Convert Subtask to Task (NEW QUESTION)

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.

5 Likes

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.

1 Like

@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. :crazy_face:

1 Like

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. :slight_smile:

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.

2 Likes

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…

  1. 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.)
  2. 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.

3 Likes

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?

1 Like

Thanks a lot! You saved me a lot of time today! =)

What I’ve been doing as a workaround is the following:

  1. Create a new top-level task, copy and paste subtask title into new task
  2. Merge subtask into the new top-level task.

I’m fairly sure this retains all the information from the merged task.

1 Like

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?

1 Like

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.

7 Likes

Hi there, can someone post a quick video of what you do to move a subtask to become a task? I read through this thread and I am not accomplishing it.

1 Like

Not a video, but did you try this which seemed to work for others:

Larry

4 Likes

Not a video. The only thing I’ve gotten to work:

  1. Expand the task
  2. Click the set of 6 docs to the left of the sub task
  3. Drag the subtask to the left in the far pane into the project that you want it in. Now it’s a task.

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!

Gold!

This topic was automatically closed after 8 days. New replies are no longer allowed.