Managing My Tasks for V2 Greatness (One way to overcome data overload in My Tasks)

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This post is specifically for those that are legacy users or finding that there is a lot of clean up needed in their My Tasks to take full advantage of the new experience. If you don’t fall into those categories, you likely don’t need to take and additional steps to make the most of V2. Cheers :beers: to you! :wink:

For me, I was witnessing a lot of lag when My Tasks was being loaded. I believe this is primarily due to data loading differently than it had in the past AND the fact that I had 14,855 tasks assigned to me. :pleading_face:

It would seem (and I might be wrong here so welcome any technical details others have to support or refute these points) the following to be true:

  • You aren’t able to collapse Sections that contain more than 1,000 tasks. Historically, this limitation wasn’t present. You could collapse Later which often held tasks for the future and those users weren’t interested to see auto-promote. It was a fancy parking lot that didn’t introduce and latency when loading data. If this is something you want to see reintroduced, you can upvote here: The ability to collapse Later in My Tasks V2 when having > 1,000 tasks

  • Data contained within a Section where the task count is < 1,000 tasks seem to load whether the Section is collapsed or not. I don’t recall experiencing this delay previously. This seems to be the case because when I expand a Section the data seems to show in full (no additional loading prompted by scrolling) and is relatively responsive.

  • Data contained within a Section where the tasks count exceeds 1,000 will only load a portion of the tasks - usually the first 100 and then another 100 as you scroll further down the page. This is preferred IMO but it seems to cause some issues when multiple Sections have more than 1,000 tasks or when these types of Sections are not listed last.

After fumbling around for several days, I had to come up with an alternative approach to get My Tasks to a usable state (I relied too heavy on the data in My Tasks for it not to serve me well). I tried creating additional Sections, moving tasks around in bulk and reordering Sections from the Board view. These actions helped in some ways and made matters worse in others (I started to get sync notices and error messages which then forced some rework). I needed a new approach. Ultimately, this is what I found to work best and what I would offer to those that can relate to my experience:

  1. Create a new, private Project called “Rainy Day”

  2. Add the Rainy Day project to any task that a) has no due date, b) is past due that you don’t want to address immediately, or c) is assigned to you and either doesn’t require an assignee or can be delegated

  3. Once these tasks are moved to the Rainy Day project, remove yourself as an assignee.

    • Removing yourself will remove these tasks from My Tasks
    • You can filter the Rainy Day project to only show those tasks assigned to you as you work through the effort of removing assignments in bulk (50 at a time). You can then later save your default view without the filter.

  4. Once you get My Tasks to a manageable state you can set it up the way you prefer and start taking action. Perhaps this previous post can help get you started: Today is my “My Tasks V2 Day” so where should I start?!?

  5. Plan to visit the Rainy Day project on occasion to work through any actions that need to be taken. I would recommend setting up a recurring task to serve as a weekly or bi-weekly reminder. :wink:

My final bit of advice to make this effort less painful and to save some time: open a separate browser tab and perform an Advanced Search for all tasks assigned to you that are NOT in the Rainy Day project. While you are adding tasks to the Rainy Day project from your My Tasks you can simultaneously be doing the same through this Advanced Search. This certainly helped because as mentioned before, My Tasks would often give me an error because of all the data it was having to process. Tip of the cap to @Bastien_Siebman for affirming this extra step! :bowing_man:

Today, I’m experiencing V2 the way it was intended! Obviously, the less data you have in My Tasks the better the experience. This is a nice indirect reminder to delegate work or better manage what can be achieved when. That said, I hope to see some improvements in how quickly data loads (confident it gets better over time).

Hope someone out there finds this useful! :metal:

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Thanks for sharing your experience with My Tasks V2 and the tips to better leverage the new features! :slight_smile: We have more improvements planned for my tasks and hopefully it will be even more powerful in the future.

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But… why? :thinking:

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Because I have been using Asana for 9 years and as the admin when we deprovision a user their tasks are assigned to me.

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Oh my. And you never go through them to delegate or delete? I love cleaning up if you ever need help :grimacing:

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I never bothered because of how the Later section worked. Would love to clean in it but it’s low priority. Primarily stuff that is several years old and doesn’t abide to the way we use Asana today.

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But isn’t anyone waiting on those tasks to be done after that person left? Just trying to understand :sweat_smile:

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In most cases, people are waiting and so it’s a priority to delegate as assignments shift with change. Your inquiry is fair and.

However, in the particular cases that contributed to my high volume, I’ll just say most of the items were not properly being managed in Asana. Nobody is waiting on this action any longer and it’s just wasted space… that I pushed to Later because I didn’t have the time to tidy it up (until I needed to, i.e. My Tasks V2)

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