I don’t know how many messages there are in the inbox: after 30 minutes reviewing “hearts”, “completed tasks”, comments I start wondering for how much longer I need to keep going. I have no idea how many messages there are in my inbox. It drives me crazy.
I can’t filter by the important tasks: often I don’t have an hour to go over the whole inbox, I just want to get to the high-priority comments first. I want to “archive” all comments about “tasks completed”, “hearts received” and anything else that is not a comment. But I can’t because there are no filters. It is very frustrating.
It takes me longer to review the inbox in Asana than all my emails on Gmail.
Are there any improvements for the “inbox” in the roadmap coming soon?
I have to agree with Raul that the inbox is one of the weaker features of asana:
It is such an unstructured long mess of updates for me.
Some ideas:
Filters to view/select subsets: Comment only, direct mention (@me), tasks assigned to me/others, heart, file, comments by certain people, …
Allow application of filter options above to inbox in general: never show me hearts or comments in tasks owned by other people
Auto-Collapse long comment chains: Show me “Task x has 9 new comments”, do not show me the whole dialogue, only expand on click
Smarten the inbox: If an update to the task happened and I have already commented on it/viewed it, this is no longer news for me (and shouldn’t appear in my inbox anymore)
+1 - Inbox has a long way to go before it could be classed as productive. I end up not even really looking at what I’m closing as I’m just trying to find comments in the sea of notifications.
I would also recommend adding a filter to “Competed Tasks by others” that way I can easily see what my team completed throughout the day. @Erjon_Metohu - I’ve done this by saving an advanced search (click the star after creating your search). Hope that helps.
Totally agree. It would be also useful to have an “inbox” tab in every project, so we can concentrate on the notifications of a single project at a time.
I agree to the comments made by Paul and others on this topic. Personally, I would like to filter my Inbox to show those items only with comments and hearts.
To add though, the mobile app should have the option to “Archived All Messages” at the bottom similar to the web version. Its time consuming to individually archived an item on the mobile app.
In our view, there are 3 changes that can significantly improve the Inbox experience:
Offer a list view (with view buttons at the top to select type of view as list or panel/preview, the current standard view) for the inbox, allows you to see far more items at once.
Filters - For our purposes, the most useful filters are for User, which will filter items and show only those where the selected person/people were mentioned, are collaborators or have commented in the thread. Other filters will be useful to other users as well, @Paul_Stoermer mentions a few useful ones.
Make it clear why a Task/Conversation/Progress Update was placed in the Inbox. Sometimes I have to refer to the email notifications to see what has changed, since the inbox doesn’t always clearly indicate why.
+1 for all the suggestions above. I’m running a small company and have been away for more than a week. My inbox now contains probably at least 900 notifications, 90% of which is non-important “person x completed action y” stuff. As I possibly cannot spend my whole day scrolling through the inbox to see what’s there I have no means of knowing if any of my employees tagged me in a comment or something important. How will I know where feedback is needed?! This leaves me very uneasy, not having any control over how to follow up with my colleagues on important issues. PLEASE fix this as soon as you can, it’s absolutely no way to run a business… I love Asana with all my heart, but this notification inbox is a NIGHTMARE to relate to. TIA!
I agree with this request completely. After reviewing my inbox for the last 10 minutes to see if I have been tagged in any comments, I gave up. i don’t know how long my inbox list goes for (even though I cleared it out yesterday).
Would be great for some automatic filters and lots of the other suggestions posed in this thread.
One of the tips is the ability to turn off the email notifications and manage notifications through the inbox, however I could spend half my working day in there and miss items.
I do also agree with all the previous comments. The Inbox is a confusing mess, especially if you have a lot of co-workers, who don’t have a good understanding of the overall structure of Asana. They don’t get the purpose and function of the inbox. I would really like to see two major improvements: It should be a lot better to see, which updates I’ve already seen and which not. The new, not yet seen messages in the inbox should be highlighted.
Furthermore, even on Subtasks, there should be and indicator to which project they belong (this goes for “My Tasks” as well).
I think these two improvements, in addition to the ones stated above, should make Asana much more user-friendly. It already an extraordinary helpful tool.
Especially in that I don’t always need to know about every heart or like. Just batch them all together. If I need to know whether a particular task or comment has been noticed, I’ll look it up.
Even more annoying, however, are all the notifications about “You have a task due today”. I already have the tasks in my task list, why would I also need notifications about them in my inbox? That just adds more noise.
I am going to be the voice outside the chorus here. I feel that the name “inbox” is not great, if it was called “notifications” it would hit the spot much better; however, I feel that not having a number of items in my inbox is sort of simple. When I have time I go through all the element and quickly archive those I don’t need, I unfollow the thread which are not any longer relevant to me and I just leave a few comments in the tasks that actually require my attention.
I have two companies running asana and I can deal with my “inbox” a couple of times a day for a few minutes. The advantage is that investing those few minutes help me keeping on top of things.
I totally agree with all the previous comment and suggestions. I would only add a very important feature that drives me crazy: auto update of the “feed/stream”, I go inside a task and when I go back if it happens to update it goes back to the first task! Grrr, if I was like three of four screens down now I have to do it again to go back on the next task… It’s so annoying.
Easy fix: add a selector on top “manual updates for new tasks”.
My turn to provide my suggestions: 1. Add an option to filter the notification items. At a minimum, filter by (1) task with comments (2) added task (3) completed task and (4) changes to recurring tasks such as due dates
2. Move the “archived” button from the bottom to the top. It’s annoying to have to go all the way down just to archive
Hoping to get this features implemented.
Totally agree that the inbox is completely unmanageable as is, so really only commenting to add more weight. Really only need to be able to quickly find what coworkers have commented/liked, and the notifications about what I have due today are completely unnecessary.
In addition to the need for an “archive all” on the mobile, I also don’t need 10 push notifications telling me what’s due today. A quick “You have 10 items due today” would be fine. Maybe the push notification for a specific task if I assigned a specific due time.
I agree with this so much. It’s the absolute worst addition to Asana. Either need the ability to decide which posts are in the inbox (mainly disabling the pointless individual posts about due tasks) or ability to filter types of posts in the inbox.
