I’m trying to determine best practices for limiting inbox notifications (in-platform) for newly assigned tasks in a large organization. We have project templates with 200+ tasks and run many concurrent projects, each of which may span a few months or more.
My preference would be to have project managers assign out all tasks initially with tentative dates based on standard intervals in the template. My concern is that doing so will flood assignees’ Asana inboxes with individual notifications for each task assigned, so if a PM instantiates 3 new projects today, each of which have 25 tasks assigned to Person A, they are going to get 75 inbox notifications that they need to either archive individually or batch (which could lead to them to miss other important notifications).
We want to make sure all users are hitting inbox=0 at the end of each day, and I would rather people check their My Tasks periodically instead of getting inundated with assignment notifications. Does anyone have any insight on how their teams/clients handle this?
Note: I’ve checked out this post and this one, but neither feel exactly applicable.
I’m afraid this ensures bombarding folks with notifications, so if this is your preference, I recommend you train users to manage their Inbox and My Tasks productively using all the tips and tricks you’re aware of as an expert. You can see some of my thoughts re My Tasks here:
If you’re willing not to assign out everything in advance at once, you could use a strategy to stagger the assignments. You could embed in the project template setup tasks to remind an admin to make those assignments when the dates are more firm or closer in, one two or more batches, so notifications become more meaningful. You could have a temporary single-select custom field for future assignees’ names, then manually or with rules convert those to actual assignees.
Another strategy is to mark the tasks complete in the template originally, and mark them incomplete when you want to make them active. There’s some risk here as you can imagine, but it would allow you to specify the assignee from the get-go. (I haven’t tried this in a while.)
Finally, make sure all are covered with the basics:
Although you likely know, it’s important for every user to get their Notification settings configured appropriately, particularly Settings > Notifications > Manage individual projects button for every project they’re a member of.
Thanks for this great, detailed reply @lpb ! I have also noticed that the assignment notifications disappeared during my testing, but not sure if it’s because someone commented on them or because I viewed them in My Tasks (I unfortunately didn’t test those independently, so will need to do that later).
Definitely going to adhere to these best practices on people’s notification settings & disabling today’s notifications.
I don’t think the team will want to assign over time (or use custom fields for it, although I do find that intriguing), so I think I’ll need to just be clear with expectations and training.
