Love Asana, Hate Subtasks

English Forum Product Feedback
1

Asana Ambassador Chris :asana: here. I love Asana and am happy to be the “Asana Guy” at my company (not my official title).

However, after several iterations of our project template, I’ve tried to steer my company away from using subtasks wherever possible. They behave too wonky in Asana.

Things that I’ve encountered in the last three (3) months regarding subtasks;

  1. Updating Task dependency dates does not update the dates of subtasks in the dependency chain.

  2. The project associated with a subtask does not appear in “My Tasks”, causing confusion to the uninitiated.

  3. Subtasks and approvals are incompatible. No matter what is chosen (even reject or request changes), the next task in the chain unlocks.

  4. A timeline with subtasks doesn’t look presentable.

  5. Subtasks don’t appear in a template, unless you know that they are included in a task and drill down into that task.

Like I said in the beginning, I love Asana, but try to dodge subtasks wherever I can. Hopefully, the Dev’s can remedy this and make it viable.

Has anyone else had problems using subtasks?

Thank you for your consideration :pray:,

Asana Ambassador Chris

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How do I submit a question on Asana forum? I am trying to ask questions about Sum of columns.

Thanks, sorry for interrupting. Thank you.

My apologies.

Troy

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Not a problem, bud. On the Product Feedback Forum screen (the previous screen) just press the +New Topic button. It’s on the right of my screenshot.

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Welcome to Asana! Good luck!

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Must remember to update the relative due dates of the subtasks when revising the template.

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Those are all valid concerns about subtasks and we have all known them for years… Sadly subtasks are not getting a lot of love, we don’t know if Asana considers those to be issues, or if it is simply considered subtasks are not being used the way they were designed to be used…

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Hi @Christopher_Ayers :wave: and thanks for taking the time to share your feedback with us!

Subtasks are a vast and dividing topic in the forum, and I believe some of the feedback you’re sharing has already been shared in the past. I’ll try and list below some of them, so you can upvote them. But generally speaking, we ask customers and Ambassadors to keep one request or feedback per thread rather than share a list of feedback. This helps keep the conversation on topic and makes it easier for us to report and follow up on your feedback.

This is happening because there isn’t a built in dependency between subtasks and their parent task. You can create these dependencies manually.

You can upvote Show project on subtask in 'My tasks' view

You can upvote Approvals - Request change should keep the task incomplete

I’m not sure what you exactly mean by this. We recently implemented some updates for subtasks on timeline, you can learn about it in Subtasks are now visible on Timeline!. The main request we received after this launch is to Allow to stack multiple tasks in Timeline on a single line, if this is what you are referring to, you can add your vote to this thread.

You may want to look into Add Subtask Icons in Templates 2.0 :slight_smile: