Deleting Sections - Don't deletes multi-home tasks in ALL projects

[Martina]

We just had to learn it the hard way that deleting a section in one project delets the contained tasks not only in this project, but everywhere (we often have a task in 2-3 different projects at the same time)! Why would I want to do that? This did not become clear at all from the warning that pops up before deleting the section. Is this on purpose or is it a bug? In case it is meant to be like this, a clearer warning would have been very nice.
Did I get it right that the only way to delete a section without srewing our entire Asana system, is to first manually move all tasks from this section to some place save, then delete the section?

[Bastien_Siebman]

This is not a bug. A task that belongs to several projects actually exists “once”, so doing anything to the task would do it in all the projects. Hence deleting a section deletes the tasks in it, everywhere.

[Bastien_Siebman]

@Martina

Did I get it right that the only way to delete a section without srewing our entire Asana system, is to first manually move all tasks from this section to some place save, then delete the section?

Yes, as long as deleting a section means deleting the tasks inside. It might change soon…

[Natalia]

Hi @Martina!

Sincere apologies for the inconvenience here. As @Bastien_Siebman has explained, this is the current behaviour when deleting a Section (it will delete all tasks nested in it including the multi-homed ones). I’ve slightly modified the title of this thread so it better reflects your request and is more discoverable for other users to upvote. I hope it’s Ok.

We also have two existing threads regarding Sections. I’m listing them below in case you want to upvote them:

Mark Sections as Complete (in new spreadsheet List view)

NEED: The ability to mark a section as complete so it no longer appears within a project when filtering for incomplete tasks. AND to be able to do that without deleting the history of tasks within that section. SUGGESTION: Add an option to sections and boards to either a) complete the section as you would a task, or b) archive the section as you would a project. *Please do not conflate this issue with the need to be able to delete a section. These are two related but fundamentally different is…

Archive a Section in a Project

When you mark a Section task complete currently, the tasks that were below it lose their reference to the section (whether they are marked Complete or not). It would be ideal to be able to remove completed Sections from view in a Project, without losing the link between the Section and the Tasks that were in it.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can help you with Martina! Have a nice week!

[Rafa_Mayer]

Um, I agree it’s not a bug but it is a lousy change to a feature that significantly worsenS usability. So worse than a bug, IMO, because it’s intentional and shows a lack of care for established user base processes.

Sections have become nigh unmanageable. Moving tasks between sections is a pain. Having tasks end up in weird sections when adding to a project is disorienting. Can’t even create a section on the fly when adding a task to a project. And mobile, oh my even worse.

Asana’s usability is declining for me daily because I have to keep adjusting my personal habits (keyboard strokes, simple processes, etc) and project/task implementations because things just work differently on the meta level.

All of which is tolerable if you know roadmap and feature direction and can adjust in time. I knew the section changes were coming but oh my lord I did not expect the interface usability to take three steps back!

[Faizi_Kazmi]

This is not a good feature at all, deleting a section deletes all the completed tasks!!! Please change this.

[Paul_Grobler]

I just added my vote to the mentioned post. Think the solution would be for Asana to implement the same logic as when deleting a project. by only deleting “Any unassigned tasks that are only in this project”