This is killing me. I LOVE Asana. But, this tiny tiny feature that seems to make so much sense has been a forum topic for years.
Let me describe my situation (similar to many others on here). I run a 1-person marketing agency. I have 10-20 projects at any given time. I open the project I’m focusing on at the time and I leave it open. Every task I add needs to be assigned to me (because of some confusion I’ve had with clients logging and not knowing whether a task is assigned to me or them). Yes, I understand I can assign every task individually or go up and add them in “My Tasks”, HOWEVER, here’s the problem. 98% of my tasks are created by me and should be assigned to me. I feel like I’m going insane when I assign each task, one by one, to me right after creating it. BUT, adding in “My Tasks” is completely and totally unproductive because it adds 3-4 additional steps for EVERY task. I work IN the project. I add tasks IN the project (at a pretty high speed). Manually assigning all my tasks to myself is unsustainable. And, jumping back to my tasks every time is totally unproductive and the flow is cumbersome.
Thank you for the AMAZING product. PLEASE add this feature to help us all stay sane. And, it should be added as a feature with three options:
Auto-assign tasks to the task creator
Auto-assign tasks to a specific user (like if my client adds tasks, and they are always meant for me, it should be auto-assigned to me so s/he doesn’t have to do that every time)
If you don’t mind setting it up on a per-project basis, you can use either Zapier or Flowsana to accomplish this. You could build a Zap in Zapier, or use a Flowsana If-Then Rule - it has an If-Then Rule that lets you auto-assign every new task in a project to a specific person:
@Craig_Fifer 's post only helps desktop users. My team is predominately on mobile.
** Every list should have a Default Assignee setting. **
This ensures that items added to lists are never missed.
The scenario where “most of the tasks for a list are for the same person” is common.
Mobile users don’t want to be fumbling around with extra steps on their cellphones!
The My Tasks would no longer be ‘useless’ (as quoted from messages above), since forgetting to assign someone to a task would still result in one person having accountability on their My Tasks.
This would not impact existing users since the Default Assignee setting would initially be blank.
As a bonus feature (from reading the messages above), allow the Default Assignee to be set to ‘Task Creator’, so whoever enters the task is set as the assignee.
Note that I’m evaluating Asana for my team and I came upon this issue immediately, which led me right to this thread. I had to create a login to post this reply, which I don’t normally do but this is important enough and I had some time - for every upvote there are probably a 100 or more that didn’t bother logging in to vote, so there are thousands of people that want this feature. You’re running a project management tool - accountability should be your number one priority! Having tasks lost in the ether is not ok. (And I get that the tasks are not completely lost, but when managing many lists with many tasks it’s likely that unassigned tasks will be overlooked.)
So in summary I’m requesting that you add the following items to your Development Task List and manually assign them to someone :
Add an ‘option’ to the List object called ‘Default Assignee’.
Allow the values of this option to be [blank], a person, or ‘Task Creator’
Whenever a task is created, check the ‘Default Assignee’ and if it is set, set that value (or the task creator) as the assignee.
This really does not seam that hard and both the demand and justification are supported by all of the comments in this thread.
When using “Board” view in a Project, and adding multiple tasks, is it possible to assign all tasks to a particular team member (NOT myself) by default so I don’t have to click to assign each individual one?
As @Phil_Seeman mentioned, this option is currently not available in Asana. We already have a thread on this topic. I have gone ahead and merged your post with Default assignee - #114 by john.penberthy to consolidate feedback. I hope you don’t mind!
I would love this feature too! I run a single person blog and love functionality of Asana, but this one issue makes using it super cumbersome. I would never assign tasks to anyone else, so having to add myself to every task is a pain.
Hi all, I came here to see if there was a way to change the default assignee. I still don’t think they’ve implemented that feature, but I did find a FAST and EASY workaround! You can select all tasks in a project and assign them to the same user in one click.
Most likely you’ve used multi-select in other programs, and it’s just as useful in Asana. To multi-select several tasks, just click then hold down Shift and click the up or down arrow .
You can also click the first task and drag the cursor to the last task. Or you can click on the first task, hold down Shift , then click again on the last task. If the tasks aren’t next to one another, hold down Shift , then click each individual task you want to select.
Once you multi-select tasks, you can take mass actions on them:
@Emily_Roman - I think @Edward_B wrote the best outline of why this is important and a very comprehensive and simple approach to how users could use the feature (the 3 options – [blank], [default assigned person], or [default to the task creator].
As @Edward_B said - accountability is not a cool extra for a project management tool… it’s essential. What’s keeping the team from considering this feature? More than 200 votes, 327 likes, and nearly 13K views on this topic. Obviously, it’s a pretty common need. I’d love to hear whether this is actively being considered or if there’s a compelling reason why this isn’t possible.
Following Now rolling out to Asana users — Rules, Business customers can now create Rules so all tasks in a project are assigned to the same person by default.(Trigger: Task added to this project / Action: Assign task) With that said, since this Rules aren’t available to everyone I’ll keep this thread open, and will continue sharing updates on this topic.
@Bryan_TeamKickstart, we are aware this feature request is popular, and while we heavily rely on feedback received in the Forum to inform our Product Roadmap, we have to take onboard other criteria like staffing resources (among other things), so we can’t always prioritize features request as quickly as users would like to! I’ll continue highlighting this feedback in my reports and while I can’t promise when this will come to life, I can promise to keep you posted here in the Forum when things start moving on this topic!
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