Issues with 'No Project' search (e.g searching to find 'orphaned' tasks)

Occasionally I’ll come across a Task that is not a member of any Project, but became orphaned when the Project was deleted. I want to find such orphaned tasks and either delete them or put them in another Project.

There are two issues here that are preventing:

  1. The orphaned tasks don’t show up at all. Apparently Asana still considers them as members of a Project even though their parent Project(s) has been deleted.

  2. Even if those tasks did show up in the “No Project” search, I have to wade through all the various Subtasks. Technically those Subtasks are part of a Project because their parent Task is part of Project, so they shouldn’t show up.

To clarify item 1. the orphaned tasks don’t show up in a “No Project” search.

@Aaron_Paul, thanks for writing in! Getting those orphaned Tasks filed away in an actionable place is a great strategy, and I think a few things are at play here.

*Tasks that only live in a single Project and are not assigned to anyone will be deleted when the Project they belong to is deleted. If Tasks aren’t showing up, it’s either because the only Project they belonged in has been deleted, or because they were tethered to another Project (and therefore, still belong to a Project and were not deleted). My guess is that Tasks aren’t appearing for one of those two reasons – could that be the case?

  • Subtasks do not inherit the project (or assignee) from their parent tasks right now. We are working on adjustments to this, but it’s expected in our current data model that subtasks appear in the “No Project” search. If you want to filter them out, adjust your Advanced Search settings under “More” >> “Subtasks” >> “Not Subtasks”. That will remove them from the Search view.

Let me know what you think!

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@Aaron_Paul: I’m curious what you found out. Were you able to retest?