Tis would be option one: You could use a people custom field (requested by) instead. No assignee means it doesn’t show up in anyone’s My tasks. An alternative is to use a single select custom field to indicate for who the request is. (not for filtering)
This is option two.
- The field would be general, and the My task filter custom (library) field would not require different values for different people. Just hide for the people who’d want to hide it from their My tasks, and show for people who’d want to show it.
- A rule to automatically add hide could work on the PTO project and others like it
- I realise you’d also need a show value, as you can only filter for positives (does contain) and not for negatives (doesn’t contain)
- People could add a rule to my tasks that “when My task filter is empty” always adds the show value
- People would need to add this field to their My tasks, and filter to only see My task visibility fields that have show
- You could also add this field as a question in a form for the PTO requests and ask if they want it to show up in their tasks.
I should warn you, this setup is quite labour intensive and will trigger a lot of rules. This might become an issue if you have a plan with rule limits. (non Enterprise plans)
I’d advise to go for option 1 as it is simpler, and use a different people field instead of the assignee field. People could choose which they’d want to use.
Sadly, Populating Person Fields from a Form - which would help with filling this field automatically - is not possible a.t.m. An alternative could be to use a single select field for the requester instead of a people field.
Now that I think of it, that might be the better option as it would allow for a single rule to choose to populate the Assignee field for those that want to see them in their My tasks.
Does that solve your issue?