I am using Asana for a personal GTD setup. I would like, whenever I add a task and assign it to myself for it to show up in my Inbox. It technically should as there is a tab for ‘assigned to me’ but nothing shows up there. Is there a way to make this happen?
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Mine go automatically to ‘My Tasks’ tab, assigned to me. I’m pretty sure that is the default.
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Yes, but my tasks doesn’t show just new tasks. It shows any tasks that were assigned ‘recently’ but that spans over several days. I’m wanting new tasks to show up in my inbox (like they are supposed to I think?) so then i can process them each day.
Are you saying that NOTHING ever appears in your Inbox/Activity tab? Interesting. Actually, the same happens for me for Tasks I assign to myself, although this appears to be contrary to Asana’s guidance:
I have my Asana profile set up for maximum notifications in email and in browser.
Fortunately, this particular use case for this oversight on Asana’s part (I’m guessing) has an easy workaround: Use My Tasks, and look for the Section: “Recently Assigned”. Everything you’ve been assigned…well…recently…should be located there. In fact, those Tasks will stay in Recently Assigned (for months+!) until you deliberately move them to Today, Upcoming, or Later. That is Asana’s ancestral daily workflow.
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Correct! Nothing ever shows up in my Inbox. I am the only one in my workspace, so I’m not sure if that matters. But yes, even if I click on the tabs in the inbox that say ‘assigned to me’ or ‘assigned by me’, there’s nothing there either!
Ok, so… The only way to move things out of recently is to move it to Today, Upcoming or Later? I guess I can finagle that to be my ‘Inbox’ then. Will just move everything to Later when I process it. I don’t understand why the Inbox doesn’t work at all though. Frustrating. It also doesnt update in the inbox if I make comments or notes. Also frustrating.
@Rachel_Sison, See the following for an explanation of why no Inbox notifications in your ase:
Hope that helps,
Larry
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Huh. Ok. Yeah i guess it just doesn’t work when its a solo board. It is strange because even if I were working with a team and I created 3 tasks assigned to each of us, I would be the only one who would have no task in my inbox. I assume if someone else made a comment it would then show up in my inbox?
Oh well. I’ll find a workaround by just manually moving tasks from Recently Assigned to Later, every day I suppose. It’s a bit janky, but will have to work! Wish I could at least set a criteria for what ‘recently’ means. As is it’s just any task that is assigned to you with no due date and setting due dates for everything is not very GTD friendly.
I do agree with your opinion on all of this @lpb. I suppose they should just get rid of the inbox if it is a solo board then, because it is confusing that it doesn’t work at all.
Thanks everyone for your input!
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Yes
You can check other threads here about My Tasks and even GTD to see how others make use of the available Asana features in different ways to suit them.
Larry
really wish asana would change this, it’s a major frustration for our team. Renders dependencies useless, for one
I set up a rule to comment on a “my task” one hour before it’s due (so that, if I’m not in asana, I get an email reminder and go tend to it or change the due time). However, the rule-generated comment doesn’t go to my email, only my asana inbox. I assume this is because I set up the rule, so Asana blocks it as a redundancy.
My only workaround is to add an otherwise inactive guest account that is an alias for my own email, and create another rule that loops that alias account in as a collaborator on the me-only tasks that I want notifications for. Currently, that’s a lot of workarounds: making a separate project to re-home , and then two rules in that project to get an email notification one hour before the task is due…
I do wish asana had more options for email notifications for people who don’t work from Asana inbox all day or cannot use desktop notifications reliably.
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I finally have a good system in place for managing my tasks in a GTD-friendly way. I have set up MyTasks with just three Custom Sections (deleting all the rest):
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New tasks: all new tasks that haven’t been processed go here automatically. This is the Inbox.
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To Action: once I have assigned a project, due date and priority (High or Medium), I move it to this section. Using the multi-sort functionality that came out recently, all tasks in this Section are sorted first by Due Date, and then by Priority. This saves having to manually move them between the Today, This Week, Later customs sections which was time-consuming. What is great about Asana is that even though the tasks due today are automatically sorted by priority, I can still move them around within that, so I can order my High Priority in subtler orders of priority or according to how I feel like doing them.
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Someday/Maybe: this is for Low priority tasks that I may or may not do.
Any thoughts on this set-up welcome!
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