Meet your new My Tasks

Board view is great, but everything else makes everything complicated. So far “My Tasks” view in Asana was perfect for GTD approach to task management. The “Today” section was the key for every day workflow.

And now it is not.

Fist, there are no keyboard shortcuts. Tab+L, Tab+T don’t work. Good bye quick keyboard Asana, hello long mouse travels for the most basic everyday task.

Then you cannot fully simulate the old, automatic, logical and obvious progression (later->upcoming->today) with rules. There is a problem if you have a task that repeats. When you complete your weekly task, a new one appears. It used to go to “Later” automatically, which was perfect. But now it always goes to “Recently assigned”! So you have to move it with the mouse to “Later” every single time.

How is this a good change? It makes things less effective, as basic things require more attention. What was automatic is now manual, what was accessed with keyboard in 0.2s how takes 2s with mouse.

And now the only solution to keep the daily workflow fast and simple is to get rid of all the sections in “My Tasks”. But then, say good bye to “Getting Things Done” approach, where list of tasks for Today is fundamental to effective workflow.

In this new solution you just can’t have “Today” section unless you spend time on babysiting it.

Asana has been changing things into more and more complicated for some time now and I really don’t get it. After all the most powerful thing was its simplicity.

So now I have to manually set some rules to get close to what was already available without any rules. And I have to keep moving tasks manually between sections every day, even though it all worked automatically before.

How is this helpful in any way?

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Hey Emily,

I’m on the free version and haven’t received the update yet. Are you still performing migrations for ‘free’ versions or should I contact support?

Thanks and looking forward to the new layout!

As it stands, it’s currently not possible to automatically move recurring tasks from the Recently assigned section to Later. We are planning to add this as a fast follow, I’ll post an update here once we have more details about this option!

That’s great to hear. Thanks for helping make this a priority @Emily_Roman !

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+1

Forces people to pay to have the custom rules functionality I imagine.

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I’ve been told there is only 1 promotion event daily to move Tasks from e.g. Later to Upcoming, and it occurs around midnight. This has seemed to be true in the rare times that I check. See Tasks not populating into the "Today" section - #4 by Stephanie_Oberg

That was true for the original My Tasks.

In this new My Tasks now being rolled out, there is NO built-in promotion event. The only way to have tasks promoted from one section to another based on date is to create one or more rules to do that (which capability is available to ALL Asana users, at any subscription level including Free).

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Hello. I still don’t see the new My Tasks section. I am a free user but from what I’ve read I should be able to see it. But it’s still the old look. Any ideas why’s this?

I don’t have the new version either, and I am on Premium. So it seems the rollout is still underway.

Hi @Nick_Rattermann, @SilviyaRadkova and @Stephanie_Oberg! We are still rolling out the new My Tasks to existing Free and Premium users so if you don’t see the features yet, it will be available soon. Thanks for your patience!

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Thank you for the info :heart: I just can’t wait to see it live on my account :grinning:

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We have an enterprise account but no news as far as I’m aware with not long left to the end of the month

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I definitely think Asana needs to add some additional ‘free’ rules to ‘my tasks 2.0’
Under the circumstances (ie the current limited functionality) we really need additional rules
to enable personal workflows. Personally I’m currently using another project to handle ‘my tasks’
until Asana’s ‘my tasks 2.0’ is useable.

Desired rules (for My Tasks 2.0)

  • Trigger: move to a section>> Outcome: add custom field to task
  • Trigger: move to a section>> Outcome: add task to a project

Asana are you planning to add any functionality to search around ‘my tasks 2.0?’
Also when we select multiple tasks in another project, shouldn’t we be able to move tasks between ‘My Tasks’ sections?

Just a follow-up, since I’m sure everyone is on the edge of their seats with my personal struggles with this change.

I’m trying to make this work, but keep running into complications of user interface which is really slowing me down.

Foremost, I took advantage of having various sections in the former “Today” category and those would change often as my workload changed. Now, I can’t get rid of them because they have tasks tied to them and I need that history. Why can’t I you ask? Mostly because when you have hundreds of tasks, it just takes too long to load and move them appropriately using the interface provided.

Any help here is welcome, I feel like this conversion to the lifestyle decision Asana promoted with “Today, Upcoming, Later” will take me more time to fix than Asana saved me by promoting that workflow. That’s not true entirely, but it will take more than a day to fix.

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I have to say that this, in my opinion, is just the worst Asana update and has totally destroyed my workflow practices using Asana. The inability to have recurring tasks, or tasks assigned with Due Dates automatically work through later, upcoming and today and the removing of the keyboard shortcuts for this is a terrible decision and one that came with no warning. Whenever a recurring task is completed it goes to Recently Assigned, and to make it go to the correct place, I have to manually drag them all to Later.

Also, on My Tasks, I have also lost the ability yo drag and drop to reorder the tasks in My Tasks, which I used to rely on to order and prioritise my day.

As an Asana devotee, I was getting close to convincing our company decide to deploy Asana company-wide, however on the back of this update we are now evaluating other options. It’s just a shame but I doubt Asana will revert this update.

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Those of you following this thread may appreciate having a look at a comprehensive My Tasks article I published today which offers helpful clarifications and alternative approaches. Here’s my Forum post that introduces it:

Thanks,

Larry

cc: @Jason_C @Ben_Studer @Tim_Jasper @anon43779106 @Unprofessional @Bob_Weber @EmilyCarter @Dan_W @Luc_Jutras @Sam

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Thanks for this new feature. While it’s interesting and I imagine it allows even new features coming in it broke several flows I’ve been using (user since 2011):

  • Shortcuts stopped working - already mentioned. Alternatives mentioned by @Marie won’t work from other views than My Tasks.
  • Recurring tasks - already mentioned. While it requires extra steps it would be great to automatically move them to Later.
  • One thing that wasn’t mentioned is today’s tasks break down per project. I’ve been using a custom report for this and it’s essential to my workflow. Right now the report stopped working because you can’t search for tasks in the specific section. In the “Sort” menu you can actually sort by project but it shows tasks from all sections Today/Upcoming/Later. There is “Sort within section” option but it doesn’t work. Please, allow creating a view like this.
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@Bartek_Nowotarski,

I just added:

so I hope you’ll vote there.

Thanks,

Larry

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Its sad to know that auto promotion feature is being removed and it is going to be added onto the rules feature, which means free users who were benefiting from this may not have this, unless we move to the paid tier. This strategy removing features and adding them back as a paid feature…is not ASANA like.

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