Can project names be added to subtasks?

[Ambryn_Dahlstrom]

Can project names be added to subtasks?

[Andrea_Mayer]

Hello @Ambryn_Dahlstrom,

welcome to the Asana forum

Have you considered multi-homing tasks?

Top features to discover

Or if you want you can use custom fields as well.

And this might be an interesting thread to upvote:

Show project on subtask in 'My tasks' view

When subtasks are assigned to a person and they show up in the ‘My tasks’ view, there is no project ‘tag’ visible on that subtask. There is a reference to the parent task, but therefore I have to look up the parent task first and check to which project that task belongs. It would be more efficiently to directly show the project tag on each subtask.

Hope that helps

[Daniel_Frischknecht]

Hi @Ambryn_Dahlstrom

Not sure if I understand your question correctly, but you can add subtasks to a project by pressing tab-p when within a subtask and then the possibility to add the task to a project shows up. Not really intuitive, but it works .

Cheers.
Daniel

[Ambryn_Dahlstrom]

Hi Andrea,

This is not helpful. All this does is show that hundreds of other Asana users have had the same problem for over three years now with no fixes. This makes me want to leave Asana.

Ambryn Dahlstrom

[Andrea_Mayer]

Hello @Ambryn_Dahlstrom
to be able to assist you better could you explain where exactly you would like to be able to see the project and the reason?
Is it in the my tasks as per the above link?

It always also depends on the project access you have on whether you can see the project the task is added to or not.

In terms of how Asana is listening to customer feedback I‘d like to refer to Emily‘s post:

@Emily_Roman

Over the last few years, we’ve heavily relied on customer feedback to build Asana, and while we can’t always address every request as quickly as our users would like to, we do have a robust customer feedback process in place to surface feedback and feature requests; you can learn more about it in this post .

[Ambryn_Dahlstrom]

Hi Andrea,

It’s in My Tasks that it doesn’t show the project that the task is linked to. So, for our copywriter, he sees, “Write copy. Write copy. Write copy,” but he doesn’t know what project its for.

Which projects have this feature?

Thanks,

Ambryn

[Andrea_Mayer]

Hello @Ambryn_Dahlstrom,

then I recommend to multihome tasks for your content writer.
You could maybe have a project just for the content writer or if you have more one project for them with various stages/sections set up on the progress such as To Do, In Progress, Proofreading, etc (if required)
Or a custom field with the project names works well too.

In general I recommend to not name tasks just “Write copy” because then when you need to find a task via the search or advanced search things can get messy and take longer to locate tasks + when team members check their inbox or Asana to do list if they have a bunch of tasks just called “Write copy” it can be very confusing.

I’d also like to refer to Bastien’s post: 🏷 Naming tasks and projects is an art, but don't underestimate its importance

Hope that helps

[lpb]

@Ambryn_Dahlstrom,

In the copywriter’s My Tasks, did they try clicking Customize and toggling on the field “Projects”?

Larry

[Andrea_Mayer]

Hello @lpb
but if the copywriter has no access to the project directly they won‘t be able to see the name as far as I know or?

[Ambryn_Dahlstrom]

Hello and thanks for replying with your suggestion.

I have clicked Customized and toggled on the Projects field. It’s good because it shows the project associated with a task. Not great, however, because it doesn’t show the project associated with a Subtask.

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[lpb]

@Andrea_Mayer, Right, the copywriter must have access to the project by being a member of the project or the team if the project is public to the team.

@Ambryn_Dahlstrom, Right, to give the subtask context that’s visible in My Tasks, either 1) home the subtask to a meaningful project and now you’ll see that in My tasks, or 2) make sure the parent task has enough contextual info because even for a subtask the parent task is visible as in your screenshot: “< Revise Slides Haley” and setting the contextual info in the parent task makes it present for all subtasks with that one action.

Hope that helps,

Larry

[anon77075002]

If Assignee has access to Subtask only, but not to the root Task or to the root Project - they will not see the Task or Project name.

[lpb]

@anon77075002,

To clarify your use of “root” which is different in the cases you gave…

If Assignee doesn’t have access to the parent task she won’t see the parent task, and if she doesn’t have access to the project the subtask belongs to, she won’t see that project membership.

Thanks,

Larry

[Bill_Pataky]

The way we solved this is to put the name of the project in the subtask title. It’s a bit brute-force but we had the same problem and this works. For example, instead of seeing in My Tasks:

• Write copy
• Write copy

they’d see:

• Project1: Write copy
• Project2: Write copy

[anon30261519]

We have the same issue, so I restructured the naming conventions of the main project, then tasks associated. Here’s an example:

[Section Title] (MP) Millennium Park Tree Lighting
[Task] MP Recap Video Blog
[Sub-Task] MP _ Write blog copy

Essentially is truncates the Project name to an acronym that can be applied to individual tasks, main or sub. This way it differentiates for my team who’s producing many blogs and easier to identify in their My Tasks.

[Myron_Flouris]

Do you do this manually? Or there’s some sort of workflow rule that automatically converts “Write Copy” to “Project1: Write Copy”?
We do the same, but we have to do this manually.

[Bill_Pataky]

We’ve been doing it manually and like Karen suggested, using an acronym for brevity. If there is a way to do this with a rule, I’d like to know about it.

This would be a very useful feature if Asana decided to implement it.

[Myron_Flouris]

I think many would find it more than useful, for recurring tasks, tasks of the same type under different projects, etc.
In my opinion, it shouldn’t be a point of discussion from the first place: it should be out-of-the-box feature (option) or at least feasible with a fairly simple workflow rule. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, neither of the above is here.

[Tamara_Hale]

This does not work. Subtasks still have a BLANK project name even when the Product toggle button is set to On.

[Phil_Seeman]

@Tamara_Hale

This does not work.

Right - that suggestion above was responding to a message about tasks, not subtasks. Tasks are attached to their project so the Projects column works to display the project name. Subtasks are not attached to the project(s) where they live so that column remains blank.

@Bill_Pataky

If there is a way to do this with a rule, I’d like to know about it.

Not with a native Asana rule, but you can do it with a Flowsana rule, as in our Flowsana integration:

• A rule can be set to trigger on subtasks only
• You can put the project name in the task’s name via a “Modify task’s name” rule action and our Variable Substitution feature or you can put the project name in a text custom field