As a paying user I’m really sorry but I have to say I’m considering to leave Asana.
The Asana inability to give a Project Manager the ability of stay on top of specific projects is something so unreasonable that I cannot believe Asana product developers are ignoring it.
Asana is made for teams, right? Teams uses people called Project Managers (!). A project manager needs to look for updates on specific projects! The inbox is ridiculously cumbersome, with notification coming from all projects, it’s totally useless when you manage multiple projects… which is something Asana is supposed to be useful for.
If someone in the Asana team has strategies to share… please I’m here to hear 1.
I feel this would be a REASONABLE request.
Recently you introduced the “Timeline” tab for every project. Great feature, I love it!
Is it so complicated to create an “inbox” tab for every project, with notification coming only from it? Or AT LEAST, give us the possibility to filter the inbox by project. Your product is not cheap, you should hear to your clients.
You have received many many feature requests about this topic. They are segmented, because there is no a single mode to describe the problem. But if you aggregate them, you can see this is one of the most important Asana adoption blocks. I could also suspect that if this feature would be available only for premium user, many many people would be willing to pay for the upgrade. See:
From an implementation standpoint I cannot believe this is something that requires much resources. It’s matter of adding a new tab in every project, that shows notification coming only from this project. Pretty simple and straightforward. No complicated interface design: it’s simply the same view as inbox, but limited to a project.
Many of your competitors, are quickly implementing feature like this. And I foresee many of my colleagues will be sadly constrained to switch, due of that limitation.
In my opinion you should seriously consider to interview real Project Managers to realize this feature needs to be prioritized before it’s too late.
I’m one of the users you pasted above. I already pay for Asana and, overall it’s great. I agree with you that the inbox is completely flawed, so we have a workaround: rather than tag people in comments we create sub-tasks asking someone to review comments/ files attached etc.
The inbox is flawed due to its inability to prioritize activity as well as the lack of filtering options (just look at one particular project). So, in the end I just ‘archive all’ and my sub-task me anything of note.
This doesn’t really help your complaint, but I think there are ways to compensate its failings. Yes it could be better, but I think in time Asana will address this issue eventually. I think it’s strengths far outweigh its weaknesses- a reality with all project software on the market: none are perfect!
Well, I appreciate your support. Thank you.
I’m aware that no tool is perfect. But in my opinion this statement would be valid for things like i.e. the inability to search for sections or the no visualization of custom fields in search results. Those are features whose urgency would be debatable.
But the total inability to give the user an overview of what’s going on a specific project is something unjustifiable in my opinion. It’s like having a boeing 787 powered by a lawnmower engine.
If you need to follow more than, let say, 5 or 6 projects, you will quickly run out of control.
The only “workaround” I’ve found is… use the email and filter the incoming email notifications from Asana… which is ridiculous, for a tool aimed to make you free from the email inbox slavery.
I have ten projects of which six are heavily used: a mix of meetings, marketing projects, sales planning, new systems and operational policies. Within each project, I create tasks reminding myself of the most important aspects that I want to follow so that I don’t lose my focus. It’s like a bookmark. It allows me to remember the main issue or what’s critical at the moment.
I also create a ‘Highlights’ section within each project - I drag key tasks into that area so the team can focus on what’s most important. We use this section of the project for weekly meetings - the team can add to this whatever is a concern for them at the time. Then we do a wider monthly review of all tasks to ensure we’re not missing anything critical.
With sales planning, we use the boards feature and shuffle the boards around to what’s most important (usually ‘hot’ prospects and ‘onboarding’), but sometimes it’s about trips to different cities to meet with clients/ prospects or larger training/ education sessions.
I guess what I am saying is that maybe you are viewing Asana in a reactive way, rather than a pro-active way.
Does anyone know if the votes across the multiple instances of this complaint issue get aggregated somewhere to the product team.
Anyway - since Asana doesn’t seem to be on fixing this anytime soon and I’m paying… wondering if anyone has suggestions on another platform I should be looking at that handles this better while providing the stuff we likely all appreciate with Asana? Does Basecamp handle this all better for example?
Hello Peter. I well understand your frustration. Asana has become a company no more user oriented, but investors oriented. User voices are not heard. It’s been years that I don’t see any acceptance of users feedback. A thing that used to be done right many years ago (i.e. I contributed with many bug report and also discussed improvements that had been included quickly).
About alternatives: discussing them here will end in the thread being banned, so I suggest to maintain it outside this forum. you can contact me via my twitter account and I can send you some suggestions.
Best.
