Thank you @Shawn_Kresal ! This has been driving me NUTS, and I’ve wasted over an hour trying to figure this out.
Honestly, I don’t understand @Natalia why Asana just doesn’t have a “Convert to task” option. There are some old, smaller projects I have archived that I’d like to downgrade to tasks with subtasks, so a “Convert to task” option would help with that.
Love Asana, by the way! It’s been a lifesaver, overall.
Thank you also @Shawn_Kresal - I was struggling with the same issue and most of the other posts didn’t capture the nuance of the subtask staying with the parent. Saved me a lot of headache!
Not sure if behavior has changed since this was marked complete but I was trying to do this (convert a subtask into a task under the same project as its original task). I tried dragging and dragging carefully but it never showed the black line to drop in the subtask as its own independent task; it would only show the grey box surrounding the Section I was trying to drag it into and it would retain the link back to its original task parent. The only way I was able to find was to drag the subtask all the way to the left-hand panel and into the project itself, however, when I did this the task seemed to enter a purgatory where it was no longer attached to any project and could only be found by searching for the task description - once I opened the task detail, i could add it back into the Project-Section I wanted by clicking on “Add to Project”. Way too hard. There needs to be a ‘simple’ “Make a Task of” option similar to the “Make a Subtask of”
I had the same problem, and the behavior has changed because I used to do the drag-and-drop trick others mention above regularly, and then it just recently stopped working for me. Thanks for the workaround Michael, this was driving me nuts.
@Michael_Barry you are right, this is way too much work to achieve a simple goal. We should not have to trick Asana into accomplishing the actions we want.
Hi Natalia, I was going round and round with this issue this morning. I think one of the responses that calls out the need to see the black line should be flagged as the correct answer—it’s a big contributor to understanding the problem! Just a suggestion.
Just a note since I was also struggling with this and trying your solution as well and it sounds like maybe some people have the same issue - I realized in the project I had sorted tasks in order of due date by clicking on that column at the top. When I was dragging a subtask over to make it a regular task I was still getting the big gray box in all sections of the project and the task would duplicate. When I removed the sort order, this problem disappeared.
Thanks a million for documenting this. Helped me finally succeed after a good 20 mins of trying to work this out. In doing so, I also found a workaround for your purgatory issue…
Click and drag the subtask from the parent task into whatever section you want it to become a task in. (When you’ve done this, it appears both in the section and as a subtask under the original parent task.)
Click and drag the subtask from the parent task a second time. This time, drop it over in the left-hand panel you mentioned – into the project itself.
Now, instead of it being landing in purgatory, it appears as a task of its own in the section you dragged it into in step 1. It is also removed from the parent task.
Good find on the workaround! Hopefully Asana will still enable a way to directly promote it to a task from within the subtask without needing to drag it around twice. Does anyone know how to convert this thread into a feature request?
I have spent hours trying to do this. My sub tasks need to turn into tasks into different projects. Instead, when I move them into different projects, they live there and I can’t remove them from the old projects. Why not just be able to change a sub task into a task?
The only thing I’ve found that works @anon18061031 is to open the details window, on the right-hand side, in the project where the subtask lives.
Drag the subtask over the the main task list on the left-hand side. But you have to hover at the very top of the list, right underneath the “Task Name” header until you see a dark black line. If you drop the subtask there it will turn into a top-level task. You should be able to make it a task in any new project from there.
It looks like it may not be working consistently for some, but I just tested it and it still works for me (on the web version).
As much as I love Asana, this is a massive oversight on their part as far as the user experience.
Thanks for this, Michael! I found the same behaviour - the above solution only copied the sub-task in the same view as the parent task - it didn’t break the Parent<>Sub relationship.
But by dragging the Sub Task all the way to the left hand list of projects, I could drop it in the project I wanted.
Interestingly, though, I found the newly minted Task would just pop to the top of whatever project I had dropped it on - so not quite out into the depths of Purgatory!