We also use Asana as tool to plan our print issues and the count numbers in brackets hack was very useful for us to check our progress status in production
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Thanks for the feedback, @Wolfgang_Fischer. Weād recommend trying out Custom Fields for adding up numbers on multiple tasks. Fields also have other benefits and can help tasks stay more organized. You can see more about custom fields here: How to Create and Use Custom Fields in Asana | Product Guide ā¢ Asana Product Guide
Do you think this could work for your team?
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@Kaitie Iāve emailed @Lily_Guy1 about this same issue as well. I will take a look at what you mention above with custom fields, but just taking away a feature (even a hack that you say may disappear at anytime) is highly frustrating when it is a feature that is used and mission critical for our production workflow. Iāll be back in touch after taking a gander at the link you posted above. -Michael
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We understand where youāre coming from, Michael. Thanks for this feedback about removing the count numbers in brackets hack. Custom fields do accomplish the same end goal (and more 
) so we hope that theyāll be able to support you and your team long term. The community will be more than happy to help you explore your options.
Please reach out if you have follow up questions. Weāre happy to help.
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Dear Alexis, I would like to support Wolfangs request to restore the count numbers hack. We used it daily to sum up the expected time needed for hours in personal task planning and project management. Although custom fields could support this information, I could not finde the function to easily sum up the value of a custom field in multiple tasks. Also, custom fields are associated to projects, but we need the time information for any (also personal) task in our organization.
We are very happy with asana up to now and are heavily relying on it for our day to day work.
I would be grateful if you could look into this again - maybe there are some other teams that are also affected?
Best and thanks
Felix
5 Likes
Iām sorry that you had a difficult time setting up the feature with custom fields. To clarify, if you use Custom Fields (https://asana.com/guide/help/premium/custom-fields) and create a number field, multi-selecting the tasks will automatically add up the values from each of the Custom Fields. It essentially does exactly what the hack did.
For added context, weāve removed this hack to help improve the loading time of Asana. We donāt have plans to bring this back as of now and unfortunately, we cannot guarantee that hacks will be around forever. Hacks are naturally experimental ā sometimes we decide to include them as features and other times we have to get rid of them. We definitely appreciate you writing in about this and apologies if weāve disturbed any of your workflows.
3 Likes
Hi Alexis, thanks for your explanation and the further context. We are sorry to hear that. I guess we will have to wait for our upgrade to Pro. Best, Felix
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Iām also rather disappointed that the brackets hack is gone - we use Asana (premium) custom fields, but also the hack - which is used by Intagantt when adding the estimated hours to complete - this is now rather useless since it doesnāt allow you to see the totals for these.
Also, I use Asana for a few personal projects as well, but canāt justify going premium which only allows a minimum of 5 users.
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Sounds like a poor way to push users to go on premium plans, even though the hack had been there for so long. Money over product right?
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I love custom fields, but I also love my [brackets] to sum my expected implementation times 
. Are you planning to add a feature to sum custom fields? It would be awesomeā¦
It is hard to work without this feature when you are working on agile projects.
Thanks, butā¦ :_D
(āÆĀ°ā”Ā°ļ¼āÆļøµ ā»āā»
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It is very disappointing to hear the hack will not be back. We have come to rely on it to link out project delivery process to finance. The custom fields option simply does not work given how we have had to set up our Asana to work for our delivery and finance teams. Nor does it work with how we can and have set up Instagantt.
Can I suggest you find a better way to transition users from one feature to another. Turning off the hack is one thing - weāve been given fair warning that they will disappear - but to simply have no option for those use cases that do not fit your custom fields option is poor customer management in my opinion.
If anyone has any suggestions please do share! Anything to fix our broken process here is much appreciated.
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You removed the hack to push people to pay for the premium service. Be honest with your users, we are not stupid. The load time of Asana was never an issue and did not change after the hack was removed. Someone on your team realized how many people were using it and relying on it, they added it into a different feature (custom fields) in a way that is apparently more complex to use than the hack was and made sure that feature was only available to premium users.
5 Likes
Wow, I just went to use the brackets feature to count numbers Iād been tallying in brackets, and discovered itās disappearance. I use it to track inbound sales, savings total on cost savings initiatives, and so much more!
As a result of this feature removal, I now need to backtrack through sales and financial tracking and move all of that information somewhere else to produce the same data I counted on in Asana. That being said, I do understand that it was placed in a āhackā section, and therefore subject to removal. Itās just that to be honest, hacks have been pretty consistent, and this one has been around for 3 years. I donāt feel I made a poor decision in choosing to rely on it, but I will definitely think twice before using any other hacks in the future.
I have not seen Asana historically take away a feature provided to itās users. Embarrassingly, I have also shared the brackets feature with others who I have brought to Asana. While I do understand that the functionality has been moved now for premium customers via custom fields (which still I think would mean Iād have to move all of my historic data to that field even if I were to upgrade), it would be very helpful, Asana, if you could take a few moments to explain why a feature was taken away?
The feature removal by itself is not really the source of the strong reaction on my part Instead, it is that I have come to rely on a service by a historically reliable, consistent company, and I wonder if this is the start to a behavior pattern for the future ā what other widely used, long-standing hacks or standard integrated features may go by the wayside or get shifted to premium users only down the road? It makes me 2nd guess whether I want to continue to rely on Asanaās features, which I have never doubted before.
The custom fields feature is enough to get me to drop the $10/month for premium, and Iām fine with that and I also understand that a free user is subject to limitations. What do I do about the historic data that Iāve gathered and is stuck in now useless brackets? Will Asana transfer it to me to custom fields once I upgrade?
3 Likes
To add to the fun, I had only glanced at the pricing page. Now I see that itās not $9.99/month (I was going to pay for a year), but $9.99/month per user with a minimum of 10 users (or some starter pack thatās $375). THEN I went to upgrade, and Asana tells me that I have 8 members, so I canāt upgrade on the 5-member starter pack. Thatās interesting considering Asana is not giving me any option to remove members. I canāt remove members from my own organization, in order to upgrade.
I was going to pay for a year of premium for myself, but so much for that plan. Thatās quite the barrier to entry. I can see how perhaps itās not profitable to manage a premium user base at that small of a monthly management fee, but itās really a bummer that the pricing page got me all excited thinking I could now afford to pay annually, then I was willing to pay a little more than planned, THEN Asana knocked me with another barrier by listing a bunch of users who havenāt been active in my system in years (theyāre just old contractors or partners - none of them still need access, I need 1 userā¦) and gave me no option to remove them so as to sign up.
Interesting strategy, Asana. This is the first negative experience Iāve had with the system despite using it since Asanaās beta release, so Iāll take it with a grain of salt. But Asana is not getting me as a premium user anymore todayā¦
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Hi everyone, Iāve recently figured that itād be nice to do the time estimate of how long itād take me to complete the task, so I can better plan my day/week. And I remembered about this feature, alas it was gone. So I wrote a Greasemonkey script that emulates its behavior 
.
So if you want this feature back - youāre welcome to use it and to contribute to making it better. You can find it here: GitHub - Stvad/Asana-counter: Greasemonkey script for Asana to sum up numbers in brackets for selected tasks
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Note: First version had some problems. Iāve updated it so it works more reliably and throughout Asana.
I revisited this thread to see if there were any updates or hopes of this hack coming back. I do agree with other commenters that it seems more like you are trying to push people to Premium - which granted, you offer a fantastic free service and are entitled to want to earn a profit at the same time, however the current pricing platform just doesnāt work for some people. For instance, I am a ācontractorā working in workspaces for different domains, and they are mainly non-profit and just do not have the funds to pay a premium fee. I provide a (free) service to them via a template, but now I cannot do everything I used to as the hack is gone.
The second point I would like to make is that if indeed you removed it for speed reasons, why not just send us an update or write a blog post suggesting that if we wanted Asana to be much faster, we could turn that hack off - and then those who want to use it, can keep it on? It seems to me that there would be many who donāt mind a small compromise on speed in order to have this useful feature back, myself included. Iāll be trying out the workaround posted further down this thread, but would much rather prefer something actually built into Asana.
1 Like
Perfect it works . Thank you so much
Brackets are back B-)
Just install tapermoney chrome plugin on chrome or if on any other browser select away https://tampermonkey.net/
& install the script what @Vladyslav_Sitalo has written https://github.com/Stvad/Asana-counter/blob/master/Asana%20counter.user.js
& voila
5 Likes
hi prajwal
I think I followed the steps but I cannot get it working. See this video
https://www.screencast.com/t/EodiHNOG
This is my first time with tampermonkey. Am I doing something wrong?
thanks!