Can an item be multi-homed as a task in one project and a section in another?

I am the assistant director of a small nonprofit and when we’re planning out the year or the quarter, it’s useful to see the major events that are happening, like quarterly newsletters, board meetings, events, etc. What I would love to do is set up some kind of roadmap or calendar project that has month names for sections, and the major events in each month as a task under that section, so it might be something like:

May:
Q2 Newsletter
5.23 Board Meeting

And so on. The idea would be that if it’s March and we have an idea for something to put in our Q2 newsletter but it’s not actually time to draft or send the newsletter yet, it’s good to have one repository for all of those ideas so that they’re waiting for us when we’re ready. However, when it’s actually time to create the newsletter, I kind of want to grab the Q2 newsletter task into another project (“Communications” or our weekly sprint planning or something), where it would live as a section with all of the specific newsletter components as tasks underneath (I strongly dislike subtasks as implemented in Asana because I chronically forget to click into tasks to look at them). Is this possible, or is there another way to structure this?

Hi
Yes you can click on the task “newsletter” and drag it into another project.
Once into this new project, you can add “:” at the end of the task name “newsletter :” and it will become a section, and you will still have into the section the info you noted into the description.

Hmm, maybe I’m not understanding but that doesn’t seem to give me the functionality I want. I was hoping to have “Newsletter” still exist as a task in one project and a section in another. I’m basically attempting to create a workaround for the fact that I can’t expand sub-tasks - if I could just put a bunch of subtasks in “Newsletter” but then expand them so they were visible in my main task view, that would work too, but as far as I know that’s not possible.

You won’t be able to have it be both a non-section task in one project and a section in another - because (as I think you discovered), once you make it into a section by adding a “:” to the end of its name, that makes it a section in both places.

FYI I’m in the process of creating an Asana-based app which solves this issue by displaying tasks and subtasks in an outline (see GetTreesana.com if you’re interested in more info).