the “recently assigned” section. I want them to stay there until I decide where I want to put them. Some times you get a task assigned to you from someone else and you don’t know about it until you look at the recently assigned section or your inbox.

Unfortunately, tasks assigned by others now run the risk of being lost, when one of your custom rules places them in a section at midnight. The old workflow was great because tasks just sat in “recently assigned” section until YOU decided where to put them.

For all the other sections I want tasks to auto-promote based on my rules. But for the recently assigned section, I don’t want auto-promotion to kick-in. I want them to stay there until I’ve reviewed them or put them in another section manually. Does anyone have a workaround for this issue for users that do not have a premium or business plan?

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Hi @Bastien_Siebman - Glad you posted this, as I was just searching for a solution that I think may be related to this?

We are a fully paid Business level Org, so we are able to use Custom Rules in all of our projects. Yet neither of our paid 2 seat users are given the option of Custom Rules on MyTasks (as it states on the support pages at Asana Academy that a Business member should have access to) (FYI: this is for all versions: app/desktop and browser).

I really need to customize MyTasks to be a useful tab for me (currently, it’s a massive long list, sorted by due dates, most of which are best guesses (vs. solid due dates) at this stage of our company’s development).

We have a very useful custom field on every task/project that helps us to prioritize daily workflow/task order (as a startup, everything is high priority and everything needs to be done yesterday!). Since we are only given the options to customize the columns by adding Due Date, Projects and Tag, I am not given the option to add that particular field for sorting. Custom Rules seems like a better solution anyway, as long as I can customize the Sections appearing on MyTasks, and create those custom rules to sort the tasks in accordance with the custom field that we are currently using for workflow priority.

But right now, My Tasks (for both paid users) has virtually no useful customization options, nor does it have an option for creating Custom Rules. It doesn’t look like the version they have on the Asana Academy pages that detail how to customize My Tasks. [How to Get Started With Asana My Tasks | Product Guide • Asana Product Guide]

Also, oddly, (and maybe this is new user error?), the only sections on MyTask are “Marked for Today - No Due Date” and “Later”. There is no “Today” or “Upcoming”. From what I can tell, all of my tasks that were assigned due dates are there on My Tasks in a huge run on list (but not auto-populated to a section); only one undated task auto-populated to “Marked for Today - No Due Date”. And anything that doesn’t have a due date auto-populated to “Later”. So it’s a very useless page to me in trying to create my daily workflow plan.

Any ideas? I’ll keep reading on the forums to see if I’m missing something obvious. But if this is how My Tasks is now, it’s a completely useless page to me if I can’t customize it to do what I will work best for me.

Thanks!

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@anon63027503 from what you are saying, I believe you don’t have access to MyTasks V2. Do you have the Board view at the top?

If not, you are on V1. On V1, sections are Today-Upcoming-Later and they disappear if there is nothing in them + there is no Rules.

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You’re exactly right on that! I did hear back from Support fairly quickly, asking for a screen grab of my MyTasks page, and then informed me I was on V1 and that it’s a gradual rollout of V2. I just wish whoever had created the Asana Academy page that got me all excited about being able to customize the MyTasks page, had also included a fairly prominent disclaimer that not everyone with a paid account would be able to access that feature at the same time. It may have been there somewhere, but it certainly didn’t register in my brain if it was. To be honest, as a new user, I wouldn’t know that MyTasks custom rules is a new feature. I had to re-read your initial post about the warning about task auto-promotion several times because I’d not yet gotten to really explore how I can use the MyTasks page to help streamline workflow. It’s your post that sent me to Asana Academy to learn more about how to use the MyTasks page more effectively. So when I read it, I assumed this was how it had always worked. Never imagined it was actually the new rollout of a feature update that was only rolling out in stages. But suddenly, I find myself on an Asana Academy page showing me in detail how Custom Rules work on MyTasks, and looking at my own MyTasks page and it looks like a scaled down version - which made me think I was somehow accessing the free/unpaid version of Asana on my MyTasks page? But that wouldn’t be right, I thought, because I have a seat in a paid business plan and Custom Rules are part of our subscription. So I sent in a request to Support about this and came back to do some more reading on the forum to see if anyone else was having this issue. Not sure whether I was not putting in the correct keywords on my searches, or if nobody else was posting about the V1 vs. V2 issues, but after reading for a while, it seemed to me that others weren’t having the same issue as I was.

Which triggered my doing a deep dive on why my Asana software and Asana browser pages were not updating the Asana software appropriately. Which was preceded by a deep dive to discover whether my MyTasks login potentially didn’t have the MyTasks Custom Rules feature, due to our Asana payment being processed by my partner using his Asana account/email. I had hoped that wasn’t a case of “you didn’t make the payment yourself, so you don’t get the feature”, as we are equal partners (and the choice of who physically processed the payment was rather random). Thankfully, his Asana account was not yet showing MyTasks V2 either. Otherwise, that would have likely triggered a rather useless back and forth with Support on a whole other subject!

I’m sure as I become a more seasoned Asana user, I’ll be more adept at figuring all of this out on my own. But this would have saved a lot of time if there had been a big huge red disclaimer box at the top of that Asana Academy page to state that I was about to read a tutorial on a V2 feature that I may not yet have access to yet, due to a random rollout.

Oh, can I also mention that Support told me that the new V2 update has been rolled out to newer accounts first, and as an older account, I haven’t gotten it yet and would at a later date. That seemed a bit strange, as we just began our paid account in May of 2021. And the forum posters that were asking questions about the V2 updates seemed to be far more seasoned users than I am at this point. So maybe they got it backwards, and the older users are getting it first, with newer users getting it last?

Who knows. But I am glad to finally realize that my Asana login wasn’t going to a free version or being blocked from some of the very useful tools I thought all seats would get access to in a paid account.

Thanks again for your amazing support of us all in the Forum! There seems to be a huge learning curve with Asana, but I do love that it’s got so many robust features. With my creative ADHD mind working in a very complex industry filled with gray areas, it really has made all the difference.

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@Bastien_Siebman looks like I finally have My Tasks 2.0. You mention “stay hidden” which is fair but did you know that with the new My Tasks you can’t collapse Later if there are over 1,000 tasks within the section? This is news to me. News to you?

image (3)

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I did not know.

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Interesting!

However, there is an easy solution to this one…

Patient: “Doctor, it hurts when I turn my head to the left. What should I do?”
Doctor: “Then don’t do that!”

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@Phil_Seeman - don’t do what exactly in this case? Don’t have over 1,000 things to do later? Trust me… that would be nice. Unfortunately, we launch annual plans in Asana so it isn’t uncommon that I have tasks assigned to be that aren’t due for 12-18 months.

The good news is Later will always remain the last section for me so I know when to stop scrolling. However, I wonder how this impacts the time to load the page. I have definitely seen some lag compared to V1.

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If this is important to you and others, I created a #productfeedback on it: The ability to collapse Later in My Tasks V2 when having > 1,000 tasks

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Precisely! :wink:

I was just kidding though… I’m quite sure you would not have that condition if you could help it!

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I actually :joy:’d when I read your response. Then I thought :thinking: maybe he knows of some trick I’m unaware of. Darn it… just a good sense of humor. :disappointed: :wink:

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These are useless sections anyway. They just complicate things. Just delete them and sort My Tasks list view by date. The due date of tasks past their due date will be at the top in red. Those due today and tomorrow will be on green and beyond that the date will be grey. Those with no due date will be in a section at the bottom of the list.

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I disagree, they aren’t useless to everyone. I use them heavily. Sorting by due date to me is only part of the picture, it is one way to go through your data. I know daily toggle between the none sort and due date sort.

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I discovered another very annoying behaviour. Most of my task were moved to a section of a project to which they never belonged. I have no idea why this happened. Is there a way to define a standard section for tasks to move to, before a rule can be defined?

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If you open one of those tasks, just above the comments there will be an explanation of what happened, when and why. Can you tell us?

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“Peter Metzinger moved this task from “Last assigned” to “Speakers list complete” in My Tasks.” (“Speakers list complete” is a section that belongs to a specific project, but the tasks which I allegedly moved – but I didn’t do that – never belonged to that project.)