The way our teams work depends on their workload that day. Our goal would be to have an entire list of “to do” tasks and then whoever is free would grab the next one. However, I don’t want them editable to anyone else but the person who assigns themselves to that task. Is that possible?
@Addie - welcome to the forum! I’m not aware of a way to do exactly what you want, but I think there are some workarounds, depending on what level of Asana plan you have.
On (all, I believe) paid plans, you can set project permissions to limit what non-assignees can do; you’d set the appropriate groups (including task collaborators) as either commenters or viewers. The limitation with this is that I believe it will disrupt your desire to have people pick up their own work (as they won’t be able to edit assignee on tasks they don’t already own).
If you are on a paid plan with no limit on rules (or you don’t think you’re at risk of passing your limit), you could pair the above solution with a two-project setup: one for intake/backlog and one for already-assigned work. You would have tasks start in the backlog project (with no restrictions on which team members can edit/assign tasks), then have a rule run when tasks are assigned and move the task to the already-assigned project (with the above permission restrictions). This would functionally accomplish your ask, albeit in a roundabout way.
Perhaps someone else here has a more streamlined solution.