How to unassign your tasks in bulk

You probably don’t remember it, but back in the days, Asana did not have the ability to do mass actions like it does today. You could only multi-select tasks and act on columns you saw. There was no box with many actions available.

However, even with this new mass-action feature, I recently found myself in a pickle: I was assigned on about 30 tasks in My Tasks, and wanted to unassign myself. Turns out the mass action box does not allow to unassign, only re-assign.

Take a second to think: is there a solution to this situation?

:drum:

:drum:

:drum:

Yes! The trick is to create an empty project, multi-home all tasks into it, and then multi-select the tasks and click on the arrow next to the assignee. That trick does not work within My Tasks because there is no assignee field displayed. Not ideal, but way quicker than opening each task one by one.

So did you find the solution before reading?!

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This is probably the best way to to this.
My workaround is to have a second project called somthing like “task triage” and I keep it private and automaticly add any new task assigned to me to this project. I use this project for my more advanced things thats not availible in My Tasks. eg. Have a custom field / section to trigger a rule to unassign the task

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I’m in the same boat and call it “Task Graveyard.” It’s where I throw anything I don’t want to deal with :grin:

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It works as well with a custom search, but I like the idea of separate project, especially the “task triage”. Thanks for sharing.

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It does work with a search indeed!

Haha now that is a well suited name

Another easy way of doing it:

  1. Create a section in “My Tasks” called “Not mine” (or whatever else you prefer)
  2. Create a rule for that section to unassign tasks that are moved to the section
  3. Multi-select wrongly-assigned tasks by Ctrl-/Cmd-clicking them
  4. Use the “Move between sections” action to move the tasks to the “Not mine” section (IMPORTANT: Make sure to use the action on the first selected task, otherwise it won’t catch them all!)
  5. Watch them magically disappear :slight_smile:
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Hi @Thomas_Schluchter , welcome to the forum :smiley:

That’s an awesome trick! :clap:

But perhaps for ‘etiquette’ reasons, you could add an additional action to your rule by adding a comment action such as the below, using the new variables feature to tag the task creator (look for the + icon on the lower right within the comment box editor).

Additionally, you could also trigger this rule using a custom field (instead of move to a section trigger) within your My Tasks by using a single dropdown with the option ‘Not mine’ or just ‘Unassign’ :wink:

PS: screen capture should have read “I unassigned…”

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