The “description” field of a task doesn’t allow multiple persons to edit it at the same time. It’s not a collaborative-friendly tool. Therefore, what happens when multiple people work on the same task at the same time, they end up overwriting the description (last edit wins)
The “best” way to handle that, is to change the behaviour and make the description field “collaborative-friendly” by detecting conflicts and managing them (there are several ways to do that, but I won’t go into technicals atm)
Another (simpler) way, would be to show an indicator that makes it obvious that someone (and, ideally, whom) is currently editing the document. That would help people avoid overwriting someone else’s description.
Such indicator would be quite useful, and is a simple yet effective way of avoiding such conflicts.
It depends how it’s done, it’s not necessarily that hard and would be limited to the “description” field. I implemented such a system when working on a collaborative Authoring tool, where teachers would collaborate on the same document to write their courses. It’s definitely not an easy task, but not necessarily overcomplicated either.
But, the current proposal isn’t to make it collaborative (it would be better IMHO, as Asana is meant to be collaborative in the first place), but simply to let know other people who may be working on the same description that the description is being updated by a teammate, to avoid loss of work.
That uses similar technologies (websockets) but is less complicated because it doesn’t try to detect/resolve conflicts, but rather help to avoid them.
Hi, wouldn’t it be possible just to implement the “dancing three dots”? Like what we see in chat or message apps, etc.? Dropbox has this live feature, it cannot possibly be so complicated… or?
I agree it would be great to have the ability to collaborate in a task’s description box similar to Google docs or shared Word docs. I’ve been finding myself working on call notes in a task to track discussions and other members of my team will want to add/edit at the same time so it would be useful to have that collaboration ability.
I know it could be done via comments as well but that defeats the “collaboration” effort since it would silo each of the responses rather than create one all encompassing description.
I just ran into this problem today. I wanted to use an Asana task for meeting notes, but when me and the other attendees typed at the same time it deleted one person’s notes. I really want to keep my workflow in Asana if possible and avoid having to have Asana and a google doc open in a meeting, but the way people typing at the same time results in losing information is a problem.
This is an issue for me both in Descriptions, and now even more glaringly in Notes. Related is Is there a way to make notes not so easily erasable? - #5 by Sarah_L - where part of the reason that the erasure of content is an issue is because of this characteristic of Asana to not allow for collaborative text areas in a place that is glaringly inviting other members to collaborate - just click in the same space and it is editable.
I had somewhat assumed that the use of ‘objects’ (heading 1, text area, etc) in the description was meant to help with this collaborative aspect, i.e. multiple users could work in different ‘objects’ and that gracefully merges. But it appears that isn’t the case, the whole thing is still treated like one object for a ‘save.’
If it is not possible to have multiple people edit at the same time without loss of data, make it like WordPress and lock it for the person not editing! The perfect solution would be locking just that ‘object’ but failing that, the whole Description/Note. Release it after the change gets sent - it updates really quickly on the other users’ side, so some kind of data is getting transmitted there. Whoever types first, ‘wins’ the lock.
The sugar on top would be both Descriptions and Notes being more like Google Docs where can you see where the other user’s cursor is. Or like Figma, where you can see what ‘object’ the other user has selected. And you intuitively learn not to work in exactly the same spot as them! The problem with Asana right now is that you have no idea until the text you just wrote disappears before your eyes.
Yep, it’s sad that in 2025 this is still a struggle.
I mean, I developed a real-time system myself back in 2016, amost 10 years ago, for a startup that’s long dead since, and I did it within 2 month of work with only another developer to help out.
Since then, this kind of thing has become even simpler to integrate.
And yet, for a product used by far more users and would have such a great positive impact, this feature still isn’t a thing. How unfortunate.
Yes, there is a lot about the text areas that is lacking. Including the numbering. Both discourse right here in the forum, and even apps now like WhatsApp, handle very nicely the visual resuming of lists after another block of text. Asana (but to be fair, also Gmail) struggle with that.
Anyway, all we can do is post and vote and wait. Asana has come a long way over the years.